Review: The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes

McClelland, Ted. The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008.

In The Third Coast, Chicago-based writer Ted McClelland embarks on a three-month circle tour of the Great Lakes in search of a common regional culture.

I’ve been wanting to read a book like this since I came across Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean in a bookstore in Glastonbury. Facing the Ocean posits that (archaeologically, at least) the people of the Atlantic coasts of Europe , from Ireland to Iberia, are more like each other than like their own inland countrymen. I suspected the same might be true for the people of the Great Lakes (I personally feel more in common with Buffalo and Detroit than with the rest of Ohio).

I won’t attempt to analyze McClelland’s entire book, but rather the three chapters where the Great Lakes meets the Rust Belt: Chapter 21, The Irony of Buffalo (including Buffalo and Erie, PA); Chapter 22, Ethnic Jazz (Cleveland); and Chapter 23, Black Bottom Blues (Detroit).

The Rust Belt subculture of the Great Lakes culture is summed up perfectly by McClelland’s companion on a boat trip down the Buffalo River, past the decaying remnants of long-forgotten industry:

“There’s few things that Buffalo has done perfectly. [But it has] perfectly separated the citizens from the waterfront.”

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.

Review: Crooked River Burning

Winegardner, Mark. Crooked River Burning. New York: Harvest Books, 2001.

Crooked River Burning has been in my to-read pile since 2006, when I bought a copy of Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, for which Mark Winegardner penned the afterword, “Toward a Literature of the Midwest.”

(Though I didn’t know it at the time, the roots of Rust Belt Reader took hold right then and there.)

In his afterword, Winegardner grimly recounts the following experience with his publishers, prior to the publication of Crooked River Burning:

We went into a big conference room. The marketing director started the meeting by saying (after admitting she hadn’t read the novel), “We see this as a strong regional book.” If it does well in the Midwest, she says, there’s hope it might catch on elsewhere.

They all seemed surprised when I asked if the elevator went to the roof, so I could go jump off.

However, this was long before All Things Local became the boutique obsession of the intellectual class, before consumers craved “authenticity” (a dressed-up marketing term for “slumming it”), before Detroit’s ruined urban landscape became emblematic of a corporate greed gone not just wild but metastatic, before recession chic became de rigueur in the Real Simple parlors of the elite.

NYT Notable Books: American Rust

American Rust is one of the only novels I’ve read so far that takes place in the post-Reagan era Rust Belt. I plan on giving it a second read and reviewing it  here in the next few months, but for now I can’t help but hope that its inclusion in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009 is a sign of good things to come for the genre.