Reading Geoff Peck’s City of Clans punched a return ticket to a rite of passage, one I’d long ago filed in the recesses of my memory. A Friday night in Bellwood’s Memorial Stadium, the spotlights flaring to life in the home of the Blue Devils. Teens in their mesh jerseys took the field. In the stands, the marching band blared rounds of “Barbara Ann” and “Thunder and Lightning.” The humidity clung to everyone with the tenacity of Saran Wrap. The school zone was dry and smoke-free, but the breath of too many parents in the stands was sweet and hoppy from pre-gamed cans of Yuengling.
Milling through the crowd were the college freshmen, like myself, back in Bellwood to attend the home opener. It was 2004, and the chatter was about Coach Hayes’ starting lineup, the next game at Penn State, the Altoona Curve’s path to a division title, the Steelers’ hopes for recovering from the shellacking of their recent 6-10 season. Not a word about Bush, or the War on Terror, or body armor, or John Kerry’s tenuous embrace of the Second Amendment, or the lingering effects of Norfolk Southern’s buyout of Conrail in 1999.
Instead, we leaned against the chain link fence ringing the field and tried to focus on the game. We ignored the parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents with smug looks that said, They miss it already. They’ll be back. This is where they’re supposed to be. This is who they’re supposed to be.
Only five years and a hundred or so miles separate my memory of Bellwood’s 2004 home opener from the setting of Peck’s City of Clans: Pittsburgh, on the eve of the G20 protests in 2009. But the weight of obligations, the unpleasant tug of home, and the shackles of blue-collar masculinity were instantly recognizable from my own upbringing in the Keystone State. These are the currency of Peck’s novel, which cashes in these chips with a steely patience that defuses the traps of nostalgia and anger.
To be fair, Jeremy Starcevic — the lost soul at the heart of City of Clans — has plenty to stoke the engines of his ire. At only nineteen, his life is on the brink of calamity, speeding beyond his control and teetering off the rails. By day, Jeremy hazards a soft launch of adulthood, floundering through classes at the Community College of Allegheny County and working at a party supply warehouse. His nights are steeped in cheap beer, drugs, and parties in the digs of Pittsburgh college students and high schoolers in the suburbs of Moon and Sewickley. Jeremy’s best friend from high school and roommate, Scott Melloy, directs these reckless evenings, and most of Jeremy’s poor choices. While in high school, Jeremy torched his prospects as a high-school baseball star, quitting the team midseason at Scott’s urging. Scott is practically cologned in a mist of hypermasculinity that roils the pit of the reader’s gut, yet he’s slick and charming — enough so that Jeremy sees himself and Scott’s girlfriend Amber as “Scott’s two people.”
“Rule follower”: this is how Jeremy sees himself, but it might be more apt to say he’s a role follower, plodding along according to Scott’s playbook, despite his better judgments. The novel begins at the dawn of the fall semester, when Jeremy and Scott move into their own apartment in Pittsburgh. Jeremy is desperate to pivot and mature: “Their own place,” he thinks. “No one else in their old high school clique can say the same. [. . .] Nobody else has this.” But after working through a celebratory case of lager purchased with their fake IDs, Scott receives a text from Amber. There’s a high school party happening in Moon. Scott wheedles Jeremy into driving. Jeremy complies, even though he’s drunk and contemptuous at “the high school party and everything it represents.”
It’s hard to encounter Scott and not think of the predators exposed during the past two decades of political reckoning, from the #MeToo movement onward. Yet, because he believes in Scott’s loyalty, Jeremy is only vaguely aware of how Scott’s will has weevilled its way into his life. But to the reader, the damage to the woodwork of Jeremy’s character is already evident. He shows up slightly pickled to his younger brother’s first time pitching a ballgame. He intentionally goads his father, nicknamed “the Bulldog,” a pugnacious retired catcher for the Pirates’ last World Series-winning team. His friendship with childhood best friend Kat Kovacs, now a photography student at Carnegie Mellon, treads across thin ice that could fracture at a moment’s notice. Their friendship has been tentative for years, because Jeremy had once fabricated sexual stories about Kat and himself to impress Scott.
Jeremy’s life is primed with enough existential dynamite to level a city block. And in City of Clans, this leaves Jeremy with two options. Either implode alongside Scott and spiral further into self-destruction or recognize that he can salvage the wreck and piece together his true self.
But then again, it’s never easy.
—
Team sports in America — and Pennsylvania in particular — often foster an image of manhood predicated in the projection of strength, discipline, and stoicism. The culture is one of resilience yet silence, where many young men feel ill at ease, but nonetheless feel pressured to practice a kind of primal masculinity. I burned much of my own childhood refusing to talk with coaches who called the landline and harangued my parents about why their boys weren’t playing football. I skulked in the backfield in baseball, wearing the jersey of a team named after the garage where my father and his pals drank incinerated coffee that makes the paving-tar espresso at Sheetz seem positively silky. Some of these men were hunting pals, eager to enroll their kids in the same hunter safety courses and to translate the discipline of the ballpark into the frigid mornings of deer season. It is what boys are supposed to do, we were told. But I wanted none of this and retreated into the extracurriculars where my friends, nearly all girls, thrived: band, choir, theatre, debate.
In City of Clans, these unspoken, implicit social norms snare Jeremy. Baseball and the discipline of the sport arenot simply credos for life, but a metaphor for manhood, sexuality, and behavior; Because of the Bulldog’s exhaustive efforts to drill Jeremy into a future pitcher, Peck writes,
Jeremy also understood early on that there was a code you had to live by, not just for baseball, but for being male, and that as a child, he wasn’t measuring up. His peers would use the word gay as some catchall for bad. Something you didn’t ever want to be, even if there wasn’t a tangible definition.
As Jeremy understands it, the implicit morality of sports is a heterosexual masculinity riven with competitiveness and hyper-individualism. And those forces keep time throughout the novel: Jeremy cannot grapple with the imminent descent of the world’s leaders on Pittsburgh for the G20 Summit, because his father’s induction ceremony into the Beaver County Sports Hall of Fame is only weeks away. His boss at the party supply warehouse tallies orders, seasons, and upcoming events based around the Steelers’ win-loss record on a breakroom calendar. And, his younger brother’s success on the mound tolls in the back of Jeremy’s mind with the cadence of a Dickensian ghost, doling out warnings about the errors of his ways.
It’s tempting, here, to invoke the other great, former high-school athlete of Pennsylvania fiction: John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. However, Rabbit’s collapse from high-school basketball star into an entitled, philandering deviant better echoes Scott’s toxic masculinity than the Bulldog’s baseball-couched code of male conduct. Still, Jeremy cannot triangulate his way outside of these models, their ramifications for his budding sexuality, and his individual agency. Sex especially haunts Jeremy: he rankles at Scott’s crude euphemisms for sex with Amber, frets over his body’s inconsistent responses to Kat’s presence, and registers his ambivalence toward the few “conventional” girls who appear throughout the story.
The reader realizes it long before Jeremy does: the “code” of baseball has boxed him into a corner, and he hasn’t yet learned, as Peck writes, “how to stand in the box and take a pitch.”
—
Even though it is set in the Pittsburgh of 2009, City of Clans is necessary and timely, fiercely rebutting the voices clamoring for a super-charged restoration of masculine values. In the past few years alone, voices from the ideological left and the right, alike, have trumpeted about the “crisis of masculinity” and proposed their own strategies to resituate men as breadwinners and providers. In The New Yorker, Jessica Winter recently has navigated the permutations of this rhetoric, from Gavin Newsom’s podcast conversation with Charlie Kirk, to Rahm Emanuel’s op-eds, to Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man, to the rise of the manosphere. “What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely,” Winter cautions, “is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be.”
This premise is one that Jeremy, at first, is willing to tacitly grant. He recognizes that his friendship with Kat is growing brittle, yet — while Kat is attempting to defuse one of Scott’s racist tirades at a party — Jeremy attempts to ask her to be his date to the Bulldog’s hall of fame dinner. In another moment, he apes Scott’s jealous control of Amber (which Kat tellingly labels as a form of “possession”) and feigns irritation at a man who greets Kat at a bar. And he resists her entreaties to pay attention to the G20 Summit and its ramifications for the city. After meeting her at Kiva Han and internally grousing about the coffee shop’s “hipster-y” vibe, Jeremy jokes, “I don’t know what the G20 Summit is, Kat. I get my news from ESPN.” He then retorts, with a shrug, “Don’t see how it affects my life in any way.”
In a pivotal moment, Jeremy’s jolted to the realization that the women in his life have experiences and memories beyond his scope of knowledge. In an effort to rehabilitate her son’s sense of family, Jeremy’s mother, Dell, convinces him to visit his grandmother in a long-term care facility. There, his grandmother revels in a memory of Dell’s childhood: a fleeting fascination with Willie Mays and a girlhood dream of being the first woman ballplayer. The story figuratively winds Jeremy, hard as a line drive taken to the ribs:
Jeremy can’t meet his mother’s glance this time. The insight into Dell has sparked a level of reflection he’s ashamed to admit he’s reaching for the first time. That his mother had limits on dreams. That she couldn’t be whoever she wanted to be. He tries to imagine what that moment of realization must’ve been like for her: Oh, silly me, I can’t play baseball. I’m a woman. A reality he’s never had to face himself. Any door that ever closed on Jeremy was due to his own fuckups [. . .].
This is Peck’s prose at its best: incisive, revelatory, serrated. Even as Jeremy’s thoughts surge toward this realization about his mother’s humanity, Peck still inflects Jeremy’s voice with a stereotypical, jaunty, “Oh, silly me” that betrays the type of implicit misogyny that Winter points out. The prose strikes twice; the first lash cuts through Jeremy’s stubbornness to expose a new awareness of his privilege, while the second stroke reveals that he still has much to learn about the lives of others, not to mention the prejudices that he has internalized.
—
The mercy of Peck’s novel, though, is that it grants Jeremy the time for “his own fuckups” and a path toward redemption, while not sparing him from the consequences of his actions. It’s like Peck has perfectly situated The City of Clans at the center of a Venn diagram, the point where grace overlaps with the disastrously selfish suburbanites of Richard Yates, the zany odysseys of Michael Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh or Wonder Boys, and the raw earnestness of Gary Fincke’s Pittsburgh short stories.
As in real life, there’s no magic wand or incantation that can whisk away the harm that Jeremy has imposed on the ones he loves — or the trauma he’s sustained from Scott. But, the novel also gifts Jeremy with a realistic flicker of hope, a frail flame that illuminates the other paths opening to him in the early twenty-first century. His composition class at CCAC alerts him to novels that dramatize the labor movement, industrialization, and the history vanishing against the backdrop of Pittsburgh’s gentrification. Kat signs him up for Twitter, subscribes him to the accounts of a few journalists, and teaches him how to vet sources and sleuth out information through hashtags. (It’s shocking, to think of 2009 as the halcyon days when Twitter was still the stomping grounds of the Fourth Estate.) And, even though she suffers a broken arm in the G20 protests, Kat shrugs it off. Her resilience, poignantly, further steels Jeremy’s resolve. “Seriously, though,” he tells Kat as they take in the Pirates’ last game of the season, “I do want to be more involved. My class, the topics, and, well, just everything has really flipped a switch, and I don’t want to be shut-off anymore.”
Peck crafts a compelling case for a liberal arts education — even as he clearly situates Jeremy’s break from toxic masculinity as a choice. Jeremy can opt into a more critically engaged perspective on his home city, its history, and its people. Or he can retreat into the templates laid out by the Bulldog or Scott. Even so, City of Clans has planted the seed for hope, for newly discovered agency, in the rich earth of Pittsburgh’s rivers and their confluence. But the future won’t come easy. For Jeremy, there’s still much to cultivate: his tenuous new sense of self, a renewed relationship with Kat, his academics, a fragile understanding with his parents, and a life unshackled from Scott.
But, hope exists and it is worth sheltering. That is what City of Clans does: it encases this fragile possibility, like warding a rose bud under a mason jar to protect it from the first freeze, preserving it for the readers who need this story most.
Editor’s Note: Geoff Peck will be in conversation with Founding Editor of PRoB Ed Simon at a 7P.M. February 6th event at our official bookstore White Whale.
