Dante and the Others is a continuation of Shiva is Satisfied, dealing with the existential threats of twenty-first century life. Congemi’s new novel presents ordinary people who continue to struggle with this fact. It details the unlikely assembling of several people, a soul-searching retreat to a rural town in upstate New York, and the group’s ambivalent return to city life.
The ‘others’ are marginalized people, new immigrants as well as native-born. The immigrants are from Ghana, Turkey, and Yemen. The native-born ‘others’ include a Goth girl, a homeless boy, a disgraced lawyer. The think tank executive Dante struggles with his anxiety regarding the world.
As Dante’s mentor Sebastian might have said, it remained to be seen if they could endure this new world, to say nothing of thriving. It was universal—if not always conscious—they wanted the world to be at ease, to be back to normal days, with ordinary problems, so that they could live life on those terms. Maybe they pushed the threats deep into their subconscious, grew bored by them, or simply refused to acknowledge them.
Robert Congemi has been a professor of literature and creative writing since 1973 at SUNY’s Empire State University.
