A CALL FROM JERSEY Paperback Out Next Week, P.F. Kluge Interview

Many may know New Jersey as the setting of popular TV shows such as The Jersey Shore, The Real Housewives of New Jersey and The Sopranos, or for it's famous musicians including Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, but New Jersey has more to offer than just reality TV backdrops and anthemic rock ballads. New Jersey is the birthplace of some of literature's finest writers, including Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Overlook's own P.F. Kluge. Kluge's A Call From Jersey will be published next week (11/29) in paperback, and to honor the occasion he is with us today answering questions about his acclaimed father-son story of 20th Century German immigration set in the Garden State.

OP: A Call from Jersey follows the life of Hans Greifinger, a German-American who immigrates to the United States and builds a life for himself and his family in New Jersey. You were born and raised in New Jersey. To what extent is this story based on your own experiences of growing up there?

PFK: New Jersey is my home state, from birth through college years and, though I don't live there now, the place is in me. A certain kind of humor, a certain attitude. I can't shake it. Wouldn't want to. A lot of my family history is in, and between, the lines of A Call From Jersey. The German-American experience. If you open presents on Christmas Eve, can sing a few lines of "Silent Night" in German, value wheat beer and pumpernickel bread, and your family includes some relatives who were on the wrong side of World War II, A Call from Jersey is for you.

OP: The book spans more than half a century, taking place between 1928 and 1984. Why did you choose to set your story in this particular period of time?

PFK: My parents had been in America for almost twenty years before I was born. I missed their green-horn years, their discovery of America. I've always wondered what those first years were like---what they were like---before they knew me. I've wondered about how the war felt. I heard the stories. I needed to use, and adapt, and add to them. And then to cover my years with them, their growing old, my growing up. Then, how they left, and how they left things, later on. Years later, I missed conversations we never quite got around to.

OP: Hans’ son George Griffin is a journalist and travel writer. Are you a world traveler as well? In your experience which cities are the best to visit?

PFK: I get nervous if I don't have at least two trips ahead of me, all the time. I like long stays. And here's a rule: for every hour of travel (airplane and airport) you need to spend at least 3/4ths of a day on the ground, at your destination. There are places I keep going back to. At one point my Peace Corps islands of Saipan and Palau, for instance, and Altaussee, in the lake country of Austria at another. The cities I return to are Singapore, Sydney, Vienna and Istanbul. I always need to see them again.

OP: In the novel George leaves New Jersey to pursue a new life, but is drawn back home to attend a class reunion. Have you ever attended one of your own high school reunions?

PFK: To me, attendance at a high school reunion is a moral imperative. That goes for the Jonathan Dayton Regional High School Class of 1960. I love these occasions. The memories, the reflections, the connections. The staring, which isn't rude, it's required. And the unanimous conviction that our music, back then...doo-wop, doo-wop, is far better than the stuff the kids are listening to now.

OP: Before he moves to New Jersey, Hans begins his journey in the United States working as a janitor in New York City. Today you are Writer in Residence at Kenyon College, but how did you pay the bills before you were a teacher and published author?

PFK: Before I was ready to write books, I worked as a journalist, on newspapers and magazines. A journalist is a good thing to be, while you're waiting for life to give you fictional material. You learn an unneurotic approach to writing, a respect for deadlines, a way of asking questions and following up on them. You learn to value conciseness and abhor bullshit, unless it's bullshit of a superior kind.

Praise for A CALL FROM JERSEY

"Absorbing ... as much about the 20th Century experience as it is about brothers, fathers, and sons." - Publishers Weekly

"[P. F. Kluge] sketches a difficult but ultimately loving father/son relationship with a rare sincerity and welcome humor. Heartfelt, funny and poignant." - Kirkus Reviews

"We're very fond of books set in New Jersey. And, since our grandparents were immigrants, we're very fond of books about those 'tempest tossed' souls." - Asbury Park Press

"This book's sense of place is authentic." - Newark Star Ledger

Interviews and more with P.F. Kluge for A CALL FROM JERSEY!

Recently, it seems that New Jersey's place in popular culture has been solidified by the TV popularity of shoes like Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

But for New Jersey native P.F. Kluge, now a professor and writer-in-residence at Kenyon College in Ohio, it's the place where he grew up, and a perfect setting for a novel about how the American dream has changed through generations.

The Newark Star-Ledger and Cleveland Plain Dealer both reviewed Kluge's new novel, A CALL FROM JERSEY, this week.

The Star-Ledger's interview offers more insight into the creation of this literary novel and the thought processes Kluge had while writing. Read the full article here, but our favorite excerpt is below.

"The book is really about conversations with my father I never got to have," Kluge said. “I have tried to imagine his experience as an American, and as a German in America, especially between the two world wars."

The son, too, is culturally adrift. He is a second-generation American, suddenly trying to understand his parents’ life and re-connect with their lost old-world ways.

“As I grow older, and the number of years since my parents have died grows larger, I grow closer to them,” Kluge said. “As I get older, I miss the sound of their voices, the sound of German being spoken around me, and the stories they told. I miss the beer parties and German songs sung into the night. I miss mother’s potato pancakes.”

The book’s sense of place is authentic. Kluge writes about “13 Bumps,” (Johnston Road in Watchung), which climbs the mountain above Route 22 and has been a teenage makeout place for generations, from Model As to Mitsubishis. And Snuffy’s in Scotch Plains, gone from “roadhouse to Parthenon.” Old Hans even recalls Madame Bey’s, the old Passaic-side boxing training camp on River Road in Summit, where Schmeling once trained.

Only one of Kluge’s previous seven novels was a Jersey story, and it was his most famous.
“I set ‘Eddie and the Cruisers,’ in South Jersey. I spent the summer of 1962 working as a college intern at the Vineland Times Journals, and I found South Jersey so fascinating, and so different from here I was from. You could smell whatever they were canning that day in the air.”

The Plain Dealer's article, which you can read in full here, calls A CALL FROM JERSEY an "engaging road novel" and also comments on Kluge's ability to vividly describe a particular location.

In P.F. Kluge's "A Call From Jersey," characters travel to the highest point of the Watchung Mountains at night, park the car, turn out the lights and strain to glimpse Staten Island in the distance. New Jersey is the place from which Kluge's characters flee, Manhattan being "in the direction of my dreams," says George Griffin, co-narrator, with his father, Hans, of this engaging intergenerational story.

Kluge, a wry and underappreciated novelist who teaches at Kenyon College, wrote 2008's beguiling "Gone Tomorrow" and "Eddie and the Cruisers."

Here, he illustrates how difficult George finds it to get entirely away from New Jersey. Even if you are away your entire adult life, the roads of the Watchung Mountains, George says, still "become part of you so you feel you could find your way along them in the dark forever."

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Then, like all great road trips, Hans and George's ends in an epiphany. Kluge handles these passages deftly, allowing for the bonds of siblings, and Hans' lingering questions: Was my brother a monster? Or was my brother me?

Stay tuned for more news and reviews for P.F. Kluge and A CALL FROM JERSEY.