Current Affairs Out Now
A new novel by Cairo Smith.
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Dear friends and colleagues,
In October of 2024 I began early sketches of a novel called A Place for You. This name was taken from a line from the song “Casanova” by Ellis Ludwig Leone. There is a heaviness to the lyrics that surpasses most of the songs on that album, San Fermin’s self-titled.
“Spider got me when I was your age / A Casanova.”
This is an allusion to Spider Kelly in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises being Jack’s boxing coach. The album is full of such references, as well as references to The Purple Land, which I read that gray October.
The way Allen Tate sings it, though, always strikes me with the image of the speaker having been ‘got,’ webbed up, venom-bit, or similar by a metaphorical ‘Casanova spider.’
That was the feeling that formed the early center of A Place for You. It would be set in the thirties, it would be about American development and industry, it would be about upward mobility, it would be about love and war, and it would be about two people missing each other over and over again and what it does to them over a decade. It would be in the tradition of those more-commercial Modernists who really seem a little more like sullen Romanticists at heart.
It was with my reading of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin that the novel made a sudden, sweeping pivot. Tomorrow, despite the Shakespearean name, is not a pretentious or archaic book. It’s entirely contemporary, set just far enough in the past that it can span a chunk of time without becoming speculative. It’s a sweet novel, well-written, and it’s of its time.
Reading Zevin made me realize that the goal of this mode, this literary tradition, should not be to inhabit the past. We’re not writing The Age of Innocence. The flappers and war vets of Fitzgerald, after all, were ubiquity when he was writing them. It was his world, true to life.
It was with this that A Place for You radically transformed from the ground up as a present-day story, and the name Current Affairs came naturally shortly afterward.
One thing that struck me in the transformation was how subject matter that seems appropriately serious when placed in the era of Fitzgerald or Austen feels frivolous, maybe even out of touch, in contemporary setting—matters of family wealth, business dealings between in-laws, new restaurants and young marriages. This is despite the fact that such things still occur, and occur much the same as in those days, and are still very serious for the people who engage in them.
I decided consciously not to slip into the postmodern scorn toward this set that seems almost inescapable post-sixties. There is plenty of revolutionary snark in Current Affairs, but it rises from the supporting characters, never from the protagonist or the narrative voice. All the derision one could apply to the almost childlike innocence of young money and small town pluck must be supplied by the reader himself, or not at all.
Writing is a long, slow, careful process, like making something ornate and complex out of wood. Thankfully there are moments of life that intermix with the work. Here are some photos from that year’s span and what it held.
Current Affairs is a novel about Calvin Munn, an Iowan, as he navigates love and pursues a professional career over ten young years in Manhattan, with all the trappings that entails. It’s still about America and the American condition, maybe more than ever, in its contemporary form. It’s also about the specific heartbreaks and joys of specific made-up people who, through rendering, become nearly real. I hope you’ll enjoy taking this journey with them and with me.
Paperback and digital edition here:
You can also read the first chapter for free here:
All my best,
Cairo
That's a good nye tradition!
Congrats, man. You appear to be killing it with the writing, and not too shabby on the social fronts either! 😅