Yesterday's Noise

As nonfiction writer Joe Mackall reaches age sixty—an age the novelist William Styron called “the hulking milestone of mortality”—he finds himself pinioned between past and future, struggling but mostly failing to abide in the present. Blindsided by his reaction to becoming a grandfather, he finds himself “moving toward the edge of a foreign land, the plains of an emotional dystopia. He knows these feelings are connected in ways he doesn’t fully understand to life as a grandfather and as a man in the last third of his life. He worries about his country, an America increasingly polarized, fracked, outsourced, droned, downsized, teetering on the dream-edge of itself. When he’s not agonizing over the future he and the world have made for his granddaughters, he wonders what he has inherited from his ancestors and what he owes them. How have their lives affected his life? Did they die secure in the knowledge that they had improved the planet for future generations? How has he been shaped by their stories? Why are some defined by their tragedies? Some by a marriage? Others by resentments? A few by their work? Too many by violence, including the murder of a beloved uncle living a secret life? And finally, he asks what he is offering his own grandchildren? Which stories will they tell and how will his role in their tales be defined? The essays in Yesterday’s Noise: A Family Legacy of Rage and Radiance are not necessarily Mackall’s attempt to answer his queries, but rather his desire to fully explore them as a writer humbled and haunted by history, and as a man nurtured and gratified by the stories he has been told and the ones he must tell.