“Rockefeller Center”
Book 1, chapter 14; Book 2, chapter 19
Characters
1.14 a young man (unnamed) and his date (also unnamed), a wife mentioned who is also unnamed.
2.19 older man (unnamed), older woman (unnamed), narrator (unnamed)
General Subject/ Plot
1.14: A young man, in the throes of an indefinite romantic sentiment, histrionically pledges to meet the girl he’s with at Rockefeller center in five years. (He keeps this pledge but of course she doesn’t.)
2.19: the narrator (the same narrator?) gives numerous accounts of a story about a man he knows losing his hat and encountering or thinking he has encountered a woman he carried a torch for for many years.
Motifs
1.14 movie, alcohol, boring party, “on the roof” , Saroyan (literature) (*), clothing (black velour dress), new year’s, rockefeller center.
2.19 grey homburg, rockefeller center, fifth avenue, sixth avenue, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, clothing (camel’s hair polo coat), husband leaving wife for secretary, false high blown language/ Reader’s Digest, person aged seventeen (like in 1.14) “five years ago” like in (1.14)
Notes
William Saroyan… grosgrain edge.. I think Sorrentino himself would have been 19 in Jan 1949….
In the first episode a young man, despite knowing how stupid it is and how it doesn’t work like this, wants his love to be like love in the movies. This occurs at Rockefeller center.
In the second, Rockefeller Center is allegedly the location of another romantic movie-like episode: a old man’s hat blown off his head lands at the feet of a woman who might be the same woman he loved as a youth.
In the second, the old man thinks he’s seventeen again which is the age of the woman in the first.
In the second, the old woman’s husband left her five years ago, which is the time, in the first, after which the young man and woman are to reunite.
If, in the second “Rockefeller Center” the woman is now 55 (“55 or so years”) and they knew each other thirty-five years ago, then she was nineteen at that time, and the man seventeen; so there is an inversion at work the first “Rockefeller Center” where the man was nineteen and the woman seventeen.
The first is a third person omniscient account, the second is a first person account of something he himself had been told, maybe repeatedly, maybe a couple of these.
The “boring party” of the first bringing the second “on the roof” to mind.
The “camel-haired coat” of the woman of the second suggesting a real prosperity as opposed to the assumed one suggested by the homburg of the man in the second.
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