Jacket Weather

So very real . . . A sad but sweet song about the uncertainty of middle age and how funny it is when time slips away. --Kirkus Reviews

Jacket Weather is a beautiful, evocative account of a late-in-life love sprung into being in early twenty-first-century Manhattan, characters tossed forth from the aftermath of the punk rock seventies. Protagonist Mike spins cryptic, poetic observations of his daily life, strikes random and true chords, pen as Telecaster. His plaintive adoration of June, the love of his life, is painted with enduring mystery and great respect. I loved this book." --Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth, author of Road Movies and jrnls80s

In this roman à clef--minus the clef--I can clearly hear the music of the NYC streets; feel the L train as it hums; and can smell something cookin'--a modern Moveable Feast. --Clinton Heylin, author of The Double Life of Bob Dylan and From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock

Mike DeCapite has an eye for deep beauty in the mundane. He writes prose that makes poetry of just walking down the street. What he observes injects a charged current into life's moments between. Reading Jacket Weather is like listening to the world reveal its secrets. --Robert Gordon, author of It Came from Memphis and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion

Mike DeCapite's books all feel like movies to me. The characters, and the rooms and seasons they inhabit, are clear before my eyes. For example, if anyone should ask me to describe the goings-on at the YMCA, I feel expert on the subject. Not that I've ever been in a Y, but from reading DeCapite's novels and short stories, I've spent a good amount of time there. I know the ins and outs of the Ys in Cleveland, San Francisco, and New York City. I know that in these YMCA locker rooms around the country, naked men are standing around talking at length (and quite hilariously) about the preparation of pork cutlets, meatballs, and sauces. The other thing I've learned from reading DeCapite's work is that love is a messy business. As surely as there will be sweaty weight rooms there will be ruined marriages swapped out for doomed romance. The losses are crushing. However, here in Jacket Weather, Mike has finally found June. Sure she's married but that's beside the point. In this case, Mike writes about a more matured, lasting love. The love is both for June and New York City. I hope he isn't jinxing anything. --Kelly Reichardt, director of Wendy and Lucy and First Cow

Poetic and compulsively readable, Jacket Weather invents a new genre--call it lyrical realism. Mike Decapite casts a cool but affectionate eye on New York in the 2010s, as it lives on despite having become a replica of itself. Like Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex, Jacket Weather traces the lives of those who've stayed on after the party. It's a love story improbably set at the beginning of late middle age and it's also a story of cities, survival, adaptation, desire, and a celebration of the small pleasures we invent and discover to offset unavoidable loss. --Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker and Summer of Hate

Jacket Weather describes in exacting detail what daily life looks like when you see it through the lens of romantic love. Every scrap of talk and every sign on the street is irradiated by love--and its step-sibling, anxiety. The book is funny, tender, often exhilarating, and borne aloft by DeCapite's ardent, plainspoken lyricism. You can't stop reading it. --Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Maybe the People Would Be the Times

Jacket Weather is a tender love story that blossoms like a rose in the concrete of a city always on the verge. DeCapite's effortless prose stirs echoes of certain New York School poets, of 'cold rosy dawn in New York City, ' night streets illuminated by great bars and the music streaming out of them, the endless possibilities of a place where, despite persistent evidence to the contrary, 'love is the heart of everything.'" --Max Blagg, author of Slow Dazzle and Loud Money

I don't think there exists another novel like Jacket Weather. Mike DeCapite has flawless pitch for dialogue and an imagist's eye, and his prose is lucent and uncluttered, but what's really a surprise (and should not be) is this: he's written an almost unbearably tender love story for adults. The days and weeks and seasons and every quotidian detail vibrate with newness and suspense. --Mimi Lipson, author of The Cloud of Unknowing