Reviews
Faustian comedy of 1970s New York, the counterculture, and the Yankees.
Gross’s lively debut takes a dip into the chaos of 1970s New York, when “those twin evils, inflation and depression, worked their ever-nastier magic on the streets” and the papers’ “daily dose of robbery, rape, rioting, arson, assassination, suicide, infanticide, and homicide” is enough to jolt East Village news-junkie Eliot from his habit. In Gross’s vivid imagining, the city’s last flicker of hope hinges on its World Series-bound Yankees, led by the “season-long heroics” of rookie star Nick “The Swan” Spillage. But even baseball’s not immune from the city’s travails, as the diabolical revolutionary group Satanic Vanguard kidnaps Mayor Lightly at a “Save the Cities” rally and threatens further violence, entangling a young couple (Joan and Elliot) and even The Swan himself.
This saga of urbane comic deviltry unfolds at a fast pace right, with disjointed scenes and multiple characters crossing paths at several junctions heightening the boisterous New York-ness of the narrative. Gross masterfully employs the character arcs of Joan and Elliot to paint a rich picture of 1960s counterculture stalwarts—they tripped at Woodstock and have busked as a folk duo on the subway—facing the hard 1970s hangover. Joan’s obsession with The Swan leads to strike a Faustian deal, setting the stage for a twisty love story intertwined with a search for identity as Joan and Eliot both face crises of the soul.
Gross’s potent blend of garbage strike-era New York portraiture, brisk comic dialogue (“Satan’s not so scary. He just don’t conform to bourgeois norms”), yellow-tabloid press accounts, earnest belief in baseball, and incisive socio-cultural and political explorations power a wild story rich with wicked humor but also a sense of humane street poetry. At its core, Spillage is an ornate portrait of New York, still vital at its lowest ebb: its politics, its neighborhoods, its diversity, and the abiding belief of the Flatbush Faithful. This is a crackerjack novel of love and self discovery that echoes themes of resilience and of redemption.
Comparable Titles: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel.
— BookLife Editor’s Pick
A Faustian baseball drama with plenty of quirk and kick, Michael Gross’s Spillage blurs the line between politics and spiritual intervention in a raucous rendition of ‘70s New York.
Reviewed by Nick Gardner
A spin on the musical Damn Yankees, Spillage features an eclectic cast of characters ranging from the star- crossed protagonists, Joan and Eliot, to a star baseball pitcher known as “The Swan.” The Devil himself even plays a prominent role. The plot is as unpredictable as Nick “The Swan” Spillage’s screwball, but Michael Gross’s fluid language deftly links each section together for a satisfying finish. Filled with role-switching characters, magic, and, of course, baseball, Spillage doesn’t shy away from its critique of 1970s New York in what, at heart, is a story about the political and spiritual forces that try to draw lovers apart and the personal tenacity required to bring them back together.
Joan and Eliot have lived in the Bronx together for years. Barely leaving their bed to busk in the subway or attend iconic concerts like Woodstock, tensions build when Eliot, in hopes of starting a family with Joan, takes a job at The Burger Boat. Left to her own devices, Joan falls for rookie pitcher phenom, Nick “The Swan” Spillage, and, confused by her conflicting desires and traumas from her past, makes a deal with the Devil to leave Eliot for the Yankees’ pitcher.
Meanwhile, Eliot falls in with the Satanic Vanguard, a terrorist organization, in hopes that he can win Joan back. In a confusing mixture of Devil deals, magic, and rigged
elections, both Joan and Eliot find themselves transferred into the bodies and roles of a famous singer and a baseball coach, respectively, taking solo journeys that will either bring them together or tear them and their beloved New York apart.
While the plot with its many characters and their frequently shifting roles may require work from the reader, the prose is the glue that holds it together. Michael Gross uses rhythmic language, at times as surprising as a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo and at others, soft and quiet. He makes a risky move from the third-person omniscient narrator into short bursts of second person narration, and he succeeds at using this second person to make, for example, Joan’s traumatic upbringing much more visceral and immediate. Gross’s language sucks the reader into the urgency of the story at large, creating characters that, even though they change bodies and roles, are unforgettable.
For those readers unfamiliar with Faust or Damn Yankees, Gross’s novel can be difficult to follow, and its complex and wide-ranging cast requires quite a bit of authorial exposition to reveal, creating a narrative that is, at times, slow moving and information-heavy. However, each of the several characters from Satan’s employee, Raoul, to presidential prospect Mayor Lightly, to the ghost of Joan’s abuser, Big Daddy, are all displayed in great depth. Each character is exposed with enough history and desire to make them worthy of their own individual story. While the complete novel may lose some momentum in order to catch the reader up on its elaborate plot, its intricacies are nevertheless intriguing and unique.
With Spillage, difficult issues like spirituality, family, women’s rights, gentrification, and, of course, the Yankees in the World Series are exposed and commented on in a unique and fresh way. While the reader can easily revel in the language and the characters, they are also forced to question their understanding of the outside forces that complicate our relationships. With all its parody and satire, Spillage is not a flippant book, but a unique expression of a time and place: New York City, 1976. A history that reverberates into our present day.
From its Milton Glaser-style cover onwards, Spillage by Michael Gross shines as a resurrected literary curio from another era. An infectiously entertaining comic novel, charming and delightfully confusing.
In this freewheeling comic novel set in 1976. a revolutionary group has kidnapped the mayor of New York, and now they have their sights on the Yankees’ star player—but a slightly jaded East Village couple gets caught up in their plan.
It’s New York in the 1970s, and the city is teetering on the brink. Neighborhoods are crumbling, and crime is on the rise. The Satanic Vanguard, a revolutionary group fronted by hoodlum-hipster Raoul Wo, has kidnapped the mayor and is threatening to bring chaos to the Big Apple. Caught in the middle of it all are Joan and Eliot, a couple brought together by their love of rock ’n’ roll and nurtured by the hopes and dreams of the swinging sixties. But now those dreams have faded, and the cracks in their relationship are beginning to show. Joan’s latest obsession is Nick “The Swan” Spillage, the Yankees’ rookie phenomenon who has single-handedly propelled the team to the World Series. While Eliot seeks to reset his mojo, Joan has been lured into the orbit of the charismatic Raoul. The Satanic Vanguard have their sights on Spillage, and Joan has just become integral to their plans.
Michael Gross began writing SPILLAGE in 1976, the year in which it is set. Having abandoned the novel for almost fifty years, he revisited and revised the manuscript through more mature eyes while hoping to retain the essence of himself at the time of writing—when he was, as he puts it, “in all my youthful, anarchistic fervor.” One of the great strengths of the book is the verisimilitude of its setting, New York (especially the East Village), captured as a time capsule of on-the-spot reportage rather than retrospective imagination. The period detail is impeccable, the mise-en-scène utterly convincing. At one point Eliot conjures the memory of the chaos of a blackout when the couple escaped from the darkness of a movie theater: “Walking home to the sounds of store windows being shattered by looters and the occasional bursts of gunshots, almost brushed by shrapnel from an exploding garbage can, they held tightly to one another to avoid being separated. Just another night in the Big Rotting Apple.” The minutiae of mid-70s New York City living and the socio-cultural hangover left over from the 60s become naturalistic backdrops for Gross’s more outlandish characters and freewheeling plot.
The book is understandably reminiscent of much of the literary fiction of its era, imbued with the cynicism that surfaced after the failed dream of the flower-power revolutionaries had wilted. Joan and Eliot’s idealism has likewise faded. The Beatles are a distant memory. There is no more busking together on the subway. Even the Che Guevara poster has been taken down. As Eliot puts it: “We thought it would be easy to remake the world, change it for the better, but then the world took a big change for the worse, and we got disheartened.”
The emotional beat of the novel is the shifting relationship between Joan and Eliot—triggered by Joan’s sudden (and somewhat inexplicable) obsession with a baseball star. By writing in third-person present tense, there is an immediacy to Gross’s prose that helps propel the narrative. There is a playfulness in its structure, too. There are switchbacks and surprises. Some logical, others almost magical. Though Gross does well in reining in the excesses of his multi-stranded story, there are times when it becomes rather difficult to keep up with the novel’s plotting, and the reader becomes as confused as the frequently-bamboozled characters within its pages.
That said, the novel is always engaging, and Gross is a skilled enough stylist to ride the confusion to a satisfying conclusion—sometimes using secondary character “gonzo” journalist Art Popov’s newspaper reports to recap the action.
From its Milton Glaser-style cover onwards, SPILLAGE by Michael Gross shines as a resurrected literary curio from another era. An infectiously entertaining comic novel, charming and delightfully confusing.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader
A wickedly playful, rock and roll satire with a Faustian twist…
Gross’s debut novel delves deeply into the frenzied landscape of 1970s New York, a city torn apart by economic turmoil and rampant violence. 1976. A once vibrant New York City has been reduced to a desolate wasteland, plagued by graffiti, garbage, and rampant crime. The Satanic Vanguard, a radical group, is terrorizing the city: they have kidnapped the mayor and set Coney Island ablaze. Amidst this chaos, there shines a glimmer of hope – the Yankees, led by rookie sensation Nick “The Swan” Spillage, fight their way to the World Series. But even this ray of hope is threatened by Satan and his followers, who aim to crush the last remnants of optimism in the city. The things go haywire further as they target a young couple in their diabolical scheme.
Through the intertwining storylines of Joan and Elliot, as well as baseball rookie Nick “The Swan” Spillage, Gross paints a vivid portrait of counterculture in the midst of a societal hangover. As Joan becomes obsessed with The Swan, she unknowingly strikes a deal that leads her on a journey of self-discovery and identity. Meanwhile, Elliot grapples with his own crisis of faith and purpose. Gross expertly weaves together elements of 1960s counterculture, political commentary, and romance to create a gritty yet poetic portrayal of New York City. With engaging dialogue and vibrant descriptions, the novel is both an ode to the city’s resilience and a powerful exploration of redemption.
A must-read for anyone seeking an immersive literary experience rooted in the heart of one of America’s most iconic cities.
