You Should Read 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS by Marie-Helene Bertino
Reading Notes
Last month, in a review of Rachel Beanland’s latest novel, I wrote about my love for the verb shimmy. You can imagine how delighted I was to start 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas and read this on the first page: “In her room at the prow of her father’s apartment, Madeleine Altimari practices the shimmy. Shoulders, shoulders, shoulders. In front of the mirror, so she can judge herself, face sharp with focus. It is the world’s most serious shimmy.”
But it’s not just Madeleine who’s got the moves. Marie-Helene Bertino’s entire novel shimmies. It romps. At times, it even levitates.
Although it’s set in December, 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino makes an excellent read any time of year (and maybe especially during this hellish heat dome of a summer).
On Christmas Eve Eve in Philadelphia, Madeleine Altimari, nearly ten years old, sings and smokes. After her mother’s death, her oblivious and brokenhearted father has sequestered himself in his room and largely given up parental responsibilities. Luckily for Madeleine, her mother left behind many friends, all of whom keep their promise to look out for her daughter: Mrs. Santiago feeds Madeleine at the corner café, and Vince Sherry treats her for head lice at Beauty Land. Madeleine’s teacher, Sarina Greene, didn’t know Madeleine’s mother but keeps an eye on the girl as well.
Over the course of twenty-four eventful hours, both Madeleine and Sarina face their pasts as they try to build their futures. Madeleine wants nothing more than to be a jazz singer like her late mother, if only she could figure out how to get on stage. Sarina, meanwhile, has returned to her hometown after a divorce and must face both her old classmates and her high school crush. While at Beauty Land, Madeleine learns about The Cat’s Pajamas, a local jazz club. Back at the café, Madeleine asks Mrs. Santiago for more information, but the woman tells her, “A jazz club is no place for a little girl. . . . I want to ride in a hot-air balloon. Hover over the city like a bird would . . . Me is to hot-air balloon as you is to The Cat’s Pajamas. Neither is going to happen!” But Mrs. Santiago underestimates young Madeleine, who finds her way to the club in the middle of the night.
In addition to Madeleine and Sarina, we also spend time with Jack Lorca, the owner of The Cat’s Pajamas. After one too many violations, Lorca is on the verge of losing the club, which he inherited from his father. If The Cat’s Pajamas shuts down, he’ll lose more than just a building; he’ll lose his father’s legacy. As Bertino’s omniscient narrator remarks, “We carry our ancestors in our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, either way we can’t escape.”
Marie-Helene Bertino’s wonderfully exact, gloriously offbeat world is one I didn’t want to escape. I hadn’t heard of her work until Courtney Maum featured her in a Craft from the Couch interview. Talking about her latest book, Beautyland, Bertino commented on her revision process. As she reread the manuscript, she’d stop whenever she got bored and rework that section until something about it was her favorite, so that on any given page of the published book she could find a scene, a character, or a line that she loved. That commitment is evident in 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, where every scene sparkles like the snow flurries covering Philadelphia.
My dog stole my reading spot, but at least she has good taste in novels.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2014
Timeline: one day
Setting: contemporary Philadelphia
Narrator: omnscient narrator with multi-character POV
Fun Facts: Bertino created a playlist for the novel. Look for it on Spotify: “Music from The Cat’s Pajamas.”
Book Club
Jack Lorca initially dismisses his friend’s concerns about his son. But when Alex comes to The Cat’s Pajamas after Jack receives the citation, Jack Lorca sees him anew: “He cannot remember the last time he had a meal with his son. He cannot remember the last time he saw Alex eat anything. The sun-colored fingertips, the mottled bruises on his son’s forearms. Alex’s shape comes into searing focus, as if Lorca’s eyes have taken sixteen years to adjust to new light.”
Think of a time when you saw something come into “searing focus.” What caused you to re-evaluate a person, place, or situation that you’d overlooked for so long? What did you do with your new perspective?Madeleine’s mother writes life lessons for her daughter: “After the cancer spread to her lymph nodes, Madeleine’s mother filled a recipe box with instructions on how to do various things she knew she wouldn’t be around to teach her. HOW TO MAKE A FIST, HOW TO CHANGE A FLAT, HOW TO WRITE A THANK-YOU NOTE FOR A GIFT YOU HATE, HOW TO BE EFFICIENT: Whenever you are doing one thing, as yourself: what else could I be doing? One one recipe card, Madeleine’s mother listed the rules of singing. The #1 rule: KNOW YOURSELF.”
What recipes would you write to share with your friends or kids? Why would these be most important to you?
Close Reading
By limiting her story to a twenty-four hour time span, Bertino sets herself quite the challenge. How can a writer stay focused in the present and also provide the backstory and subtext necessary to create fully developed characters?
It’s not unique to use an object or place to trigger memory in a character, but Bertino does it so seamlessly that it’s worth pointing out. For instance, we only learn the history of Gus, the club’s drummer, from Jack Lorca. While Jack is reflecting on how his old friend Mongoose might help him save the club, the phone rings:
“Mongoose, the traitor. The desk phone rings. It is Gray Gus, five years earlier, calling to tell Lorca about a girl he’s just met.”
The phone seems to ring both in Lorca’s present and in his memory. Because Bertino keeps the flashback in present tense, it has the quality of a lived scene, more than a reminiscence. She pulls this off again when Sarina wanders through the city with her high school crush, Ben:
“Sarina’s mother calls: Sarina!
‘Should we go in?’ he says. ‘Or, shall we continue our tour of the city’s fountains?’
‘Pardon?’ Sarina says.
With a sweep of his hand, Ben showcases the city. ‘Our tour…’
‘Sarina!’ her mother yells. ‘He’ll be here any minute!’
‘I’ll be right down!’ Sarina bows her head in prayer. She is twenty years younger and standing in front of her bedroom mirror.”
The first time Sarina hears her mother’s voice, the italics indicate it’s clearly in her head. But the second time, Bertino adds quotes to make her mother’s voice part of the dialogue in the scene, again blurring the line between the present moment (12:15 A.M.) and the night Ben took Sarina to their high school prom.
Creative Writing
Clare Kelly is Madeleine’s nemesis at St. Anthony of the Immaculate Heart. Not only does Clare win all the awards, but she’s also the student anointed to sing at morning mass—until December 23, when she is involved in a bicycle accident. While Clare is a minor character, there is one sentence that perfectly sums her up: “In the back bedroom of her family’s row home, Clare Kelly dozes on her chaise lounge, busted led propped on a pillow, dreaming of GLORY and THIGH GAPS.”
I adore this sentence. Like a Polaroid picture, its specificity provides a clear snapshot of precisely who Clare is. She’s resting on a “chaise lounge,” not a couch. She’s dreaming of “GLORY,” not love. She wants “THIGH GAPS,” not Christmas presents.
Choose a character from a work-in-progress that you need to get to know better. This could work with fiction or memoir. Use Bertino’s sentence as a starting point: “In the [location], [character] rests on [furniture], dreaming of [something abstract] and [something concrete].”
Gus, the drummer at The Cat’s Pajamas, is a recovering addict. When Jack Lorca takes him back after a love affair gone wrong, “Gus goes clean and quiet, and never ties up again. The last time Gus sees Alessandra is through the elbows and arms of her brothers and sisters who force themselves in between them. That’s a drummer’s love story. If you want a prettier one, you’ll be waiting forever. If you could separate your body into four distinct rhythms, you’d be cracked too.”
Start with a profession: a swim instructor, a zookeeper, a firefighter. The more specific, the better. Then write a job description for that position. You might need to do some research for this step because you want to be precise. Finally, use details from the job description to write a “love story” for someone in that field. How do the necessary skills for, say, feeding giraffes or teaching kids to do the butterfly translate into relationships? End your story or scene with this: “That’s a [swim instructor’s / zookeeper’s / firefighter’s / etc] love story.”
Sentence Study
Singing makes Madeleine feel holy. Bertino describes her experience onstage as follows: “It is the rest of her life rising to meet her like heat from the sidewalk and she knows it like she knows to take the A train when you want to find yourself in Harlem.”
I pulled this sentence because it does the opposite of something I’ve been telling my students to do: It uses a weak linking verb, “is.” Student writers tend to over-rely on forms of the verb “to be” because they’re easy. During writing workshops, I exhort students to tap into their imaginations and use stronger, more precise action verbs, even in academic essays. Such specificity creates a distinct voice.
But when a writer has, like Bertino, the knack of including specific details and similes—such as “the rest of her life rising to meet her from the sidewalk”—a linking verb works just fine.
