Review 159: The Garden of What Was and Was Not by David Stone

The Garden of What Was and Was Not
The Autobiography of X
Book One
(as told to) David Stone
Copyright © 2008
ISBN 9780595439454
iUniverse
250 Pages
$16.95 Paperback
$15.25 Amazon

I came across David Stone’s book, The Garden of What Was and Was Not, on a random Amazon.com search one day.  I was immediately captured by the title and after reading the product description I decided to contact the author to see if he was willing to send a copy for me to review.  Mr. Stone gladly agreed and I had a copy of the book in the mail in just a few weeks.  I think what caught my curiosity the most was the subtitle: The Autobiography of X. I immediately considered Malcolm X, but the cover of the book doesn’t indicate that this book might be about him, and indeed it’s far from it.  The Garden of What Was and Was Not is actually a fictional autobiography of a man named Peter McCarthy, as if he is telling his life story to the author. It begins in the 60s, but don’t think this is a nostalgic walk down memory lane for a baby boomer reminiscing about the Beatles, Vietnam, Elvis, drugs, peace, and all the hippie culture that today’s generation is left only to read about in the back of their history books.

That X in the subtitle is almost like a “fill in the blank” for anyone who may have grown up in that era, but not really been a part of the bigger picture.  Maybe you never got to see the Beatles or Elvis in concert, but their music was still the soundtrack to your weekends.  Maybe you didn’t go off to war, but you feared the draft and you lost friends who did go.  Maybe you didn’t smoke pot, but you breezed through a party and its pungent smell pierced your nostrils and you knew immediately what it was. You didn’t get arrested at a peace rally, but you picketed and chanted right along with the rebellious ones safely in front of the black and white television in your living room. You may not have been a part of that history, but it was a part of you.

My generation may still not be convinced or even entertained by the tales of some “old man”, but David Stone’s book does pan forward to 2003, just two years after 9/11 when Peter recounts “where he was” on that day we all remember.  Now ask yourself if you were in New York when the first plane hit the first tower?  I wasn’t.  But I do know where I was; I will never forget.  Peter even says in the story, “Of course, my story’s nothing special. There were thousands more dramatic. I exercised no acts of heroism or extreme endurance. I escaped to midtown just before the first building was crushed, going ahead with what was intended to be my normal business for the day, and never experienced the swelling walls of dust and death that roared up the canyons as the towers fell.”  Those of us not in New York, those of across the rest of the country experienced it in our living rooms, right in front of the television where our parents saw JFK get shot or heard Martin Luther King’s infamous speech.

Now, David Stone’s book is not about experiencing history through the boob tube.  What it is about is the life we live while history is being made around us.  Peter McCarthy’s life isn’t special.  It isn’t a dramatic biography just eager to be flashed on the big screen, but it is his. He spends most of the book reminiscing about his friends and girlfriends, and various jobs he landed by beefing up his resume after dropping out of high school.  What gives the book its essence is the way the author, or Peter’s own voice, has presented it.  There are pieces like this:

In America, the social landslide began to move like and iceberg accelerating as the ground below turned to grease. Things lost certainty. Change felt inevitable. A wave hovered, throwing an intense shadow, ready to crash over everything on the human shore.

or this…

One of our most pervasive and persistent illusions suggest that there is some sort of separation in time, as if we’re somehow distanced from the past. This capacity, the ability to see life as an ongoing procession measured in uniform distances, evolved because our brains lack the capacity for managing more than a moment or two at once, especially when the moments are not uniform.

Just when you think McCarthy is about to drop into a political or scientific rant, he brings us back to reality with Peter, to scenes so innocent and haunting as falling asleep while overhearing Peter’s girlfriend having sex with his best friend in the bathroom. Much of the book takes place in the 60s and 70s.  The sub-subtitle “Book One” suggests that maybe we’ll see more of Peter later on. Having just read John Knowles’ A Separate Peace for the first time  week’s before beginning Stone’s book, I appreciated the “coming-of-age” quality that Stone’s book presented in a more recent generation that I knew more about than Knowles 1940s tale of young boys away at school during war.

And while the historical headlines wallpaper the backdrop to Peter McCarthy’s life, it is the real life everyday actions of his teenage and young adult years that push the story forward.  The first paragraphs of the story put the reader in a specific place in history (the assassination of JFK), but then we are walking down an old country road with Peter and his friend as they wander around in the early hours of morning past curfew.  They are the moments in our lives that we wish would never end, that we don’t consider being historical, but Stone embraces them and reminds his reader that those moments will undoubtedly slip away from us all.

Being a white male in my thirties, growing up in a blue-collar family in the 80s and 90s, had I read Stone’s book ten years ago I would have probably been bored to tears.  But someone once said the universe picks what book you read, why and when. As I approach middle age and look back, Stone’s book couldn’t have come at a better time for me.  Baby boomers might shed some tears as you walk in the garden with Peter, but this is a book for anyone who found themselves just going through the motions of life, only to discover life is what happened when you were too busy just going through the motions.  David Stone, thank you for the wake up call!