Jim Forgione Surface Tension, Self-published, 2023, ISBN: 9798853413443, 359 pages, $13.50
I typically skip the front matter and read it after finishing a book. I like subtle things, like this bit from the acknowledgments, that evolve what I’ve just read:
This novel stemmed from sixty years of dialogue and memories . . . . To them I added a lot of fully fabricated plot turns and came up with Surface Tension. Maybe we all invent alternate stories.
Partly, Forgione’s work is an alternate account of his life over thirty years. In Surface Tension, John is a gay teenager, and later, man, navigating New York, Baltimore, and a large Italian family (the Russos) from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, consisting of siblings, their seemingly neglectful father, and their mother, Loretta.
The story frequently jumps between characters to build the family story outward like a web. As each member grows into a new stage of life, they establish their independence from the core homestead while maintaining close and sometimes fraught ties with the other members. By the end, three generations make up a web of history, formed by familiar large-family dynamics and oblique relationships.
Perhaps because it’s based on real life and memory, and because fact is often stranger than fiction, the story evades predictability. Some progressions don’t result in character development, and people fall in and out of love at the wrong times or go through false starts and short tangents. That structure serves to emulate the ebbs and flows of daily life: One day could be a picnic, another a death in the family. It’s hard to predict what each new chapter will bring, especially when any one Russo could be the focus of a particular chapter.
Despite its structure, I found Surface Tension accessible. The novel’s focus on daily, moment-to-moment conversations grounded it in a feeling of being in the room with the Russos, perhaps as friend invited to dinner, trying to eat lasagna quietly as everyone around you argues. Small characterizations emerge from those conversations and work toward building strong dynamics between each family member. And by spending ample time in conversation, the reader has plenty of opportunities to memorize and recall characters, which helps to keep track of the large cast.
The aforementioned web starts to take shape after the first few chapters, when John decides to take a stride toward independence and move out. Loretta, the matriarch of the family, reacts poorly:
My God. My family’s falling apart right before my eyes. Give me some time to get used to the idea—you just sprang it out of left field. And you need a better plan. Maybe you’d know that if you weren’t all hopped up on pot.
Loretta’s negative reaction to her son’s ambitions to grow up is familiar for most readers. But the appended insults and guilt tripping carry an underlying resentment (You hurt me, I hurt you). The get-back tactic speaks to a desperation of sorts, where Loretta is lashing out to show how much she cares about her son and how she fears his leaving. It seems she can only see the pain that her son is inflicting on her, and not his independence. It is also important to note that John wants to move in with Brian, his not-so-secret boyfriend.
From that interaction onward, it becomes clear that John and Loretta are the two polar forces in the family. On one side, they repel and fail or refuse to understand each other at a fundamental level. But flip the magnets, and they connect, though not in a direct way
The inherent tension between John and Loretta—which is centered around John’s sexuality and Loretta’s reckoning with her later years—is marked by a pattern of rhyming plot points as the mother and son diverge further from traditional American lifestyles in pursuit of their own fulfillment (happiness, love, success, etc.). Through the resulting dysfunctional romances and unlikely companionships, the two develop a mutual understanding that exists in undertones and clashes with the mother-son jabs they often trade.
As the story progresses, Loretta befriends and grows to understand another person who, like John, defies what she knows and believes. After the early death of that friend and their funeral, John compels himself to ask Loretta if she is proud of him.
She was blindsided by it, and the look on her face, which clearly revealed some sort of guilt at being exposed, made the need for a verbal response unnecessary.
This and other contradictory behaviors by Loretta help make her one of the more complex characters I’ve recently interacted with. I appreciate Forgione’s restraint in laying out her life before the reader and allowing them to draw their own conclusions (and that extends to most characters).
The past twenty years have seen an explosion in queer (in the reclaimed sense) representation. Surface Tension serves as important addition to the scene, especially in a popular media landscape that favors feel-good stories. Ostracism and the AIDS epidemic have erased much from that time. The pervasiveness of the disease throughout Surface Tension speaks to some of that lost history, and to how catastrophe and fear dominated the community for many years.
But yeah, we all know people who are sick or who’ve died. It’s so weird, so tragic, having my contemporaries die when I’m only thirty-three. Some people are hanging on, some aren’t. I read the obituaries every week now.
In Surface Tension, plot conveniences and unspoken rules of literature are often eschewed in favor of messier ones that have more texture and exemplify the reality of a family’s story rather than a plot line sloping upward and then dropping off. In writing what he knows, and especially what he remembers, Forgione captures the beauty of the semi-functional family.
© Jim Forgione and Michael Fialkowski
Jim Forgione lives in California and is sometime painter and photographer. He enjoys traveling, and among his favorite cities visited in the recent past are Verona, Pittsburgh, Seville, and Cheyenne. Surface Tension is his first novel.
Michael Fialkowski is a Communications and Creative Writing student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. As a part of his coursework, he researches and writes about the sociopolitical implications of online discourse and narrative. His first published work can be found in Volume 18 of Loch Raven Review.
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