In his Cold War era novel Comeback Love, Guilderland resident Peter Golden uses the weaponless battle as a backdrop to tell the coming-of-age story of the role of women in the United States.
`I guess as background music, it plays all the time,` Golden, 57, said of the use of the Cold War in his book. `The point was that of all the things that occurred during the Cold War, the most important was the change between men and women.`
One of his main examples of this is the presence of women in the workforce since the ’60s and ’70s, which he said has skyrocketed. Now a household is able to rely on two wages instead of one, something he said can really help when if one of the spouses loses a job.
He added, though, that the role of women in U.S. culture is centered on their role as a nurturer and caretaker of children, but in the book it shows them as more empowered with having access to effective birth control, better protection from venereal diseases and the legalization of abortion.
The story takes place in Spuyten Duyvil; Dutch for `spitting devil,` in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where the main character and narrator Gordon Meyers’ love interest Glenna Rising is renting out a house.
`It’s a beautiful place, it looks like something right out of the 19th century,` said Golden. `It’s like the country within a city.`
Golden said that he visited the place after reading a piece in the New York Times and took pictures.
While the women’s perspective has been well-documented, Golden said, he wanted to write about how their change in roles affected men.
`Their lives didn’t change at all, but we were changed enormously by this,` he said, calling men the `innocent bystanders` to the changes.
`Men were sort of watching them make these choices and their ambivalence to it.`
The main plot point of the story is the relationship between Glenna and Gordon, where Gordon pines after a woman he can’t have. The two had known each other 35 years ago, and since then Gordon has become a consultant with a grown son and a failed marriage.
Gordon begins longing for Glenna and decides to surprise her at her office in Manhattan, where she has become a pediatrician, and things don’t go very swimmingly. Even Golden isn’t sure as to why Gordon would do such a thing.
`He goes to meet her and she thinks that he’s sort of lost his mind,` said Golden. `They eventually go out and have a drink.`
This meeting is an `awkward` one, said Golden, where Glenna is confused about her decisions regarding her career and having a family. It’s a situation Gordon finds himself stuck in.
In this scene, Golden uses flashbacks to show what had happened to the two previously. It is a tool he uses constantly throughout the book, which he said is due to him being a historian.
`I felt the only way to get a handle on the situation was to look from now until then,` he said, `to get an honest accounting.`
In the middle of doing research for a book on the Cold War, which he said would be coming out next year, Golden soon became compelled to write `Comeback Love.` So when he found a break during his research, he decided to write it.
`I would say it took me less than six months, maybe four or five,` he said. `I have been thinking about these characters for a very long time, but they had different names, of course.`
While most of what happens in the novel is of his own creation, Golden admits that where events in the Cold War were used, he sometimes had to do extensive research. There is one scene where Stalin gives a speech after the war, which he said had taken him several hours to get the most intricate details of the speech.
`I probably consulted 15 sources,` he said. `I was sort of stuck with what he said. There was a response to that speech that formed our response to the Cold War.`
He notes the differences between the facts created by history facts a writer creates in a fictional story, adding that an author can find themselves stuck with what they have invented.
`It has to be truer than true,` he said. `You have to be very careful with what you invent.`
As Golden lived through the Cold War, he has also interviewed many of the leaders during the era such as former President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Soviet Political Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He was afforded this opportunity while writing a biography on the late American Diplomat Max Fisher, who worked on the relationship between the U.S. and the Middle East.
Golden’s book `Comeback Love` is available for purchase at bookhouse.indiebound.com.
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