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. (more…)
