Sitting Pretty

Rating:
Summary: DeCapite...thundering down
Review: I had to read it twice, and will probably read it several times more to get all the little nuances that Decapite has filled this story with. My favorite line on first reading..."It's so bright my soul squints..." The story is very male socially and very human relationally. It offers an insight into something that most of us take for granted, a father's love. Decapite's writing captures the essence of the human relationships in a microcosm that is so full, it is like glimpsing the angels on the head of a pin.

Rating:
Summary: Sitting Real
Review: I had to read it twice, and will probably read it several times more to get all the little nuances that Decapite has filled this story with. My favorite line on first reading..."It's so bright my soul squints..." The story is very male socially and very human relationally. It offers an insight into something that most of us take for granted, a father's love. Decapite's writing captures the essence of the human relationships in a microcosm that is so full, it is like glimpsing the angels on the head of a pin.

Rating:
Summary: DeCapite...thundering down
Review: It's eighty-seven degrees, just after noon and Danny and his father are sharing a cigarette in the heat on their way to the track.

This is the way of Michael DeCapite. How he moves through the telling of what he sees. Life as it is, with no embellishment. Slow mostly. Mostly time passing...

DeCapite is to writing what baseball is to sports-deceptively simple, slow, quiet, an expanse of green spread out under sun or lights, a few players...waiting...most of them. Men returning to the field daily, doing it again, waiting it out. A field so perfectly laid out that the deeper into you get, the more you realize the perfection of the game-from the precise incline of the pitcher's mound, adjusted over the years to most evenly match pitcher and batter-to the distance to dead center-it all matters...quietly...it's all headed somewhere. And there is so much going on in any given moment that you can scarcely take it in. This is DeCapite on the page.

Sitting Pretty is a quiet story. Seven men spending an afternoon together, old friends, one of them dying, his grown son too 'slow,' too 'troubled' to realize. "Those doctors know what they're doing. They're scientists. My dad was sick but he went to see the doctor. They can do anything. The doctor gave him some pills, he's better now. Aren't you, Dad? Hey Dad, you're my sunshine, right?"

Gambling, drinking, cancer, oppressive heat, loss, the horses barreling down the stretch for home...all this hanging from the afternoon sky, while downstage, seven lives move tenderly through another couple of hours. So quietly you might miss it if you didn't know where to look. A father's hand on the back of his son's neck. The whole world is in it.

DeCapite traffics gracefully in the realm of the overlooked - here in Sitting Pretty and in his novel Through the Windshield. I hope America doesn't overlook Michael DeCapite.