From Electric Lit:
Tod Goldberg, the writer — the one who told me in my first quarter of his MFA program to stop being intimidated by everyone because, “we’re all just people who sit around in our underwear, late at night, typing” — is introspective and deeply concerned with the welfare of people. Goldberg writes his observant vulnerability into the heart of his stories — even the ones involving killers.
Goldberg’s newest book, Gangster Nation (Counterpoint), is the sequel to his award-winning 2014 novel, Gangsterland. The series is going to be produced for TV by the team behind Peaky Blinders. The premise of the books is that Sal Cupertine, Chicago mafia hit man, makes a mistake: he shoots undercover FBI agents in a deal gone bad. He’s subsequently hidden in a temple in Las Vegas, given a new face, and a new identity: Rabbi David Cohen. Since he’s not Jewish — and has to become so, at least ostensibly— quickly, Rabbi David Cohen pulls from the Jewish texts he binge reads and rounds them out with Bruce Springsteen lyrics. Gangster Nation picks up two years after Gangsterland: Sal’s new face is failing him, and he is growing desperate to reunite with his wife and son.
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HSP: A lot of angst in Gangster Nation comes from The Family’s middle management. The idea that working for someone else, doing the drudgery that it takes to keep things moving is soul-crushing. In the case of this novel, it pushes some of the lesser-knowns to make bold, even sloppy, moves toward greatness. Have you had any of those moments in your professional life? Did any of your previous jobs push you toward what you ultimately wanted to do, simply because they were so banal?
TG: I worked for a while in the infomercial business. This was right after I graduated from college and was trying to become a writer, so the mid-1990s. It was a terrible job. I was an account executive for a bunch of products with really dubious names and claims. There was one whose whole concept was that you could do exercises for your face that would essentially make you look decades younger, thus eliminating the need for plastic surgery, and yet it was, ironically, lauded by plastic surgeons. You can make yourself look like a cat for pennies on the dollar compared to plastic surgery! That wasn’t the call to action, but in my mind it was. Anyway, working in the infomercial business, even for just a year, I saw and experienced some deeply weird stuff. There was one time we got a call about a boatload of those rice pillows that had been infested with vermin, which then led to a discussion about how one burns vermin infested rice pillows on a boat in a port. We had an exercise device we sold that had some tension spring that was shooting out of it and breaking windows and hitting animals and children and such, which prompted a massive recall and a lot of panicked phone calls that inexplicably landed on my desk.
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I tell you this all as a long way of saying that even then, at the bottom rung of an organization the seemed at best morally toxic by definition (separating people from their money in hopes that their cheeks won’t sag is a grift, folks, no matter if it’s on your TV or someone comes to town with a magic tonic) and actually abetting criminal activity at its worst, I only really figured out something was amiss when I came to work and the bagels and snacks had been removed from the kitchen. There was a meeting that day and our boss announced that in order to cuts costs because of the projectile tension screw problem, there would no longer be free snacks…and that there might be a few layoffs. I can’t say I made any bold moves toward greatness at that moment, but I did come home and tell my then-girlfriend-now-wife that if I had to work at that place any longer, I might jump out a window and that I really wanted to try to make a go at this writing thing full time, but not, categorically, in the infomercial business.
Link to the rest at Electric Lit