What Sammy Knew

Description

“Laskin’s narrative captures it all–the fervor, the drugs, the sex, the politics, the magic, the tragedy of the 60s and 70s and most of all the angst of that wonderful, terrible time. A fun, transporting, and evocative read.” –Daniel James Brown, New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat

A turbulent coming-of-age novel about a young man who loses his innocence and finds his soul in the ferment of New York City in 1970

On the brink of a new decade, as the radical 1960s turns to the 1970s, seventeen-year-old Sam Stein is about to grow up in a hurry. Raised in a cushy Long Island suburb where his parents consign him to the care of Tutu Carter, their live-in housekeeper, Sam is learning uncomfortable truths about his place and privilege in his relationship with Tutu and in the world. When he stumbles into a New Year’s party and meets firebrand Kim Goodman, his life is changed forever. In short order, he falls in love and flees with her to the drug-soaked East Village of Manhattan, and gets swept up in the revolutionary political movements of the time.

An aspiring writer, Sam bears witness to the seismic upheavals of the day while remaining utterly blind to a high-stakes plot that Kim and her comrades are executing right under his nose. As seemingly unrelated events click into place, what Sammy knew and what Sammy didn’t know become matters of life and death – not only for himself and Kim, but for Tutu and her grandson Leon in Harlem, and for the radical protest movement teetering between disillusion and revolution.
 
Compulsively readable, peopled by unforgettable characters, crackling with wit and suspense, What Sammy Knew brilliantly evokes a chaotic, dangerously polarized, and historically important moment in America.“Engaging…hugely accomplished first novel…There is a great deal to admire in this foray into fiction. With wit, acuity and tenderness, Laskin paints a vivid portrait of a young man coming of age…timely and engrossing.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A vivid portrait of adolescence and New York City in the 1970s.” —Seattle Times

“Fresh and entertaining…it races to the finish as a compelling read well worth your time…A sweet novel that holds our interest to the last page.” —New York Journal of Books
 
“… an aching story about loss of innocence…Laskin adroitly integrates heartache, rock ‘n’ roll and violence, and references to the pumping songs of the era, to kick this one up a notch.” —Shelf Awareness

“A big-hearted novel, full of empathy and compassion and hope, that does what all important stories aspire to do:  leverage the power of story-telling to change the world.” —Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

“David Laskin enlivens the compelling urgency and confusion of the 1960s and 70s in Samuel Stein, a smart young man coming of age on Long Island, who turns his back on his family in pursuit of love, only to find that love resides in humility, and often much closer to home than we realize.” —Robin Oliveira, New York Times bestselling author of Winter Sisters

“A powerful coming-of-age novel that’s shockingly contemporary and undeniably relevant. Both brilliantly complex and relentlessly page-turning, devastating and tender.” —Deb Caletti, National Book Award Nominee author of Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
 
“An engrossing, timely, beautifully written book, What Sammy Knew reveals the perils of coming-of-age in a country fraught with instability, inequality, distrust, and strife.” —Julie Barton, New York Times bestselling author of Dog Medicine
 
“Irresistible. The story begins with teenage lust and humor but swiftly turns to idealism and recklessness en route to its exciting climax.” —Jim Lynch, bestselling author of The Highest TideDavid Laskin is the author of The Children’s Blizzard, which won the Washington State Book Award and Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for nonfiction. The author of several other works of nonfiction, Laskin writes for the New York Times and the Washington Post. He and his wife, the parents of three grown daughters, live in Seattle.Reading Group Guide for
What Sammy Knew by David Laskin
 
An Introduction to What Sammy Knew

“A hugely accomplished first novel…timely and engrossing.”
— Star Tribune

“Laskin’s narrative captures it all – the fervor, the drugs, the sex, the politics, the magic, the tragedy, and most of all the angst of that wonderful, terrible time. A fun, transporting, and evocative read.” 
— Daniel James Brown, New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat

God, how Sam hated the suburbs – especially this suburb, Fat Neck on Lone Guyland, as he and his pal Dirty Face had taken to calling it. So what if F. Scott Fitzgerald had lived here in the 1920s and immortalized the place as West Egg in The Great Gatsby?  Fitzgerald made West Egg sound glamorous and sexy and vaguely sinister – but now it was just a bedroom community stuffed with rag-trade impresarios, pill-popping trophy wives, and their brilliant Ivy-League-or-bust offspring.  Oh yes, and the Black maids who raised them.  On paper, it sounded awfully tony – the Gold Coast, the Miracle Mile, Kings Pit, Queens Expressway – but it wasn’t. Sam’s family’s privilege was so new and shallow it threated to come off in the rain like a bad dye job.

On the brink of a new decade, as the radical 1960s morph into the turbulent 1970s, seventeen-year-old Sam Stein is about to grow up in a hurry. Born in a cushy Long Island suburb he calls Fat Neck, and consigned by his parents to the care of their live-in Black housekeeper Tutu Carter, Sam has been raised with privileges he never really fathomed or even questioned. But when he stumbles into a New Year’s party and meets radical firebrand Kim Goodman, his life is changed forever. In short order, Sam falls in love with Kim, flees with her to the drug-soaked East Village of Manhattan, and gets swept up in the revolutionary politics of the day.
 
An aspiring writer, Sam witnesses the pivotal moment when 1960s idealism tilts into rage and violent revolution, but somehow he remains utterly blind to a high-stakes plot that Kim and her comrades are executing right under his nose. As seemingly unrelated events click into place, what Sammy knew and what Sammy didn’t know become matters of life and death – not only for himself and Kim, but for Tutu and her grandson Leon in Harlem. In the end, a page-turning plot propels Sammy to its shattering, redemptive conclusion.
 
Hailed by the Seattle Times as “marvelous…a vivid portrait of adolescence and New York City in the 1970s,” What Sammy Knew brilliantly captures a chaotic, dangerously polarized moment in American life. Though set half a century ago, the novel grapples with issues and passions that remain astonishingly relevant today.
 
“Laskin adroitly integrates heartache, rock ‘n’ roll, and violence, and references enough fist-pumping songs of the era, to kick this one up a notch.”
—Shelf Awareness
 
“Fresh and entertaining…it races to the finish as a compelling read well worth your time…A sweet novel that holds our interest to the last page.” 
— Paul LaRosa, New York Journal of Books
 
 
Q&A With David Laskin

You are known for your nonfiction work, including The Family and The Children’s Blizzard. What inspired you to write your first novel in your 60s?
 
WHAT SAMMY KNEW actually grew out of a memoir that I wrote about a dark time in my life. After publishing The Family, I really struggled with finding another subject. I think part of the reason was the emotional impact of writing about the Holocaust—after discovering and narrating the tragic murders of family members in Lithuania and Belarus, every other subject seemed trivial or somehow beside the point.  Following the advice of my mentor Ivan Doig, I began keeping a journal, hoping that something would emerge—and what emerged was my growing obsession with the life and history of Ethel Foreman, the African-American domestic worker who lived with my family and essentially raised me during the first decade of my life.  The memoir charted how I regained my own balance and vitality as a writer by pursuing Ethel’s past. In the end, the memoir was not published, but I knew I was not done with this story. It tore me up that Ethel, who died with no descendants, would remain forgotten.  I felt I owed it to her to honor her legacy in a greater way—and one gray November afternoon, while I was out walking my dogs, the lightbulb flashed on: what if I recast the memoir as a novel?  After that, everything just clicked into place.
 

What research went into writing WHAT SAMMY KNEW?
 
In researching Ethel’s life, I delved into the African-American experience in tidewater Virginia, where she came from and where her family had been enslaved and had lived since slavery. The Northern Neck of Virginia was the birthplace of three of our first five presidents, slave-holders all of them—and so with the help of a professional genealogist I searched deeply for anything I could find about the slaves of the founders and then broadened my search to Ethel’s people.  Eventually, I traced her family two generations back into slavery and also tracked down the last slave-holding family. 
 
Using records archived on Ancestry.com, I learned the basic facts about the life and early death of Ethel’s only son, whose name was Albert Nickens. It turns out the Nickens family have a deep and fascinating history on the Northern Neck as one of the earliest free Black families in America. Through a lucky stroke, I found a Nickens descendant named Karen Sutton who has devoted her career to African-American family history. While on the Northern Neck, I visited the site of the oyster processing plant where Ethel worked as a young woman and I interviewed a descendant of the man who had hired her. In the novel, I invented the story of Tutu’s encounter with Mr. Jamie—but all the details about the oyster plant and the shacks where the shuckers lived are authentic. 
 
 
The second line of research concerned the radical protest movement of the 1960s and 1970s.  Luckily, some of the major players like Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Cathy Wilkerson wrote memoirs, which were really helpful in capturing the Zeitgeist.  I also interviewed a local writer I know who was a member of the Weather Underground and grilled my sister-in-law’s brother, who was a radical at Columbia University in the 1960s and a close associate of Mark Rudd. In addition, I researched the Black Panther movement in depth, reading their newspaper The Black Panther and perusing some recent histories of the movement, including Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin’s Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. I also read social histories of Harlem in the 1960s and spent time digging into the archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.  Finally, I delved into the life and times of Andy Warhol and his wild and crazy circle at Max’s Kansas City. 
 

You include some actual historic events like the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion of March 6, 1970 and the outbreak of political bombings in New York that winter and spring.  Can you talk about how you reconstructed these events?  How much did you invent or embroider—how much is grounded in historical fact? 
 
The memoirs by radicals cited above gave me a very vivid inside view of the people responsible for the townhouse bombing, the events leading up to it, and the disastrous aftermath.  The New York Times and other papers of the day covered the event in depth and I drew on those stories as well.  Of course, my character Kim Goodman is entirely fictional—no one by that name participated in the bombing—but I was able to insert her realistically into the story after doing my homework.  Many American cities, but especially New York, were plagued by radical bombings in these years. I tried to be as accurate as possible with the historical context and the actual events in the book—the morphing of SDS into Weather Underground, the rhetoric deployed by the violent left, the frustration of the anti-war movement.  But instead of the actual historical figures, I invented characters to carry out the bombings, attend the meetings, etc.  In some cases, I drew on dialogue reported by participants in their memoirs or accounts.  You won’t see the name Mark Rudd or Bill Ayers in my book—but the views they espoused, the acts they committed, and the reactions they had later are all here.
 

The book is dedicated to Ethel Foreman and Ivan Doig.  Can you talk about their roles in your life and what you learned from the two of them?  How did they inspire your literary journey?
 
Ivan was my mentor and he provided me with every kind of support and guidance that a seasoned writer can offer to a rookie.  Ivan could be gruff and he had strict boundaries around his privacy—but I always had the sense that he believed in me and in my work, and that sense was invaluable to me over the years.  I think every writer must face down inner demons – the voices inside our heads that disparage our work and question our competence.  You—YOU—are going to throw your hat in the ring with Tolstoy and Twain and Henry James and write a novel—HAH?! Ivan’s voice was also inside my head—still is—but its message is the opposite:  Get back to work, do your best, stay with it, maintain high standards and you WILL succeed.  This has been a huge boon to me over the years.
 
Ethel was an uneducated domestic worker with little in the way of earthly possessions, but she did have her voice—and that voice was strong.  She showed me that a strong voice wields considerable force in just about every situation.  She was funny.  She was tough.  She was uncompromising.  She had an enduring faith in God and in herself.  And I truly feel that she believed in me.  This belief has proved to be as powerful and enduringly important to my career as Ivan’s endorsement. 
 

WHAT SAMMY KNEW is a coming-of-age story about Sammy Stein, a typical teenager who thinks he knows everything but is also riddled with inner doubts and insecurities. Did you channel your inner teenager to get that character?
 
Yes, for sure.  I was an extremely gullible teenager and I tried to graft that onto Sammy.  Sammy’s a romantic, always falling in love, always ready to believe the best of anyone he falls in love with—and I was the same in many ways.  I was also a late bloomer, like Sammy, growing up literally and figuratively quite late in the day.  At first, when I started writing the book, it was something of a struggle to dial myself back to age seventeen— but after a while, I felt really at home in this world. By the end, it was as if I was eavesdropping on my teenage characters instead of writing their scenes. I love the passion and openness of people that age—their willingness to tackle big issues, to jump in heedlessly and enthusiastically and rally around causes they really don’t understand.  I came to love my cast and I miss hanging out with them.
 
Sammy is an aspiring writer. You have been a published writer for a while. What advice would you give your teenage self or someone like Sammy about the road to becoming a published writer? 
 
Persevere!  That is probably the single most important piece of advice I’d give an aspiring writer.  The idea that I would one day write a book would have struck me as sheer insanity when I was seventeen—I could barely face writing a five-page paper—but if you persevere the pages mount up.  Keep your mind and your eyes and ears open: that would be my second bit of advice.  Focus on details—and let the big themes take care of themselves.  Other random adages:  Don’t make assumptions.  Don’t start writing until you’ve really tracked down or figured out the story.  Aim high—choose big important subjects even if you find them intimidating.  Do your homework.  Check your sources.  Don’t wait for inspiration before sitting down to write – if you do that, you’ll never get the job done.  Try to write every day, even if it’s just for a few minutes in your journal.  And finally:  read.  Read a lot—read as much as you can—and read like a writer, by which I mean read with an eye to craft. 
 

How is your approach to writing fiction different from writing nonfiction? What advice would you give to someone making the transition from nonfiction to fiction?
 
The old chestnut about show don’t tell is invaluable, or at least it was to me when I was struggling with the early stages of the narrative.  In the first chapter of the first draft, I wrote something like “Sam Stein was a chronic eavesdropper.”  That fell flat until it dawned on me:  show Sam eavesdropping on something!  That got me off and running.  In nonfiction, when I got stuck, I would usually do more research, dig deeper into my sources, interview knowledgeable people.  With fiction, when I get stuck, I delve deeper into my heart.  Ivan once said to me that in fiction you have to wear your heart on your sleeve in every scene—by which I think he meant to be emotionally present at every moment of the narrative.  Every scene you write in fiction must be there for some reason—to carry the plot along, to reveal something about a character, to create suspense or confusion. Action! This is key.  In the first draft I had far too many scenes set at kitchen tables or in diners: the characters chatted a lot but did little.  I worked hard to change this.  And finally, be open to inspiration and serendipity.  I had no idea that Sam would filch the FBI guy’s notebook until it happened—but something prompted me to do this and it turned out to be a great plot device.
 

What do you hope people take away from reading WHAT SAMMY KNEW?
 
I am not an observant Jew, but I am religious in my own way and I very much felt the presence of Ethel’s spirit as I stood by her unmarked grave in Westchester and spoke with her. I vowed I would honor her memory to the best of my ability. So my dearest hope is that readers will feel her presence in the pages of this novel.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Questions for Discussion
 
1.     This is a novel rich in characters – Sammy the innocent wannabe writer, Kim the radical firebrand, Richard the charming schemer, Leon the church-going grocery store clerk with the golden voice, and Tutu the stern, wise woman at the center of it all. Which character do you find to be the most fully-realized, and what brings that particular character to life?
 
2.     Laskin employs a variety of narrative modes in the novel – invisible omniscient narrator; Sam’s diaries and journal entries; Tutu’s reminiscences; shifting points of view. How does the fluid narrative perspective impact your appreciation and understanding of the story? Does your understanding of Leon shift based on these narrative modes and if so, how?
 
3.     The political scene evoked in Sammy is eerily relevant to today – simmering protest erupting into violence; institutional racism warping the lives of ordinary people; privilege and oppression operating at every level of society; seemingly unbridgeable divides between opposing ideologies; alienation and distrust between the generations. What is different between today and the world evoked in Sammy, and what remains the same?  Talk about how the characters and political situation might look if Sammy were set in the present day. Consider the concept of political radicalism and how it has evolved in this country over the past half century.
 
4.     New York City is so vividly evoked in the pages of Sammy that it practically becomes a character in its own right. Sam’s rapturous enthusiasm for the city and his paeans to city life give rise to some of the book’s most memorable passages. Compare Sam’s disgusted view of Fat Neck on p. 17 and p. 18 with his celebration of the East Village sidewalks on p. 106. Analyze the language, imagery, and allusions that Laskin uses to conjure up these very different places. Sammy grew up with privilege and comfort and yet he carries so much angst and tension focused on place of his birth. Why do you think this is?
 
5.     Music resounds through the book, from Gospel spirituals to hard-driving rock, from R&B classics to Jewish chants, from Bob Dylan ballads to funk hits. How does Laskin’s use of music capture the spirit of the age and to round out his characters. Can you think of other novels in which music is so important? What songs are on the soundtrack of your own life?
 
Visit the following link for a playlist of songs referenced in the book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61jfm219ArA&list=PLWXQQbA0qogKaxLiZwrKH6ZK4fcVyBHS2 
 
 
6.     When the book ends, most of the characters are in their late teens or early twenties. What sort of future do you imagine for Sam, Kim, Richard, and Leon? Are there hints or clues embedded in the narrative that suggest what kind of lives these characters will lead as adults?
 
7.     Why do you think the author chose to place an Israeli character in the middle of this highly American story? Eli is used mostly for comic relief in the early parts of the novel, but his character deepens as the book nears its end. Do you see a political message in Eli’s evolution and fate and if so, what is it?
 
 
8.     References to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby run through the book – not only in the scenes set in Fat Neck/West Egg but also in the excitement that Sam feels in fleeing to the city. Aside from the geographical overlap, why do you think the author chose this particular great American novel to riff on? What parallels do you see among the characters?
 
9.     What Sammy Knew is, among other things, a portrait of a writer as a young man. Consider the book in the context of other novels with writer heroes or anti-heroes – not only James Joyce’s classic, but also Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, all of which feature writers as protagonists (and arguably as stand-ins for the author). Writers lead notoriously quiet, withdrawn, often outwardly boring lives and yet they so often place themselves or their surrogates at the center of novels. Why do you think this is? How does Sammy differ from other writer characters you have come across?
 
10.  Using Sammy as a springboard, dive into memories of your own youth. What personal memories did the book stir up? How has Sammy altered the way you look at your past? If you were to write a novel or short story about your own youthful rebelliousness, what would it look like?  
 
 
11.  Sammy is an historical novel set half a century ago. Analyze some of the techniques that Laskin uses to conjure up the “feel” of 1970. What about his use of historic events like the emergence of the radical Weather Underground and Greenwich Village townhouse bombing? If you were to write an historical novel about your own youth, what actual events would you include, and what would you be trying to portray by including them?
 
 
12.  Tutu’s character is grounded in the history of African Americans on the Northern Neck of Virginia and the Great Migration of Black people from south to north. Consider how Laskin brings this history to life. What kinds of research do you think went into the novel? How does Tutu embody her own particularities, and how is she simultaneously symbolic of her people and her time?
 
13.  Servants have long been important characters in novels and films –What questions and dynamics does the employer-servant relationship raise about the stories’ characters, and their broader social milieu? How does Tutu compare to other portrayals of fictional servants?US

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