"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 2

We continue PILCROW’s Inaugural Serialized Novel Contest: over the next three weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our three Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack (Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.)

Our Finalists for this round:

1. Seasons Clear, and Awe by Matthew Gasda

   Chapter 1

2. Mites by Gregory Freedman

3. Notes on the State of Virginia by Peter Pnin

We’re excited to have all of you as a part of this endeavor to forge a new path for fiction on Substack. If you believe in what we’re doing, please consider offering a paid subscription.

“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.

Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.

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The next morning, Adele took Elizabeth with her to her parents’ place in Allentown, leaving Stephen at home with his father, who was working on a new stone patio in the backyard. Stephen loved watching his father work, or seemed to. He was really still too young to say what he liked or didn’t like. Like all very young, little toddlers, Stephen was obsessed with construction of all kinds. One of his first words was backhoe. And he loved all sorts of big machines. Stephen’s eyes would grow wide when they drove past the now largely shuttered Bethlehem Steel, which had turned into the largest brownfield site in the United States.

Adele’s grandfather had worked at the steel mills, while Michael’s father had been a steelworker, which was the difference between them. They came from the same class of European peasantry, but Adele’s family had already been educated for a generation. Adele’s father had gotten a scholarship to Moravian Academy, had learned Latin, and memorized ...