Gloucester Daily Times Tuesday, April 22, 2004
Hard Times in Anastas' Stories: the American dream slides out of reach
By Greg Cook
Staff writer
The title of Peter Anastas' new book, "Broken Trip," comes from local slang for an unprofitable fishing voyage, but in his stories it becomes a metaphor for the devastating effects of poverty in Gloucester
"What I'm trying to do is show what it feels like, what does it really feel like, to have a low-paying job; what does it feel like to live on the edge? When I wrote the book (in the 1990s), the country was in one of its biggest economic booms ... and I was trying to think about the enormous irony of this huge wealth that was being generated in America and people here in Gloucester not participating in it in any significant way," Anastas said. The 66-year-old Page Street resident reads from his "novel in stories," as he calls it, at The Bookstore on Main Street at 7 p.m. Thursday. The text is augmented by a photo essay by Gloucester documentary photographer Ernest Morin.
In one story, a woman turns to heroin to help ease the pain after her boyfriend is wrongly gunned down by police. Their daughter struggles for a normal life, living with her grandmother, taking care of her baby sister, going to school, but this is threatened after her mother dies and her sister's father steals into their home to claim his daughter and attacks the older sister.
In another tale, a woman falls into trouble when she becomes enamored of a bad boy. In a story inspired by an actual crime, a damaged boy and his friend savagely murder a homeless man at his camp in the woods along the railway tracks.
They are tales, told in a deceptively simple manner, about generations of parents and children struggling to forge relationships amidst ravaged lives. Junkies overdose. The state Department of Social Services removes children from homes. Jobs disappear. People apply for social services, medical care, food stamps, housing subsidies. Anastas takes an unblinking look at drug and sexual abuse, AIDS and teenage pregnancy. This personal devastation is paralleled by larger collapses - the fishing industry sputtering under tighter and tighter government regulations and the social service net shrinking under corporate consolidation and government cutbacks.
If you know Gloucester, you'll recognize the taverns, fish plants and neighborhoods Anastas writes about. The book is populated by the sorts of people and places he's known here. "It comes out of living here my whole life and knowing there's not just one Gloucester, there are a number of them," Anastas said. Starting out he packed fish and reported for the Gloucester Daily Times. He went on to be a social worker with the Gloucester antipoverty agency Action Inc. "'Broken Trip' is really a book I couldn't have written unless I'd worked at Action for 30 years, because working at Action took me into the heart of the culture of poverty in Gloucester, and few people have had that experience. And I felt it was my responsibility as a writer to write about it," Anastas said. "I wanted to have a certain objectivity in the book so that I could dramatize attitudes that are prevalent in the community," Anastas said. "And really the vehicle for this is fiction because it enables you to use your imagination in dealing with reality. It enables you to expand on reality. You have a broader scope. A nonfiction book, you're pretty much restricted to what happened and why it happened, just as you are in journalism. In fiction, you can imagine the consequences of actual events or you can imagine alternatives. In nonfiction, you have to stay with the people. In fiction, you can make them up. Every character in this book was made up."
Anastas' last book, "At the Cut" from 2002, was a frank look at his childhood in Gloucester in the 1940s. But this book, like his first, "Glooskap's Children: Encounters with the Penobscot Indians of Maine," looks closely at the effects of poverty. Anastas began thinking of characters and stories in the late 1980s but didn't begin writing until about a decade ago. He finished his latest book around 1997, but it took him a while to find a publisher. Finally, Glad Day Books decided to take it on. The Thetford, Vt.-based publisher was formed by novelists (and husband and wife) Grace Paley and Robert Nichols around 1998 to publish fiction, nonfiction and poetry addressing social change. Speaking of Anastas' book, Paley said, "The stories are about ordinary people and how hard their lives are. This is kind of an essential fact that needs to be seen in the literary world," Paley said.
Anastas said, "I wanted to write about Gloucester and people living on the edge, as a way of writing about America. ... People need to know the America behind the myth of America. This illusion that everybody has an equal opportunity, that everybody can work, that everybody can consume. People need to know that it's a struggle for a lot of people. There are people who don't have educations. There are people who for one reason or another dropped out of high school. There are people who come out of situations of family violence. There are people who have been traumatized living in poverty. It's not fun being poor, and it's hard to get out of poverty if you don't have an education. I wanted to show that there's great humanity in poor people. The society tends to marginalize poor people - they're crooks, they're drug addicts. I wanted to put a human face on poverty."
There are glimmers hope in Anastas' stories as people begin to turn their lives around, but the overall mood is gloomy. "One agent I sent this book to said to me, 'I like the writing, but there's no redemption.' My answer is, I don't believe in redemption. I have an essentially tragic view of life. I'm an existentialist. There is no inherent meaning in life. The only meaning is what we give it by our acts. It's as simple as that," Anastas said Counselors, social service providers, medical workers and police officers, as Anastas put it, "populate the book in a quiet way." One recurring character is the welfare case worker, Tony, the son of an Italian fishing captain who serves as Anastas' alter-ego. "What I wanted to show, not just in Gloucester, but in society at large, people tend to look down on the helping professions. They tend to look down on teachers, social workers, nurses. I wanted to show that in many ways these people are the heroes of our society. They make very little money and yet they're on the firing line. When someone is in trouble, the human service profession is there. ... These are all people who do society's dirty work. And I wanted to show, through their presence in the novel, how they help people change their lives," Anastas said. "...Without the helping professions, many people would live less happy lives and less productive ones. "I wanted to show Tony as a person who had the gift of education, unlike so many people we grew up with, and he didn't use that to enrich himself. He used that to help other people, to give to other people, and that's what life is all about. That's basically been the whole tenor of my life."
