"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 13 [fin]

Today we conclude our serialization of Matthew Gasda’s Seasons Clear, and Awe. It’s been quite a ride having all of you along as we try to bring back the serial novel as a force in American letters. We hope you’ll stick around for the next cycle, and please share what we’re doing here at PILCROW.

• Chapter 1

• Chapter 2

• Chapter 3

• Chapter 4

• Chapter 5

• Chapter 6

• Chapter 7

• Chapter 8

• Chapter 9

• Chapter 10

• Chapter 11

• Chapter 12

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  “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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  2019

  Elizabeth arrived at Charles de Gaulle with gin and Xanax in her blood system. The recording session had gone terribly. She had fought with Louis for three days.

  After spending the first week that they were supposed to be recording, taking her to parties and going to the countryside and drinking in bars, not really thinking about music, and then suddenly pushing her to sing until her voice started to crack. It was ridiculous.

  —You’re a genius, Louis had said in New York. We need to make an album together.

  And she’d been so excited, she’d really thought that this was it.

  The unconscious was life and life was turning against her, dominating her, and had forced her to buy a bottle of gin before she left. She was already starting to forget the songs she wrote. She didn’t really write anything down.

  She spent six weeks in her apartment in Bedstuy, writing them, preparing the album, gave up her apartment, went to Europe, worked on the farm in Switzerland, went to Genoa, went to Paris, started recording the songs and just broke down. The manic energy started to falter; Louis started to push her; she broke down;

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