On reading Shelby Raebeck’s coming-of-age novel, AMAGANSETT ’84, the famous line from poet Philip Larkin kept coming back to me, about something pushing people to the side of their own lives. Ricky is a teenager, a gifted basketball player, and eager to embrace life, but he doesn’t seem to know how to go about it. Combined with a closely-observed portrait of life in a sleepy eastern Long Island fishing community, the result is a slow-burning, quietly mesmerizing commentary on the peculiar vicissitudes of adolescence.
Ricky’s family has endured tragedy after his mother dies from cancer, though her absence is curiously vestigial, the product of a neglectful, or at least uninterested, attitude towards her children that also manifests in Ricky’s father’s hands-off approach to keeping the household. Ricky’s sisters, like Ricky, struggle to carve out lives for themselves following the arrival of a new woman, Gladys, in their father’s life. Ricky plays basketball, and strikes up a friendship with Lance, the Black star player in the school team. Ricky, who is white, falls in with Lance, his friends, and Joany, Lance’s sixteen-year-old sister, who is arty and seemingly uninterested in Ricky. Before long, however, a romance blossoms between them.
Raebeck’s dialogue is naturalistic and description is sparing in a way that focuses attention on the emotional interplay between characters. Certain passages on race and abortion that would have seemed relatively innocuous in the 1980s – or even ten years ago for that matter – land very differently in a post-truth, post-Roe vs Wade America. The story is poignant without being sentimental – in fact, Raebeck pushes hard against any possible tendency to maudlinism with some verve. Heart-to-heart conversations between Ricky and his family members are either to-the-point, or else leave the important parts unsaid, almost until the very end, when the pent-up frustrations of his sister Lonnie become too much for her to bear. For what becomes clear as AMAGANSETT ’84 progresses to its breathless conclusion is not only that this family is as directionless as its individual members – who are by turns rebellious, cowed, or simply irresolute – it is also that in families, the proximate cause of rifts is never the only one.
A touching coming-of-age story set in a sleepy eastern Long Island fishing community, and by turns poignant, romantic, and tragic, AMAGANSETT ’84 by Shelby Raebeck bristles with nostalgia for days gone by.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader