Jacket Weather
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Nick Hornby meets Patti Smith, Mean Streets meets A Visit From the Goon Squad in this quintessential New York City story about two people who knew each other in the downtown music scene in the 1980s, meet again in the present day, and fall in love.
Mike knew June in New York’s downtown music scene in the eighties. Back then, he thought she was “the living night—all the glamour and potential of a New York night when you’re 25.” Now he’s twice divorced and happy to be alone—so happy he’s writing a book about it. Then he meets June again. “And here she was with a raincoat over the back of the chair talking about getting a divorce and saying she’s done with relationships. Her ice-calm eyes are the same, the same her glory of curls.”
Jacket Weather is about awakening to love—dizzying, all-consuming, worldview-shaking love—when it’s least expected. It's also about remaining alert to today's pleasures—exploring the city, observing the seasons, listening to the guys at the gym—while time is slipping away. Told in fragments of narrative, reveries, recipes, bits of conversation and snatches of weather, the book collapses a decade in Mike and June’s life and shifts a reader to a glowing nostalgia for the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Themes of love and aging propel DeCapite's spare and lyrical novel (after Through the Windshield). Mike, a middle-aged man, has been living in New York City since the 1980s. His eye for the rusty, worn-down sheen of the city's surfaces reflects his own malaise, as do his thoughts while walking around ("How long could I go unnoticed in a guard box on the Manhattan Bridge?"). A chance encounter with June, an old acquaintance, rekindles memories from 20 years earlier. June reveals she is leaving her current husband, which fuels Mike's obsession ("I've always had a thing for you," he tells her). The feeling, it turns out, is mutual. Yet Mike and June both operate in the past, using their midlife realizations and woe to sound off on their feeling that life didn't add up the way they expected. DeCapite has a poet's eye for the city's majestic details, and illustrates how his characters come to see the same things differently over the years. DaCapite ultimately shows how Mike and June can't control the forces around them, but they can hold onto the memories that helped shape them, adding up to a worthwhile meditation.
