THE Standard Grand
ORIGIN STORY
My former sister-in-law deployed to Iraq in 2008 as part of the surge. Her MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was 88M, motor transport operator. She drove trucks, one of the most dangerous jobs in the Army. About halfway through her difficult deployment, my brother got word she was having an affair with another soldier.
After fifteen months, her tour ended, and she returned stateside. Stationed a couple thousand miles from my brother, she cut off all communication. None of us could reach her — e-mailing, calling, texting — we had no idea what had become of her. In that absence of information, while my brother went out of his mind with grief and confusion, I did what writers do. I went into my mind. I worked to imagine what could’ve happened, and I did so partly out of a sense of guilt.
I did not love my sister-in-law. I didn’t even like her much. I tolerated her because my brother loved her. It’s sad — shameful really — but I’ve found it’s my lot. I fail as a person. I’m awkward, anxious, or angry in my dealings with family, friends, and strangers. In the face of my social shortcomings, which are legion, I try, after the fact, to right them by rewriting them. Sometimes I find my way toward empathy. Occasionally, when I write long and hard enough, running myself through the full wringer of human emotions, I reach something that approximates love.
While my brother’s marriage gradually dissolved, I spent the next five years in daily communion with a make-believe woman inspired by my sister-in-law. In the early going, she, the main character of my first novel, The Standard Grand, bore a resemblance, at least on the surface, to my sister-in-law. But the longer I spent with her, the more she asserted herself, becoming an individual. Divorced from me and my preconceptions, and sharing only a few cursory details — a military job, a home state — with the woman who spurred her into being, she assumes selfhood. She takes on a name, Specialist Antebellum Smith, and a roster of nicknames: Bellum, Ant, Bang Bang. She has a dog and a dirty mouth. With every nuance, every telltale detail, she comes more lovingly to life.
But what is love to a novelist? In Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of Love, she tells us: “When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call ‘white’ is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.” When we love someone, what we feel for this person is the full range of affect. This, according to Ackerman, is love. Love is not an emotion. Love is all emotion. And there aren’t all that many. The dominant theory holds that there are merely six basics: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
When I’m trying to create a major character, I’m attempting to evoke in myself — through the thought, action, and talk of that character — every last one of those six emotions. When I ultimately do — if I do — I come to love her. This is my consolation. Love, the life-giving breath. And if I do love her, dear reader, then maybe you will too.
— excerpted from an essay in
Poets & Writers Jan/Feb 2017
REVIEWS
"[An] exceptional first novel…The Standard Grand is an important and deeply human contribution to the national conversation."
— Booklist (starred review)
"[A] promising debut…its vibrant style and twisting plot — at one point a character is mauled by a cougar — make for an appropriately complex snapshot of America’s relationship with the men and women who defend it."
— Publisher's Weekly
"In capturing the story of one deserter's search for love and redemption in an increasingly corporatized America, Nicorvo carves out something truly original."
— Library Journal (Great First Acts pick)
"[A] seamless blend of road-trip saga, love story, and critique of military contractors… An ambitious novel that effectively braids corporate greed, outdoorsy grit, and human connection."
— Kirkus
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...with sentences that flow like water down a mountain, Nicorvo’s muscular and energetic prose will stun readers with its poignancy, while providing a punch to the solar plexus. Whip-smart dialogue and keen emotional insight bring a ragtag, damaged, but lovable cast of characters to life. Ultimately, it is Nicorvo’s depiction of the deep psychological scars soldiers bring home that will keep this exceptional first novel in the hearts and minds of readers. Alongside Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Yellow Birds, THE STANDARD GRAND is an important and deeply human contribution to the national conversation.
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Like O'Brien and Stone before him, Nicorvo's language lays bare the sinewy lusts, rattling hopes, and incommunicable fears that are our human machine.
T. Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville
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Frederick Reiken,
Day for Night
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Jay Baron Nicorvo has written an absorbing and unabashedly brilliant first novel. With echoes of Tim O'Brien and Joseph Heller, and the added pleasure of an almost Dickensian plot, he has crafted an appealing, deeply humanistic, yet entirely geopolitical dimension that is all his own. I am in awe of the range of his knowledge, his swift and sure-handed storytelling, and the wonderfully diverse set of characters who live and breathe on these pages. Nicorvo's sentences often have the precision of fine miniatures but his canvas is large, multicultural, contemporary, and magnificent. He is a gifted writer and THE STANDARD GRAND is one great gift of a book.
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Pam Houston, Contents May
Have Shifted
I find few things more hopeful, in these darkening times, than a writer who can stare, unblinking, into the gut-wrenching destruction humans are wreaking upon each other and the earth, and still find shards of humor and humanity. A dash of Coetzee, a dram of DeLillo, but mostly just the complicated compassion of Nicorvo. THE STANDARD GRAND is a brutally beautiful novel.
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Don Lee,
The Collective
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This novel pops and sears. It picks you up and doesn't let you go until it's finished with its rollicking, fiery story. Nicorvo has produced a masterwork.
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Matt Gallagher,
Youngblood
A rollicking howl into the void of American empire and excess, THE STANDARD GRAND raises hell with both style and charm.
Bonnie Jo Campbell, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
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With profound compassion for his outrageously wonderful characters, Jay Baron Nicorvo brings readers to a defunct and decaying Catskills resort where a ghost platoon of vets — from wars current and past, AWOL and discharged, traumatized and traumatizing alike — are surviving among dangers both natural and human-made. Whether he’s inhabiting the consciousness of a one-eyed cougar, tracking corporate greed and espionage in the energy industry, or describing “achy, inflexible” geriatric sex, he’s doing so with an unflinching eye and an attuned ear. Insanely funny, by turns tragic and, ultimately, redemptive, THE STANDARD GRAND is a desperate masterpiece of a debut: honest, epic, constantly surprising, and relentlessly entertaining.
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Antonya Nelson, Funny Once
THE STANDARD GRAND defies categorization, as a novel; its pleasures are those of both the family saga and the government-covert-secrets sort. The reader engages politically, emotionally, and morally, with a page-turning obsession to see what, exactly, could (despite what should) possibly happen next. I welcome such reads, the surprise and satisfaction of encountering a winning and arresting new voice in the world of letters.
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Sterling Watson, Suitcase City
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Jay Baron Nicorvo's THE STANDARD GRAND is, from its eye-catching title to the prophetic peal of its last word, a stunning debut performance by a young novelist of extravagant talent. This novel gives readers everything — a gob-smacking plot, language that sings like the angels, and characters as compelling as our best and worst friends and lovers.
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Scott Spencer,
Man in the Woods
Jay Baron Nicorvo hits the sweet spot in THE STANDARD GRAND, a novel that delivers the tough and tender, twisting and turning pleasures of classic noir, while paying all due respect to what Terry Southern called Qual Lit. Not since I discovered the work of Daniel Woodrell have I read prose so attuned to the violence that lies beneath that fiction we call Normal Life. Kaleidoscopic in its vision, encompassing in its humanity, here is a novel I wish I could send to Robert Stone.
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Dennis Lehane,
World Gone By
Jay Baron Nicorvo
is a bracingly original writer and a joy to read.
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Don DeLillo,
Zero K
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Forget the chicken suit — and good luck.
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What Booksellers Say
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Channeling the absurdist humor of Heller, corporate intrigue of Pynchon, and an empathic, sure-footed storytelling entirely his own, Jay Baron Nicorvo has given us the next great (post) war novel. Nicorvo is the kind of writer I’m constantly seeking — compassionate, fearless, deeply intelligent — and THE STANDARD GRAND — utterly unputdownable with its cast of outrageous yet fleshy characters, elegant story and overflowing reservoirs of wisdom — is a book I’ve been awaiting.