By Marion Filler
Author Mark Di Ionno acknowledges that Gods of Wood and Stone is a clearly masculine book, ostensibly about sports — predictable fare from a reporter who has covered it for years.
Yet in Di Ionno’s talk Tuesday at the Morristown & Township Library, it became clear that his novel really is about the changing American experience, and the loss of traditional values in the face of rampant commercialization. Sports is just the metaphor.
Di Ionno sees a similar duality in his own life.
“The book is the culmination of the two halves of my journalistic career,” said Di Ionno, who began as a sportswriter and sports columnist for the New York Post.
After six years as a front-page news columnist at The Star-Ledger, he changed course and now is public affairs manager for the Newark Police Department, a contributor to an online news site, and an adjunct professor of journalism at Rutgers.
“Being a sportswriter always felt like being a little bird riding on the back of a rhinoceros,” he said.
It took him 14 years to write this book, and his agent was not helpful. “He said this will be a tough sell. Men don’t read books. Nobody wants to read about a couple of disillusioned white guys. A year later, Trump got elected and I said, ‘See, we are still out there.'”
The protagonists are two men who come together in Cooperstown, NY. One is an aging former baseball player about to enter the Hall of Fame, the other, a blacksmith who clings to a vanishing rural society.
Mark Di Ionno describes genesis of ‘Gods of Wood and Stone.’ Video by Marion Filler for MorristownGreen.com, March 26, 2019:
They reflect Di Ionno’s personal conflicts as he contrasts the merits of change with the inevitable loss of the past. The blacksmith sees so much wrong in popular culture, and Di Ionno tends to agree.
A trip to Italy reinforced his opinion that America, unlike other parts of the world, has no baseline culture, no sense of cultural identity.
“Pop culture has avalanched everything in our country,” Di Ionno observed. “The truth of the majority has made us slaves to popularity.”
In the ranging conversation that followed, the author described his views on parenting, and the difficulty of trying to imbue the young with a sense of history — a conflict gripping the blacksmith.
Exorbitant salaries of star athletes are indicative of how out-of-balance our society has become, Di Ionno asserted.
Hall of Fame catchers Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk, he said, are representative of the generation between “guys who had to work for a living in the off-season and the guys who are making 30 million a year. Carlton Fisk had to work two years in the National Guard before he could play baseball. That would not happen today.”
While taking care not to reveal the book’s ending, Di Ionno offered a few hints: His main characters are mirror images of each other, and come to realize that they share more in common than they knew.
Play ball!
