San Francisco Public Library

Jacket weather, a novel, Mike DeCapite

eng

technical information on music

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not applicable

fiction

Jacket weather

electronic resource

Mike DeCapite

a novel

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 twenty-five." 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 the listener to a glowing nostalgia for the present. "Themes of love and aging propel DeCapite's spare and lyrical nove." "DeCapite is a phenomenally skilled writer…The dialogue is rich, believable, and often very funny, and this is a wonderfully unusual meditation on nostalgia and love." "So very real…A sad but sweet song about the uncertainty of middle age and how funny it is when time slips away." "In this roman à clef-minus the clef-I can clearly hear the music of the NYC streets; feel the L train as it hums; and can smell something cookin'-a modern Moveable Feast." "Mike DeCapite has an eye for deep beauty in the mundane. He writes prose that makes poetry of just walking down the street…Reading Jacket Weather is like listening to the world reveal its secrets." "Poetic and compulsively readable, Jacket Weather invents a new genre-call it lyrical realism…A story of cities, survival, adaptation, desire, and a celebration of the small pleasures we invent and discover to offset unavoidable loss." "DeCapite has flawless pitch for dialogue and an imagist's eye, and his prose is lucent and uncluttered." "Jacket Weather describes in exacting detail what daily life looks like when you see it through the lens of romantic love. Every scrap of talk and every sign on the street is irradiated by love-and its stepsibling, anxiety. The book is funny, tender, often exhilarating, and borne aloft by DeCapite's ardent, plainspoken lyricism. You can't stop reading it." "Mike DeCapite's books all feel like movies to me. The characters, and the rooms and seasons they inhabit, are clear before my eyes."

adult

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