REVIEW : TELL US WHEN TO GO / EMIL DEANDREIS
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Tell Us When To Go
Emil DeAndreis
Reviewed by
Spencer Tierney
Two male friends try to survive in San Francisco (in the Sunset district) after college and in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. Except for the last part, this premise captures my early twenties, and that’s what drew me to Bay Area author Emil DeAndreis’s latest book Tell Us When To Go (Flexible Press, 2022).
The novel follows the post-college years of former college baseball players Cole and Isaac, a rising star and a benchwarmer, respectively. One of the book’s most captivating features is how these male characters are given room to be sensitive and empathetic, and there’s no need to prove their worth to each other. No ego games, no aggression.
In their first meeting on a bus to an away game, Cole interrupts Isaac to ask him what’s playing in his headphones. They bond over movie soundtrack music, and music plays a recurring role in their friendship and the book’s section titles. The title itself is a nod to a Bay Area hip-hop song by E-40. But it’s the next part of their first meeting that endears me to them. Isaac’s knitting a scarf for a girl, which only interests Cole more. Isaac explains:
I taught him what I could, and for the last leg of the trip, he asked me about the girl—peculiar questions like if she was a lake or ocean person—while making clumsy knots in the scarf, knots I was going to have to go back and fix later, but that was OK.
Isaac embraces Cole’s imperfections in small, and later big, ways. When Cole suffers from “the yips” at the peak of his stardom as a pitcher, Cole shuts out everyone except Isaac. The story begins as they move to San Francisco, where Isaac’s a college graduate but not Cole, and this difference plays a heavy hand in their job opportunities in 2010, a year of high unemployment.
Isaac and Cole trade off as narrators, weaving together a tale of two SFs: Isaac’s time at a tech startup and Cole’s at a high school as a class aid to students who need extra support. The differences are stark: an on-campus café and free Odwalla in the company fridge vs. the short lunch break to a nearby, overpriced deli. Isaac helps people he never sees, while Cole helps a school-age girl not get expelled for starting fights. Descriptions of both SFs reach hyperbole at times, but they don’t distract from center stage: two millennials trying to figure out their place in the world.
DeAndreis includes a smattering of social media posts and replies, which recall early-era Facebook statuses and the ways people bragged or insulted each other even then. The book opens with a post from a baseball fan asking, how is Cole these days? The comments aren’t kind.
Cole has a hard time accepting how people around him and online think of him and his fall from baseball. Even the story of how his baseball career ends is gradual in the book, mostly a series of flashbacks as if Cole can’t stomach telling the full story. It doesn’t help that Isaac’s new work friends lack the empathy to understand this:
Now they wanted to meet [Cole], watch a ballgame with him, which to me was an odd wish. Wasn’t it intuitive to assume Cole hated baseball now, that he had some level of PTSD?
In contrast, Cole’s style of judging Isaac’s new friends (and everything else) is more blunt, funny, and class conscious. He dunks on their choice to party in the Marina:
It’s a bunch of rich bros from the peninsula who claim they’re from the city and act tough because there’s no one real around to beat their ass.
The book maintains a sharp eye to power dynamics. The class divide between Isaac and Cole grows and alters their mindsets about the city and each other. Both of their bosses are women trying to make their mark while following management above them. The city of San Francisco faces mass evictions of old tenants in the same buildings that tech workers move into.
Tell Us When To Go is not a love letter to San Francisco or to friendship so much as a plea to talk about how things change and to check in with each other. How we hurt and how we heal. Maybe that’s a love letter after all.
Tell Us When To Go by Emil DeAndreis is out now from Flexible Press.
Spencer Tierney is a writer in the Bay Area.
