Review: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

Robertson, Don. The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2008. (Originally published in hardback in 1965.)

Nine-year-old Morris Bird III is a timid sort of boy with a precocious sense of right and wrong. After hearing his teacher describe the brave deeds of James A. Garfield, Morris makes up his mind to atone for all the lily-livered mistakes he’s made and earn himself some “selfresepect.” The best course of action, he decides, is to embark on an epic pedestrian journey to see his best friend, who just moved a whopping two miles away to the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood of Cleveland. As fate would have it, the day he chooses is October 20, 1944 — the day of the infamous East Ohio Gas Explosion. (Also see the Cleveland Memory Project photos of the explosion and aftermath.)

(Because I like looking at city maps, I’ve recreated approximately the walking route that Morris Bird III used. Point B is the epicenter of the Gas Explosion disaster.)

View Larger Map

What interested me most about The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread was the portrait of two Cleveland neighborhoods — Hough and St. Clair-Superior — that took a huge beating in the postwar suburban flight epidemic (and which have never entirely recovered). This was a pre-Rust Belt era. Cleveland was a more densely populated place where people lived smaller, more localized lives, where they walked to the store and rode streetcars to work, a place where East 63 and St. Clair and East 91 and Hough were thought of as worlds apart, and not just to a child’s mind.

It’s tempting to dismiss The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread as a mere nostalgia piece. There are, in American literature, a lot of literary reminiscences about being a child during the 1940s. But such a distinction misses the point: the book is a tragic coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of one of the worst industrial accidents in American history, made doubly tragic by the fact that nine is awfully young to come of age. (After all, a grown man would not normally feel nostalgic about seeing his best pal incinerated right before his eyes.)

It’s also important to note that the book was first published shortly before a conflagration of a different kind — the Hough Riots, which took place in the neighborhood where Morris Bird III lived. As Mark Winegardner illustrates in Crooked River Burning, the Hough Riots were as good a symbol as any of Cleveland’s own loss of innocence.

Don Robertson earned the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1966 for The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. He wrote two additional books featuring Morris Bird III, The Sum and Total of Now and The Greatest Thing that Almost Happened. The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature presented Robertson with the Mark Twain Award in 1991.

Review: The Keepers of Truth

Collins, Michael. The Keepers of Truth. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Bill, a reporter for the Daily Truth, has returned home to the once-thriving town in downstate Illinois where his grandfather, an immigrant who had escaped the crushing poverty of the Russian steppes, had singlehandedly built a now-defunct refrigerator manufacturing empire. Although Bill attempts to use his position to pontificate on the decline of the American Dream, he is expected to report exclusively on local bake-offs and high school sports rivalries.

His boss’s attitude shifts, however, when Old Man Lawton turns up murdered and all signs point to his son, Ronny, a body-building loose cannon who works as a short-order cook at Denny’s. Sensing this might be his last opportunity for a big scoop (before he sells out to the Big City Paper), Bill’s boss sends him out to cover the Ronny Lawton story. Which, of course, turns out to be similar to his own: Ronny Lawton is a man who feels trapped by the seeming inevitabilities of familial heritage, whose rapidly shrinking pool of career options leaves him floundering in the sort of defiant self-hatred that, as Bill might say, “usually gets taken out on kids in supermarkets and checkout lines.”

The question that preys most heavily on the reader’s mind, however, is not “who killed Ronny Lawton’s father?” but “why on Earth did Bill leave Chicago and move back to this awful place?” The answer is not because he failed at law school. Nor did Bill labor under any noble illusion of reversing the town’s hard luck and bringing it back to its glorious heyday.

The answer is more complicated. Although Bill hates this place, he’s drawn back to it out of a debilitating sense of familial guilt: if he did not come home, there wouldn’t be anyone to witness the death of the place his grandfather built (and which drove his father to suicide). If Bill did not return, no one would be around to observe that without any meaningful work to do, Rust Belt people were as trapped and purposeless as zoo animals during the winter. No one would be around to suggest that “the truth” was just whatever the corporate-entertainment-culture complex said it was.

In other words, someone’s got to be there to identify the body.

What’s most interesting about The Keepers of Truth is that it’s written by an outsider. Michael Collins is an Irish immigrant who originally came to the United States on an athletic scholarship in the 1980s. Between semesters he drove around the country in an old station wagon, sleeping in parking lots and documenting the slow death of American prosperity. As a result, The Keepers of Truth is filled with a bleakness that can only come from an impartial observer, someone who doesn’t impose his own nostalgia upon the place. Although The Keepers of Truth does a meritorious job capturing the mood of the Reagan-era Rust Belt, it lacks the poignancy of Crooked River Burning because there’s no possibility of a better future.

Instead, it’s the stark chronicle of a culture that — perhaps — is best left to die.

Has the term “Rust Belt” Outlived its Usefulness?

This week WCPN listeners got a chance to sound off about their overwhelming — and I mean overwhelming — dislike of the term “Rust Belt.”

So has “Rust Belt” outlived its usefulness? Well, that depends on what you want to use it for. “Rust Belt” was never meant as a marketing slogan, but rather to describe a region suffering from a period of economic decline.

There are three ways people use the term “Rust Belt”:

1. As an impartial, shorthand reference to the region that was once America’s manufacturing belt;
2. As a pejorative reference to that same region, suggestive of stagnation and decay;
3. As a defiant badge of pride, much like “Dixie”

What do I think? Although I have less interest in imposing a positive or negative interpretation on the term, I’ll admit to using “Rust Belt” to describe my own geographic heritage (as opposed to “Midwestern” or “Ohioan.”) I suspect that liking or disliking it is often a generational issue: people who remember gleaming steel think of Rust as a bad thing, but those of us who don’t remember anything else and like it here…well, Rust is just our culture. There is a passage in American Rust where young Billy Poe contemplates the broken-down, overgrown landscape that used to be the thriving steel mill town of Buell, Pennsylvania. To the older residents of Buell, the ruins represent failure. But Billy associates them with the happy moments in his childhood, when he roamed the landscape learning about trees and animals. To Billy, these ruins are beautiful because they’re all he’s ever known.

The Rust Belt question always brings to mind a story from an old episode of This American Life, where a Brooklyn musician transforms his Hasidic friend Chaim into an underground rock star. They decide to call him Curly Oxide, owing to Chaim’s rust-colored payots, and because oxidation (i.e., rust) represents one thing changing into another thing.

In other words, Rust doesn’t have to symbolize decay. It can symbolize metamorphosis.

2010: The Year of Rust Belt Fiction

I predict that this is the year that Rust Belt fiction will start to take off. And that this is the decade when the Rust Belt will confront its own history and turn it into art.

There is an audience who is really hungering for honest, clever, artistic interpretations of the  Rust Belt. What evidence do I have? Take the snarky, self-effacing Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism videos:

There’s a reason why people responded so strongly and fervently to these videos — they fill an artistic gap that, say, regional marketing campaigns can and will never fill. No matter how clever or catchy they are.

Why can’t marketing-speak fill that gap? Because marketing by its very nature isn’t totally honest – you have to admit that. It takes the positive and blows it up — that’s how it achieves its purpose. Art looks at all angles, even when they hurt. Art and marketing are not the same thing. People think they want to be happy all the time, but art tells us that they don’t — they want to experience the full range of human emotions.

The best art emerging from the Rust Belt will be truthful and transformative. It will be thought up by hard-luck underachievers waiting for the bus, not in the conference rooms of any marketing firms. It won’t croon about what fun times can be had at the trendiest faux dive bars, but it will chronicle the anguish of those who are desperately trying to hold on to a long-dead ideal.