Gilvarry is a scholar, of sorts, of Norman Mailer. He finds himself raising his hand for a writing assignment in war-torn Vietnam, mainly to try to win back his wife, Penny, who has left him and taken their children with her.Īlan Eastman belongs firmly to the chest-thumping, self-aggrandizing, tree-swinging school of male author, and it sees him ending up in many tangles of thorns that other people seem to avoid. Eastman rages at the dying of his literary light, and everything he does seems to be at once intense and half-hearted. Eastman Was Here, the second novel by Staten Island-born Alex Gilvarry, features a hot-headed, fading writer in his 50s in ’70s-era New York. Perhaps it still goes on: similar thoughts about Alan Bennett, say, or even Martin Amis - just not as sexy. “What would Norman Mailer do?” “How would Saul Bellow write this bit?” “I’m almost as funny as Philip Roth!” These are thoughts that, one suspects, certain male writers of fiction have had in the past.
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