When American Arcadia opens, it is New Year’s Eve and college friends Chry and Mina are testing death and trying to survive, respectively. Chry is the privileged daughter of a congressman, in love with the bass and sowing her many wild oats, while Mina is working-class, working her way up on a trading desk on Wall Street. Their love for each other and grossly different personalities mean they act as counterbalances, with Chry getting them in trouble and Mina managing (mostly) to get them out. For a brief, glorious moment that year, Chry and Mina’s friendship is doubled through the addition of quiet, beautiful Dare and moneyed, thrill-seeking Nyro, and in the delicious, dangerous way of twenty-somethings with money and without responsibility in the mid-eighties, they play: they ride the ferry back and forth to Staten Island, they scour the city for Chry’s musical hero, Jaco Pastorius, they do lines of coke off of a gilt-framed mirror, and they eat gourmet food in snow boots and put it on someone’s daddy’s credit card.
This can’t last. By summer, the wealth that buffers Chry and Nyro maxes out, Mina endures harassment and hazing at her high-pressure, brutal finance job, and Dare withdraws even further into his secrets. By the time the friends accompany Chry to “Arcadia,” her family’s mansion in New Jersey, for the annual St. James Day party, the cracks that have been forming through winter and spring get larger until even Mina can’t keep the four of them whole.
Like the water that features prominently in the story, from the ferry rides to Chry’s daredevil dip into the freezing Hudson in the opening pages, Scalzo’s prose picked me up and carried me, breathless, through each of the novel’s perfectly crafted moments. I was a tourist on the ferry, listening to Chry jam out on her bass, I was peeking over the fence to see the wildflowers emerge in Chry and Mina’s scrap of backyard, I was the bathroom attendant at the pretentious restaurant on top of One World Trade Center, handing tissues to Mina as she sobbed. And in the story’s final, poignant moments, in which Mina finds herself facing down her own family secrets, I was right there with her, grieving and understanding all at once.
Never sacrificing plot for the sake of flowery language, American Arcadia gives a vivid portrait of the era, the city, the friendships, and how Mina, at the center of it all, matures. I found myself reading, again and again, a scene in which the four friends are wandering the woods of Arcadia and lie down in a clearing: “I’m asleep and awake, dreaming of the exact place I am in… And for the moment, I don’t know anything else so there’s nothing to dream about. We lie and lie and lie in the circle beneath the sky and dream dreams about only this. I respectfully decline the universe’s standard offer of the future.”
For the length of American Arcadia, this was possible for me, too.
Regal House Publishing (2023)