Steve Israel: Nelson DeMille knew Long Island and Long Islanders

Long Island author Nelson DeMille passed away this week. We lost not only a gifted writer, but someone who understood and conveyed Long Island masterfully.

I met him when I was in Congress. I asked him to read and endorse an advance copy of my first novel, “The Global War on Morris.” His blurb was classic DeMille sarcasm: “I haven’t laughed so hard since I read my last novel.”

DeMille, who was 81, inspired us with that rapid-fire snark, which pulled the reader through dark themes of crime and terrorism, and with his Long Island sensibility. He understood us because was one of us.

The characters in the “The Gold Coast,” “The Gate House,” “Plum Island,” “Word of Honor,” “Night Fall,” and “Radiant Angel” are our neighbors, our families. They’re cops and detectives and good guys and bad guys. They curse and snark because that’s how Long Islanders behave. They’re authentic, believable, pure “Lawn Guyland.”

If you haven’t read “The Gold Coast,” read it now. If you have read it, read it again. No book since “The Great Gatsby” more effectively captures the irony, physical setting and personal clashes involved in achieving the American Dream on Long Island. Only DeMille could capture the glitter of Gatsby’s West Egg and East Egg with the more level cultural sensibilities of, say, Massapequa.

I spent many hours and dinners with Nelson talking about the craft of writing. Usually, his wisdom was delivered with a cigarette between two fingers and a glint in his eyes.

Research was critical to Nelson. He told me he once sat at a North Shore yacht club as an observer, soaking in the aesthetics and the personalities, weaving them into his storyline. The members may not have appreciated his take on things, he said, but it didn’t matter. His readers did.

Despite regularly landing on the bestseller list with every title, he never allowed his fame to get ahead of him. He remained true to his Long Island grounding.

I once invited him to Washington. My colleagues and I had started a “Congressional Writers Caucus” and I’d asked him to discuss his career. I watched his eyes widen at the grandeur of the Capitol and Library of Congress and considered the irony: the recipient of a Bronze Star in Vietnam being feted by members of Congress, the politicians he often barbed now soaking in his wisdom.

After leaving Congress, I confided in him my desire to open up a bookstore. He looked at me skeptically, and said, “I think you’re crazy. Bookstores are having very hard times. How will you make money?” But when we opened Theodore’s Books in Oyster Bay, he was there, signing books for a crowd that wound through our store and onto the street. He returned several times.

We met for dinner for our final conversation just before he fell ill. He admitted a growing frustration with the publishing industry. The #MeToo movement had changed many publishing priorities. The traits that made Nelson’s characters so believable (and yes, sometimes offensive) were to be scrubbed, sanitized, sensitized. An editor told him that the cleansing would broaden his readership. “They just don’t understand my readers,” he said.

Nelson DeMille understood us. He knew how to enthrall us, how to make us laugh at ourselves, how to keep us turning page after page, sometimes breathlessly.

In losing Nelson DeMille, we’ve lost a chronicler of Long Islanders. We read him because he knew how to read us.

This guest essay reflects the views of Steve Israel,  who represented  the 3rd Congressional District from 2001

to 2017.