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As far as I’m concerned, two great novels have come out of the Steel City in the last 15 years: Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Salvatore Pane’s debut novel, Last Call in The City of Bridges. Each of these books has that certain unnameable quality—deeply rooted in characters who struggle to make sense of the world—that truly speaks to the generation about which it writes.
During my early adolescence, when I was so unsure of my existence and how I could fit into the world, the sort of confessional, vulnerable prose of Perks’s narrator, Charlie, said some of the things I felt but couldn’t quite put words to yet; he tapped into that intangible, emotive experience of growing up, asking questions about our own sense of humanness. He said, “So this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.” Reading these words for the first time, they filled my gut with that breathy swell you get when someone finally understands: Yes, I thought.
Now, on the brink of college graduation, I am faced with another set of uncertainties stemming from the future’s “unknown.” As a former MFA student (2010) at the University of Pittsburgh who now is an assistant professor at the University of Indianapolis, Salvatore Pane beautifully captures the experience of a hip twenty-something trying to find authenticity and be original during the age of mass digital output and consumption. While Perks’s Charlie is lovable in his charming vulnerability, Last Call’s Michael Bishop is not that type of narrator. Instead, Michael Bishop is a snarky self-proclaimed elitist who wields sarcasm like a bad (relentless) habit. He likes to “drink his balls off,” alone or with his cheating best friend, and have sex with his other best friend and never speak about it again. He’s the type of downer who gets away with being so depressing because he’s so smart. While it is debatable if he is a likable character to the reader, his friends see his negative quirks for what they truly are (massive cover-ups for his blatant insecurities) and love him in spite of it.
In the beginning of the novel, the narrator’s voice screeches with corny lines that sound like he is trying too hard (note: “the heavyhearted, the young, the oh so imperfect”). Michael is a manic narrator with questionable morals; but as the novel goes on and the reader gets to know him more intimately, the moments of sarcasm become scarcer, replaced by truer, more authentic moments. We learn that, resulting from unresolved feelings of complicity in his best friend’s suicide, Michael lost faith and is now struggling to find faith in love, friendship, and self.
The novel is also littered with gestures towards Pittsburgh hip spots, like The Library, a bar on on East Carson Street, the Duquesne Incline, and the Brillobox bar at Penn and Main in Bloomfield. Pane skillfully reproduces the sort of “inside jokes” that capture and make up a place: for example the “sub-par sushi” in the Cathedral Café and the hipster crowd at Gene’s Place, a grungy bar in South-O. As a Pitt student reading this book, I get the same sensation I get when hearing my favorite obscure song on the radio, like when I heard “The Cave” emerge from the speakers in my friend’s car one summer’s night drive.
Last Call is a story of the love triangles between best friends—all tragic and fatal in their own way. The novel is understatedly complex: It is partly a rumination on best friends and how the dissolution of such friendships is possible (or even inevitable); partly a lament, or an attempt to make sense of suicide; and partly a “look into the life” of a modern-day hipster living amongst a “generation of micro bloggers.” There is a certain obsession with technology in the novel; it functions as both the veil under which the characters live as well as the vessel through which they publish their voice. In this paradox, Facebook figures both as a source of insight into relationships as well as the cause of those relationships’ destruction.
While is it obvious that the narrator is privy to his personality flaws, the reader only gets that through the (rather blunt) dialogue with his friends, who constantly tell him that his sarcasm perilously masks his underlying insecurities and, as Ivy—“the smart, pretty pastor’s daughter whose innocent charm takes his breath away” —puts it, a certain lovable neediness.
Indeed, Stewart O’Nan’s accolade on the book’s cover rings profoundly true: “Salvatore Pane’s debut novel is a romantic ironist’s plea for authenticity in a fantastic age.” Michael Bishop is that complex, real character that we all fall in love with despite our best judgment.
—Kelsey Hughes
Kelsey Hughes is a senior English Writing and Literature double major at the University of Pittsburgh, where she spends her time editing the Three Rivers Review of Undergraduate Literature and writing as much as possible so that, one day, she might be able to make a living out of it.
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