“The Submission”

“It’s complicated.” So goes the ubiquitous rejoinder to inquiries about most everything from the war in Afghanistan to the Eurozone meltdown…even to a difficult marriage. But as The Submission, the debut novel by Amy Waldman about a memorial design competition for New York’s 9/11 site, so remarkably illustrates: it really is complicated.

In an all-inclusive political environment, New York’s Governor appoints a special jury of representative constituents to select a design from blind, unattributed open submissions. To chair this diverse group she selects the well-respected and practical retired bank president Paul Rubin. He is a conciliatory sort with aspirations to rise to the Chair of the New York Public Library Board and other distinguished civic positions in his senior years.

Rubin is apprehensive of the process. “History’s great monuments and memorials – from the Sistine Chapel to the St. Louis Arch – had been elite commissions, not left to, in Edmund Burke’s apt phrase, ‘warm and inexperienced enthusiasts.’ Only in America did those enthusiasts reign, enthroned by politicians who feared nothing more than appearing undemocratic.” Still he embraces the challenge and is particularly sensitive to Claire Burwell, the wealthy, middle-aged, attractive suburbanite who lost her husband in the towers that day and is on the committee to represent all the families who lost someone. When she argues to select a dramatic garden design over the objections of the artist in the group, Rubin is supportive and pleased when her opinion is confirmed by a vote of the jury.

Opening the Envelope

With obvious, even explicitly stated, reference to the Maya Lin controversy over Washington’s Vietnam Memorial, Waldman’s real story then launches with the opening of the envelope containing the architect’s name: Mohammed “Mo” Kahn. “The piece of paper containing the winner’s name was passed from palm to palm like a fragile folio. There were a few gasps and ‘hmmms,’ an ‘interesting,’ an ‘oh my.’ Then: ‘Jesus fucking Christ! It’s a goddamn Muslim!’ The paper had reached the governor’s man.”

Other than being born into a Muslim family, Kahn is as American as they come. Born in Virginia, educated at Yale, religiously agnostic, handsome and single, living the Yuppie life in New York City, he entered the contest to test his creative vision against the best architects in the world. When he is selected, however, all hell breaks loose.

The carefully secretive deliberations of the jury are leaked (by the politically ambitious Governor’s shill?) to a shameless tabloid reporter Alyssa Spier who, like any good Post wannabe columnist, fans the flames of controversy, creating news as much as exploiting it. “Like a junkie’s, her addiction had progressed from reading the news, to reporting it, to breaking it, then – the crack cocaine of her business – to shaping it. Being it.”

A Political and Social Octopus

The tendrils of the political and social octopus of post-9/11 American hysteria touch a large cast of characters including an undocumented Bangladeshi widow of a janitor lost in the towers’ fall, the violent younger brother of a lost firefighter, American Muslim action groups, “Save America from Islam” fanatics, and, of course, a radio talk show nutcase. Waldman weaves them all into her increasingly complicated story with a deft touch for details and a compassionate understanding of all sides. The Submission is Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities without the snarky disdain and excess.

Claire and Mo, however, are at the heart of the drama. Trying to be a sincere representative of the mostly angry families of the dead yet sensitive to the innocence of Kahn, she finds herself torn in a manner described by another liberal Manhattanite: “It just makes me uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable makes me even more uncomfortable.” On the other hand, Mo knows that although resigning the commission would best quell the volatile uproar and give him his life back, having done no wrong except showing ambition, he feels compelled to stand firm for his design and his rights just like those of any other American.

Waldman builds this crescendo of strong emotions, death threats, citizen meetings, and political manipulation without any clear resolution in sight – until a moment of mob violence finally convinces Kahn to walk away.

Twenty Years Later

In the final chapter that takes place twenty years after the controversy, Waldman presents us with a very successful Mo, now living in Mumbai – still single, still hurt by the rejection of his country – and a Claire who has only visited the replacement memorial once: “With all the infighting, picking a whole new jury, soliciting new designs – by the time it got built I’m not sure anyone cared…and so many more Americans ended up dying in the wars the attack prompted than in the attack itself that by the time they finished the memorial it seemed wrong to have expended so much effort and money.”

The world Waldman so effectively creates exposes much of the anger and inflexibility that seem to underlie today’s American political and social dysfunction. As she suggests: it’s complicated. But her coda chapter in the future also suggests that we are not in a hopeless decline: “The country had moved on, self-corrected, as it always did, that feverish time mostly forgotten.” Would that she were right.

I met my future wife Jane Addams Allen at Chicago State. She was the grand niece of the famous Chicago social worker Jane Addams, but like me, her perspective on the country was shaped by living many years in Europe.

Jane and I shared a passion for visual art. We were both painters, and our search for new aesthetic adventures soon took us to a college art association conference at the Hilton in Chicago. One of the keynote speakers was Leon Golub, the artist of conscience who spoke intensely of his concern over repression, racism and sexism in America. That intensity was spreading through the art world; and Edward Fry, then the curator of the Guggenheim Museum (later fired for putting up a show of slum properties owned by some museum donors) decided to form a splinter group called The New Art Association.

Follow The Artists

As the first Chicago members, Jane and I were tapped to put out the first regional edition of its art newsletter. Working out of Jane’s apartment in Hyde Park, we mimeographed a 4-page newsletter about the growing art scene in Chicago. This was our first taste of publishing, and the reception encouraged us to believe Chicago was ripe for a free and open discourse about all facets of the arts.

Invited to appear before the Illinois Arts Council, Jane argued for a more liberal approach to individual arts grants. The role of an arts council is to follow the artists not lead them, she said, quoting from Lord Maynard Keynes’ famous address to the British Arts Council. A few days later, Tom Willis, the arts editor of The Chicago Tribune and a great admirer of Keynes, asked Jane and I to become the Tribune art critics.

We worked hard uncovering risky new art in Chicago, never missed a deadline, and enjoyed considerable freedom to follow our own tastes. The arrangement lasted for 18 months. Then without the courtesy of an explanation, we were bumped for Alan Artner, a music student who’d shown little interest in art at the time and a safe, if predictable, guide to the Chicago galleries. We apparently were not.

The New Art Examiner Is Born

But we remained passionate about art criticism so we convinced Art News in New York to commission a piece about Chicago artists appearing in the Sao Paulo Biennial. When that story was spiked (it ran instead in Studio International), we decided the only way to continue writing was to become our own publishers. So in October 1974, The New Art Examiner was born. The cover of the eight-page tabloid carried an editorial titled “Without Fear or Favor.”

For the next 28 years, The New Art Examiner roiled the art scene in Chicago with sharp opinions, outsider perspectives and not a little controversy. Everyone on the staff was paid equally, about half what they deserved, and equally shared in the brickbats and accolades of our readers.

When we started, Chicago was looked upon as an arts backwater. But for young artists, it was a place to be a big fish in a small pond, and no one really cared where the water’s edge lay. I remember Chris Millon’s diving board atop the Federal Building downtown and the Ice House show in an old Soo Line railroad storage facility. I remember the first Art Chicago exhibition at Navy Pier and venturesome new galleries outside the usual Michigan Avenue corridor like N.A.M.E., Artemesia and the Randolph Street Gallery.

The New Art Examiner covered them all with a passion and intelligence that soon gained it a national following. We didn’t care whether the art was good or bad. Our editorial policy was to give writers an opportunity to use their reviews as a springboard for intelligent discussion of larger social issues. Whether deserved or not, our reputation was as a renegade in an otherwise staid art community.

Jane and I stayed with the New Art Examiner until the mid-eighties when, for health and other reasons, not the least financial, we moved to Washington, D.C. We could see a growing age gap between ourselves and the young writers we commissioned. As outsiders in an increasingly insider’s world, we also couldn’t find teaching positions here that would allow us to continue mentoring their work.

A Shift in the Landscape

The art scene has shifted to academia––not only in Chicago but in all the art capitals. Art patrons and their endowments allow art schools to sponsor a variety of new art exhibitions that outsider galleries cannot afford. But the legion of students emerging with BFA and MFA degrees do not necessarily emerge with a professional arts education, especially when it comes to making a living as an artist. They only come out with a better appreciation of what it takes to make their work commercial.

The inner working of the art world, for instance, remains a mystery to most faculty and certainly most graduates. The inside dealers and collectors on the museum trustee circuit, the curators and art historians at museums foster an environment where art only trickles down, not up. Artists looking for a foothold in the market find themselves climbing a ladder to success stripped of the rungs of appreciative reviews that the New Art Examiner used to provide.

Art writing, art criticism and art publishing has once again coalesced in New York, which has regained its status as the epicenter of the art distribution center. But in its prime, “The New Art Examiner was the best thing to have happened in the Chicago art scene in the 70’s and 80’s,” as Franz Schultze recently recalled.

Independent Thinking Dies Slow

The New Art Examiner struggled along in its last ten years under the constant threat of financial foreclosure. In its last days, Lew Manilow, the pre-eminent Chicago art collector, tried to resurrect the publication with a cash infusion. The board appointed an adjunct art professor at the School of the Art Institute graduate, Kathryn Hixon as editor. But the experiment lasted only another 18 months. The publication closed its doors for good in 2002.

Still, The New Art Examiner will not go gently into that good night. This November, the Northern Illinois Press will publish an anthology of articles from the magazine in a book called “The Essential New Art Examiner” by Terri Griffin, Kathryn Born and Janet Koplos.

It features timely articles by Fred Camper, Dan Sultan, James Yood, Ann Weins, Jan Estep, Robert Storr, Carol Diehl, Jerry Saltz, and Carol Squiers that resonate even today.

But the debate over what killed The New Art Examiner will go on. My own view is that it wasn’t one thing, but a change in the art scene itself, a sort of calcifying of the status quo, not unlike the slow transformation of America itself, into a self-satisfied boosterism where independent thinking, running against the grain of people’s comfort zone, no longer has a place in American cultural life, much less the art scene.

Derek Guthrie, now a resident of London, was a co-founder with his wife of The New Art Examiner. You can buy a copy of “The Essential New Art Examiner” on Amazon.com or read more of his writings at neotericart.com.

Everything Happens Today

In this 60^th anniversary year of the quintessential New York teen angst novel Catcher in the Rye, Jesse Browner’s new novel Everything Happens Today not only updates Holden Caulfield, but – dare I say it – bests Salinger with a funnier, kinder and wiser novel.

It’s Tough to be Seventeen

It’s tough to be seventeen. It was tough in the 1950’s and it’s just as tough in the 2010’s. But Wes is a sensitive guy. For a year he has had his heart and mind set on losing his virginity to his sultry and aloof classmate Delia. She is a Buddhist and different from the other girls at The Dalton School.

“When you pictured some girls naked, it was all thrashing and grunting, but when you pictured Delia naked…you thought of waking up in a feather bed in an icy cottage on the moors with one of those strong, smooth, fragrant thighs splayed across your midsection.”

As it turns out, too many Bloody Marys and several flirty texts from the popular Lucy grab him by his dick instead of his heart, and his first lovemaking experience goes to the “thrashing and grunting” Lucy and not the “feather bed” Delia.

Wes walks all the way home to Greenwich Village from Lucy’s parent’s Upper East Side apartment in a state of “exhaustion, shame, hopelessness and loss…A teenager had no business feeling this way…this was a much older person’s kind of sadness, informed by regrets, nostalgia, a sense of half a lifetime’s squandered opportunities.”

Fixing Everyone Else’s Life

The iPhone-toting, Beatles lyrics-spouting Wes has lots of adult responsibilities. His mother is bed-ridden with advanced multiple sclerosis. It falls to him to fix her pudding and treat her bed sores. His thirteen year old sister Nora, however, is his pride and joy. He lives to protect and teach her. His father, a “failed novelist” professor who has moved into the garden apartment where he entertains his female students, brings Wes the most confusion and anger.

His father tries to connect – he even takes up Facebook thinking Wes will help him––”…you know, post my own pictures, find friends, join groups, that sort of thing.” But this is a non-starter: “Dad, I really don’t have time for this. Can’t you figure it out for yourself? Everybody else does.” His father pleads with him: “Can I friend you?” Wes pushes him away: “Parents and children cannot be friends.” Wes is saved by a phone call from a post-coital Lucy: “Wes had no desire to talk to her, but anything was better than helping his father make a total dick of himself on Facebook.”

As Wes grows in understanding and experience, he realizes that his father “has not changed at all but has always been like this, even in those days when it had seemed that he was perfect in every way.” What Wes remembers most about his father from those early days is how “his “eyes teared up whenever he heard ‘Brown-eyed Girl’ on the radio.”

Wes is a complex seventeen year-old, as much introspective and worried about who he is and how he appears to others as he is the social glue that keeps his mom alive and his sister curious. He is the family cook who quite literally keeps them all alive. When in a moment of nostalgic dementia for a honeymoon meal in Paris, his mother asks for a special meal of sweetbreads and bok choy, Wes takes up the challenge with the same rigor with which he churns out A+ English papers at school.

A food journalist (as much known for his work in Gastronomica and the history of hospitality in The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down as for his previous three novels), Browner brings to this novel all the details about preparing sweetbreads as a comparable talent, Nicholson Baker, brings to shoelaces, sex, kitchen matches, and just about everything else.

A Day in The Life

In the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or James Joyce’s Ulysses, Everything Happens Today takes place all in one day – a day in which the observant Wes notes “Everything had happened, and nothing had happened.”

He loses his virginity. He walks the crowded streets filled with what appear to be “tourists and daytrippers from the outer boroughs and suburbs because they walked too slowly and did not look intelligent enough to live in Greenwich Village.” He worries about an overdue English paper on War and Peace. And he broods about his helplessness in the world…as if you “allow tech support to take remote control of your laptop during a technical crisis, and suddenly some dude in Mumbai is moving the cursor across your monitor while your own keys go limp.”

Wes feels trapped by his family, his school, even his botched deflowering. But he is no Holden Caulfield. He works hard to do the right thing for his sister and his mother and even Lucy. He will not walk out on them. “He wished he could just be free to enjoy the moment, but he didn’t have it in him to pop a woody for new beginnings.”

Instead, he cooks a very competent sweetbread meal shared on his mom’s bed with his sister and retires to his room to get that English paper done. His life may be complicated (“It made War and Peace feel like The Runaway Bunny.”), but in Browner’s sympathetic hands, it is a life full of goodness and mercy.

Stone Arabia

Before everyone crafted a new life on the internet – whether an evolving profile on Facebook, a portfolio of pithy tweets, an avatar on Second Life, a Tumblr blog or Flickr gallery; some people created an alternate persona in paper diaries and scrapbooks. In her newest novel, Stone Arabia, National Book Award nominee (Eat the Document) Dana Spiotta focuses on two siblings in their late forties whose facsimile lives (“chronicles” as both call them) make school girl diaries look like…well, school girl diaries.

Spiotta’s narrative weaves in and out of the written and recorded paraphernalia of aging rock star Nik as told in both first and third person by his sister Denise in her own hastily written chronicle of Nik’s last year. Even Denise’s daughter Ada is in the chronicle business, although she too is a few tech decades short of the internet and works with DVD camcorders. Talk about old school.

Contemporary Life

Yet, Stone Arabia is very much a novel of contemporary life. Divorced and living alone (but for the weekly visit of an old-movie-loving, not-bad-sex boyfriend) Denise is certainly of the moment: “I couldn’t wait to get home, get in my bathrobe, eat my dinner, watch something stupid on TV.” Her favorite time-killers are endless drill-down web crawling and the endless cable news shows where her eye follows even more endless news updates tracking along the bottom of the screen.

This mostly solitary life is only interrupted by the frequent need to deal with the advancing dementia of her aging mother, infrequent calls or emails from Ada in New York, and her underpaid daily job as a personal assistant. She is depressingly strangling in her valley subdivision of Los Angeles.

Only her brother Nik and his music can lift her spirits and take her outside of herself. Nik was always the musician, the artist…and yes, also the irresponsible addict who never found a drug or drink he didn’t love and couldn’t afford. Even as a child, he loved the dizzy high he got from winding up the swing set chains and then letting them unwind in an uncontrollable spin. “Swing sets were his gateway drug…how he craved anything that undid his equilibrium.” It is left to Denise to pick up after him; but in exchange, she always gets the first pressing of a new CD with his hand-painted cover.

The Demonics and The Fakes

Nik’s musical career got off to a fast start with the teen metal band the Demonics which later morphed into the multi-hit, pseudo-pop band the Fakes. He changed his name from Nik Kranis to Nik Worth, but then dropped the whole band thing to begin creating his “chronicles” and a twenty CD compilation of his life’s musical work, “The Ontology of Worth.”

As he enters his fiftieth year and closes in on the last CD of the collection, Nik’s niece comes to LA to shoot a documentary of his life. There she finds him in a room surrounded by the pastiche of these chronicles, “the various iterations of recordings…movies and videos…separate books by some of the characters…items of merchandise…tie-in promotional products…court documents…spin-off projects.” The young Ada is bewildered – “Why make a fake life? Why not do it with real life and get a real audience for all your work.”

This interview is Denise’s last view of Nik, for it takes place in the year he disappears; and all we know about him is what Denise records while sitting at his desk writing her own “chronicle” of his life. Ada’s documentary of his life “wasn’t strictly part of his Chronicles because it was about the Chronicles, and the Chronicles don’t exist in the Chronicles, of course. So Ada’s movie fits into my chronicles, the fact-based ones.” Don’t be alarmed if you don’t quite get it. Spiotta’s story unfolds in different voices at different times, but it all holds together amazingly well.

Stone Arabia in many ways is a sad story. Denise has plenty on her plate, but she also knows herself well. She can see how Nik has planned for and created his own legacy, even his own obituary which “would leaven even the most sordid life with comforting obitual formality.” She knows his longing for “what it was like when he began, before all of it had piled up into a long life.” And she knows that “he would go and I would stay. I would stay and watch as my life wound down. I would watch the decay and the quiet. I would endure the dregs and the hangover. I would stay till the end, to the slow slipping and gradual dropping away of my life. This is what I did: I endured. Nik would leave, and I would endure.”

Redemption in the Music

If there is redemption for Denise, it comes in the music Nik left behind and in the Chronicles which were his way to “imagine letting go of explanations, of misinterpretations, of commerce and receptions…to imagine doing whatever you want.”

Alone, she skeptically listens to the last CD of his “Ontology” with its childlike lyrics and pop orchestral accompaniment until “the harmonies overwhelm the strings and the next tough-sweet guitar riff comes in. I am won – all of it, even the dreaded violins. Now I really feel something: love, sure, need, sure, even hurt, just everything all at once.”

Spiotta knows her music, the music scene, and Los Angeles. She also knows families and Tolstoy’s famous dictum about unhappy ones. In the end, Stone Arabia may just be a modern family saga where “we are all really good at pretending we are a normal family, and somehow us pretending all at once is a big part of what makes us feel like a family.” This is a novel about how we can create our own lives, and by doing so, perhaps create meaning and even some measure of contentment when the real world lets us down.

My baseball book of the year is not just a baseball book; but then, no baseball book is just about baseball. Baseball contains all there is of our lives – our hopes, our dreams, our disappointments, our errors, our ennui, our strike outs (both swinging and looking) and our occasional hits…all played out under an eternal clock where “theoretically, just one at bat could last forever, with foul ball after foul ball spinning into infinity, like a never-ending decimal measure of pi.”

The absence of a game ending clock is at the heart of New York Times columnist Dan Barry’s new book Bottom of the 33^rd. On the Saturday before Easter in 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox take on the Rochester Red Wings in a chilly early season Triple A game in worn out McCoy stadium in worn out Pawtucket, RI.

Eight hours and 32 innings later the tie game is suspended as the Easter sunrise reveals the last 19 fans huddled against the cold, hungry and ready to go home. Two months later, the same players, umpires, and coaches take to the field again to resume play in the 33^rd. This time, it takes only one inning to end the game, setting a record for the longest professional game ever played. And to think when we occasionally head to the ballpark, my wife gets bored and is ready to leave early after only the 3^rd inning. What a piker.

A Pastiche of Talent

With his focus on the highest rung of the minor league ladder, Barry finds a cast worthy of Shakespeare. The teams are filled with kids from across the country and Latin America (Tulsa, Brooklyn, Mobile, Huntsville, Omaha, San Cristobal, Tucumcari) all putting up with the bad hotels, cheap apartments, and low pay for their shot at the bigs – even if it is just to take their swings against a big league pitcher before they are sent back home to sell cars or work the farm.

Barry chronicles the doomed lives of each of them – doomed since “less than 3 percent of those who sign professional baseball contracts ever reach the major leagues.” But every team, every game has the few who will finally be somebody. This longest of all games tested the mettle of future stars Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr.

Players Who Are Coming and Going

A minor league game has not only young players fighting for their chance, but also older players who are fighting to get back. They once enjoyed the perks of the majors – the fresh uniforms each day washed by someone else, the big lockers and showers with hot water, the chartered planes, the clean and orderly bats and gloves – they got a taste but couldn’t hold on to it.

Their last chance to return will be played in small town rickety stadiums before crowds that number in the hundreds. Most are just hanging on to the dream even though they know it is over; few get back, they just get older and slower and run out of gas.

Barry spends paragraphs, pages, even whole chapters describing the lives of these players and their families. He takes time and more pages to follow the umpires, owners, concessionaires who are out of hot dogs, radio announcers who no longer have an audience, even the scorekeeper (imagine the detail in the well-kept set of three scorekeeping books necessary for such a long game).

Nobody is having fun, everyone is cold and hungry – but the game doesn’t stop because of a little discomfort. There are always more pitches, more at bats, until both teams have had their chances. With the game straddling Holy Saturday and Easter, Barry has the perfect metaphor in his hands. The subtitle says it all “Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game.” The game begins like a holy rite:

“The twilight’s last gleam has vanished…An umpire who would rather be home adds two more words to the opening anthem, two commanding words of release that tell a pitcher, who will never know the big leagues, to ready himself on the mound; that sends a catcher, who will play in the big leagues for thirteen years, into a coiled squat; and prompts a hitter in his last baseball spring to dig a fleeting foothold in the batter’s box dirt. ‘Play Ball.’”

The game ends, as many ball games do, with a walk-off hit by Pawtucket’s Dave Koza in the bottom of the 33^rd. The loudspeakers play Peggy Lee singing “Is that all there is?” The scorekeeper records the last run and closes his books as Koza’s teammates slap his batting helmet and carry him off the field. The victory and loss make no difference to the final standings of either team. Dave Koza, 5 for 14 in the game, never makes it to the majors. But he suits up again the next day.

Doc
By Mary Doria Russell
Random House ($26.00, 394 pp.)

If you think the historical Western disappeared with Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, think again. Michigan crime writers Elmore Leonard and Loren Estleman have been writing them for years. Ron Hansen’s early novels told the stories of the Dalton and James gangs in Kansas. And then there is the 800 pound gorilla in the genre: Larry McMurtry’s sweeping Lonesome Dove, a novel so good and so rich in character that it won a Pulitzer and became a four part TV mini-series. No Western has quite measured up since – until Mary Doria Russell’s new novel Doc.

The eponymous Doc is none other than Dodge City’s famous John H. “Doc” Holliday whom Russell’s novel brings to life like no caricatured TV show or movie ever has. Right from the start we learn that he was afflicted with the same fatal tuberculosis that took his devoted mother. We also quickly learn that Doc was not a physician, “a haven for quacks and charlatans hawking patent medicines and fake cures to the unsophisticated,” but a surgical dentist, a more “scientific discipline and a respectable profession for a gentleman.” With his education and skills, he was destined for a professional career in Atlanta until his TB ruthlessly took hold such that his family sent him west where dry air might, if not cure, at least slow the disease.

The Earp Brothers

And so Russell takes us to Dodge City (“Naming this place Dodge City was pure bluff. It barely amounted to a village.”) where Doc falls in with the lawmen Earp brothers informally led by Wyatt, whose “[chin] was strong and square and chiseled, and silently proclaimed his strength of character and moral rectitude,” and Morgan, who “loved the feel of a book in his hands, loved the pictures books drew inside his head, loved even the smell of paper, and leather binding, and glue.”

Doc takes up with Kate, a multi-lingual, classically educated Austro-Hungarian immigrant who found herself in Dodge by way of Mexico City after she escaped when Maximilian’s court fell to Juarez in the Revolution. What can an over-educated former heiress do to survive in a no place Kansas cow town but become a part time classy whore and take up with the best poker player in the saloons of Front Street?

Russell’s Wild West is not all that different from that of the HBO series Deadwood, but without the foul-mouthed dialogue. To be sure, there are few sissies in Dodge City; but when the sheriff is a reformed moralist like Wyatt, things are pretty clean – to Kate’s dismay. (“I don’t trust him…He don’t drink. He goes to church! Never trust a lawman who goes to church.”) The itinerant priest comes from Wichita to hear confession and returns to one-up his peers with the “litany of violence, greed, deceit, and debauchery…all in a single memorable afternoon. Everything but sloth, he realized afterward. Dodge was diligent in sin.”

Get Out of Dodge, You Cur

Doc has all the clichés of the old west – the good-hearted Chinaman who works himself to death (and wealth) running a laundry, the drovers who shoot up the town in their adolescent drunkenness after driving cattle up from Texas, and horses which are admired, bought, sold, bred, raced, and stolen. It even has Doc’s well-delivered classic line: “Get out of Dodge. And don’t come back, you soulless cur.”

We all know the story…or do we? In Russell’s able hands the familiar story becomes rich in nuance, capturing the times as they surely must have been – not the romance of good guys versus bad guys, but the hard lives of hard-living people trying to make a go of things in a hard world…and none more so than the fascinating Doc Holliday.

He is a complicated man. Despite his extraordinary skills in dentistry, his knowledge of classical literature and languages, his mastery of Beethoven’s “Emperor” piano concerto, and his empathy for the downtrodden and the helpless; he must live a life on the frontier of civilization knowing he carries a TB death sentence yet struggling daily to be a man of value to those around him. When he once saves Wyatt from a gang of drunken cowboys, he proudly thinks: “And it wasn’t Wyatt Earp they’d feared. It was little ole John Henry Holliday, a sick, skinny dentist from Griffin by-God Georgia!” In this epic novel the sick, skinny dentist becomes Odysseus; and in Russell, Doc finds his own Homer.

“My Korean Deli”
By Ben Ryder Howe
(Henry Holt and Company, $25.00, 301 pp.)

According to last week’s New York Times, Koreans own 70% of the city’s greengrocer delis, but their numbers are rapidly falling – from 2500 to 2000 over the last decade. “In ten years there will be no more Korean mom-and-pop stores,” said Chong Sik Lee of the Korean-American Grocers Association.

One victim of this trend was the Brooklyn deli owned by Ben Ryder Howe and his wife’s Korean immigrant family in the gentrifying Boerum Hill neighborhood. Howe’s transformation from a Paris Review editor in the tony Upper East Side to a fumble-fingered cashier in their tiny beer, smokes, and lottery tickets bodega near the Gowanus Projects wasn’t enough to buck the trend, but it did provide a great story and moving account of a cross-cultural family bootstrapping its way into the middle class told with self-deprecating wit and newly acquired street smarts.

A Blue Blood Upbringing

Howe is a product of old-line Boston Puritan ethics, Colorado boarding school, and the University of Chicago where he met his wife Gab. She was drawn to the academic rigor of Chicago (“voted that year by Maxim magazine ‘the least fun school in the entire country’”) with the almost clichéd ambition of an immigrant child determined to rise above her parents’ hardworking service labor. He was a rich kid with intellectual aspirations. “In U of C-speak, Gab was more of a Lockean-liberal, whereas I fell into the Marxist-Rousseauian collectivist camp.”

A few years of graduate school later, they wind up living in her parents’ basement in a small house on Staten Island after she has abandoned the boring contract review work of a low-level lawyer in a big Manhattan law firm while he is earning the typical pittance paid by underfunded literary magazines. They can’t afford anything else in New York; and besides, it is an accepted – or rather expected – Korean tradition that multiple generations live together for mutual emotional and financial support.

Gab’s mother Kay is a no-nonsense survivor who has worked in convenience stores since arriving in the United States. Her father Edward is an independent refrigerator repairman – a job much envied by Howe where “you get to indulge in three of life’s greatest pleasures: driving, smoking and tooling around with machines.”

Kimchi and Tight Quarters

But the Kimchi smells and tight quarters of his Korean family’s bungalow drive Howe crazy. The solution, Gab is convinced, is to mortgage the little house, pool all of their savings and buy a deli so her mom can run her own show and they can make enough money to pay it all back and get a place of their own. Howe is not so convinced: “Even though stability-oriented people like Gab and me are probably destined to settle down early and bore even ourselves, marriage needs surprises – although truth be told, they need not go as far as buying a deli.”

“My Korean Deli” is Howe’s largely successful attempt to describe and understand his uncharacteristic leap into the risks and long hours of owning a small hands-on family business…not just any business, but a neighborhood corner deli/bodega – a business he and every other New Yorker enters every day but never once considers what it takes to run it successfully every day, eighteen hours a day.

The humor and wisdom of Howe’s chronicle of this two years of his life grows from the obvious disconnect between his large, privileged past and the cramped, penny here-penny there ways of immigrant life. Fortunately, he is without pretense or arrogance and knows his way around a good narrative; his years at the Paris Review under George Plimpton’s slightly off-center wing paid off.

Family Foibles

Among the many funny anecdotes and reflections, Howe’s takes on his own family, Gab’s family, and the customers and employees of the deli are the richest. His parents are academics whose roots easily trace back to the Puritans. His was a pleasant childhood: “…being the son of an anthropologist is a wonderful thing…for one thing, there tend to be a lot of blowguns and spears lying around the house.”

But this circumspect background is not a very useful background for understanding Gab’s family’s ways of “banging from decision to decision” in their rush to get ahead. In his family’s way, “we like to think things through – then think about whether the process of thinking them through was as thorough as it could be, then write a book about it.”

The chaos of life in their little deli with customers streaming in and out, deliverymen double-parking and rolling their two-wheelers in and out, employees not showing up, and late night drunks picking up just one more Colt 45 before closing humbles him. “I’ve never been a great worker, but not because I don’t work hard. I just tend to focus on the wrong things, like how people look, what they’re wearing and whether they use words like ‘fortuitous’ properly. Gab once called me a ‘big-picture person’…a euphemism for having one’s head up one’s ass.”

Howe eventually masters the daily grind of working the store, but he also needs to learn that a business must earn a profit. His mother-in-law teaches him that lesson very quickly. His screw-ups making change, his over-stocking of the wrong products, his passive acceptance of employee absences, the city fines for his failing to check the age of cigarette buyers all hurt the business.

A North Korean Deli

They are soon losing money, and Kay and Gab tie him down to “the sort of brutal austerity program University of Chicago economists used to be famous for imposing on Third World economies.” Vendors can’t be paid and so they stop delivering. “Then it comes to me: with its empty shelves, dirty floors and damp, desolate chill, our store has become the North Korean deli.”

Howe is at his best in these introspective observations of his life in the street trenches. When he tries to turn the same eye on his life in the offices of the Paris Review, he is not quite so funny or understanding. The much revered literary magazine and its wealthy long time editor Plimpton are also losing money, but that doesn’t seem as important or threatening as the struggles at the deli. It is only when Plimpton dies of a heart attack that the magazine’s trustees hire experienced managers and editors with business smarts. In this process of succession, Howe is soon out of a job.

The demise of his deli comes in much the same way that his Paris Review job disappears. His hyper-active and over-worked mother-in-law has her own heart attack and needs to slow down. Even though her sister steps in to help out, the family concludes that it is time to sell the store. They are lucky – they find another Korean immigrant family to buy it and get their money back. It will be another decade perhaps before it falls to the fate predicted in last week’s Times.

It is time for Ben and Gab to move out of the Staten Island basement…maybe even have kids. She finds another legal job in Manhattan that pays enough to cover the rent on a Brooklyn apartment. Fortunately for us, Howe writes “My Korean Deli” and finds a publisher. If enough of us buy a copy, perhaps his royalties will be sufficient to keep him out from behind a deli counter…unless the next New York trend after Korean delis will be Puritan delis.

“Three Stages of Amazement”

We’ve all been to San Francisco at least once, or seen it in the movies. You know the scenery – the Bridge, the Bay, the Hills, the Rock, the Haight, Chinatown, Tim Lincecum…and all that money.

Who can afford to live there? In her second novel Carol Edgarian takes us into the city­­––that “fine lady in linen and heels”––on the eve of Obama’s reign and at the bottom of our “great recession.” She lays open the lives of two marriages: one of longevity and great wealth perched in a mansion on the hill overlooking it all, another in its difficult middle years of more modest wealth in a pink overpriced bungalow in the shadows below.

A Troubled Marriage

The marriage of surgeon Charlie Pepper and Lena Rusch is in trouble. A former activist and advocate for the disadvantaged and the arts, Lena now has her hands full just trying to raise their precocious son and the surviving, damaged twin daughter of a premature delivery that went bad.

Charlie has abandoned a stable medical career to launch a start-up company to make surgical robots. But he missed the “glory days of the nineties…cash, no contingency” and now the money is gone and venture capitalists won’t touch him.

Without a quick infusion of several million, his company is finished. Lena resents his travel to shake the money trees leaving her with constant hospital trips, never knowing if little sickly Willa will survive or not. As their marriage unravels, in walks Lena’s very, very rich estranged uncle Cal to offer Charlie the angel money he needs to save the company.

Angel Investor?

Cal was a pioneer in the dot.com frenzy and made his zillions as much by knowing which flaky entrepreneur to back as by knowing when to sell out…which he perspicaciously did before it all imploded. His wife Ivy put up with his bullheaded ways because…well, because she had all the money she ever needed and she got a kick out of his often crude ways.  Because of Cal’s long ago rift with her father, Lena has sworn to never see him and Ivy again, and she has forbidden Charlie to take his money. But what’s poor Charlie to do? He needs it. He has maxed out his credit cards, his daughter’s medical bills sit unpaid, he has criss-crossed the country so many times his son thinks he doesn’t live at home…and Lena is always quick and loud in reminding him how things are not the way she expected when they walked all gooey-eyed into their marriage.

“He took a quick drink just to busy his hands.

‘Why did you marry me?’

…’Because you were good, smart. Steady. Loving. Kind.’

…Charlie held up his hands.

‘You make it sound like you were choosing…an old Volvo.’”

A Party To Remember

In the middle of the country’s economic meltdown, in the middle of these marital woes, in the middle of “Three Stages of Amazement” comes the party to end all parties. For more than a year, Ivy has planned their daughter’s engagement party: “The cost of the night would exceed a million dollars. Seven hundred and two guests.”

Like a modern day Tolstoy, Edgarian spends fifty pages chronicling every hors d’ oeuvre, every drink, every Brioni suit, every tipsy, flirty conversation, and every one of the “handpicked army: chefs from Chez Panisse, Roses Café and Jardiniére…with their support teams and a hundred waitstaff.” The guests include a string of movie stars, politicians (why would anyone invite Al and Tipper Gore and the Pelosi’s to a party?), Cal’s many partners and investors…and, in an effort to mend fences, Charlie and Lena.

When the party’s all over, Cal compliments her on the success of her big event with only a terse: “good job.” Ivy takes no guff:

“That was that. A year of preparation came down to a ‘good job.’ For that matter, almost fifty years cohabiting with this man came down to a ‘good job’…What was marriage anyway, but a daily exchange of preferences and habits – of beef not salmon; coral not pink; Democrats not the other guys; a series of negotiations, and lines shot across rooms, and the mad dash to get out of the house on time: ‘The Brendels are coming, not the Druckers; the car’s in the shop; your breath is heavy. Larry Goldman is a fool. Do you love me? I said I did, and I do, damn it.’”

A Litany of Questions

The past sneaks into the story at the party when Lena runs into her Italian first love Alessandro who is now a part of Cal’s investor team and is hell bent on re-seducing her while her troubles with Charlie make her ripe for seduction. Charlie’s hopes for Cal’s money dry up when Cal’s doctor accidentally observes a terminal melanoma on his face while visiting the house to tend to Ivy’s sudden stroke.  With Charlie’s benefactors and Lena’s aunt and uncle on their death beds, we watch Cal and Ivy’s long marriage limp to an undignified end of private nurses and merciless surgeries.

You can guess where Edgarian is going to take the younger couple: with no money for his business and a new lover in her bed, Lena and Charlie have to split before they can forgive each other, reunite, and discover what really holds them together. More family secrets are revealed. Their son learns love and responsibility when he inherits Ivy’s two protective, third generation Great Danes. After the splendid party scene, all this plot melodrama is something of a let down.

With her keen eye for the details of both the trappings of marriage and its very real, but straining, bonds, Edgarian shines a bright light on where this age old custom sits today…especially in the “gorgeous sugar-cake” monied world of San Francisco. Her plot may get a little hokey and contrived as she works toward some kind of resolution, but her language and characters make “Three Stages of Amazement” well worth these mild stumbles.

What began in the 14^th century on an island in Lake Texcoco as the capital of the Aztec Empire has grown to encompass 571 square miles. The lake was long ago drained and the center of the city today sits on water soaked silt and volcanic clay.

In 1985 an earthquake along the Pacific coast 250 miles southwest sent seismic waves all the way to the unstable bed of the city, damaging over 2500 historic buildings and killing an estimated 10,000 people. In the rainy season floods are frequent and parts of the city are sinking as much as eight inches a year.

Nonetheless, every day, 4.1 million riders take to the Mexico City subway system, not only because the fare is a mere 25 cents, but because it is the only logical way to navigate your way through the city.

Life in a Sardine Can

The adjoining studios of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

On my first day as an art explorer, I wanted to visit the hallowed homes of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the Coyoacán neighborhood. When the famed couple lived there, Coyoacán was a pleasant outlying city, but, like many other suburbs, it has been subsumed in the city sprawl. I joined a throng of people––mostly students, laborers and peddlers––rushing through the station and pushed my way into a car.

I was the rare American. With barely room to stand or even find a pole to hang on, I noticed that nobody reads on the subway. But there is plenty of noise: friends talking to each other, hawkers selling their wares (marker pens, maps and Chiclets), and strangers battling for position. During rush hour, the Metro authorities set aside “women and children only” cars at the front of the train so they don’t get trampled under foot or molested under their clothes, but the hucksters pay little heed.

At stops along the way, the automated doors would bump open and closed a few times to encourage riders to get their limbs either in the train or out. But when it came time to leave, the train was off.

The Cayoacan subway stop

When I reached my destination, I emerged not into daylight but another tent city of peddlers, a virtual mini-mall of Mexican essentials: food, water and holy icons. (Willie Sutton’s admonition that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is” applies to Mexican street vendors at subway entrances: that’s where the customers are.)

I walked almost a block before I could get my bearings, and walked many blocks more to where I wanted to go. But the good news is that wherever you are in Mexico City, these colorful street stalls are a sure sign a subway station is nearby.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

Diego and Frida’s marriage in 1929 was followed by many tumultuous years of infidelity, travel, divorce, remarriage, and, of course, art.

The courtyard of Casa Azul

Casa Azul was always Frida’s house: the place where she grew up, where she retreated when Diego frequently enraged her, where she had an affair with exiled anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky, and where she died. The walk from the subway station was long and confusing but the house was easy to find because of its stunning blue paint. On this sunny day, the pleasant courtyard and bright blue masked her tortured history that so graphically permeates her paintings – especially the self-portraits.

When they married, an artist/architect friend Juan O’Gorman bought two plots of land on the other side of Coyoacán (a damn long walk, let me tell you) and presented Diego with a bold idea to build two block shaped houses connected by what looks to be an early version of a skywalk.

He and Frida moved into this new arrangement – one house and studio for him (in blood red) and one for her (in her family blue).

Diego Rivera's Studio

His was bigger so that is where he worked and they entertained.

Frida Kahlo's kitchen

Hers was like a hideaway in comparison. Given their rough and tumble relationship, O’Gorman now seems a genius to have designed separate spaces for each.

Not far from Casa Azul is a museum dedicated to the third partner in the marriage.

Trotsky's portraits in Mexico

The Trotsky Museum sits in the house he moved to after his affair with Frida and celebrates a man who was the intellectual force behind the 1917 Russian Revolution, second in command only to Lenin, only to be pushed out of power by Stalin.

During his lifetime, Trotsky was always on the ins or outs with someone. Under the czar, he twice escaped from prison in Siberia. Under Stalin he was deported to a half dozen countries, and finally welcomed to Mexico in 1935 to spend his last years with sympathetic friends like Diego, Frida, and other Mexican communists.

His house preserves the furnishings of his barebones intellectual life. In the end he had chickens in his courtyard and Stalin-hired assassins at his doorstep, one of whom successfully killed him with an ice pick to the head. But I’m glad I took the time . . . if only to rest my knees and feet in front of his tombstone.

Bosque de Chapultepec

I spent my remaining days in Mexico City in much the same way: dive down into the subway tunnels, surface into the smells and colors of street vendors, and walk walk walk to discover works of remarkable art.

Chapultepec Park

Chapultepec Park, more commonly called the “Bosque de Chapultepec” (Chapultepec Forest), is the largest public park in Latin America. Only two subway stops away –practically right down the street – it was a fitting target for my next adventure.

The Castle

The park includes the Mexico City Zoo, a Museum of Anthropology filled with Aztec artifacts and the Castillo de Chapultepec, a playground for emperors and dictators and later the official residence of the Mexican president. Since 1940, the castle has been the official history museum of Mexico although it sits high atop a rock hill and is approachable only by foot.

From the terraces of the former rulers’ home, the city and its broad Avenida Reforma glisten in a bright midday sun.

The Grand Hall

Inside, the carefully preserved rooms and elegant courtyards illustrate the fundamental dichotomy of Mexican history – the rich and powerful keep ruling while the peasants and poor keep revolting.

Portion of the room size Siqueiros mural

Nothing makes this more clear than the extraordinary José David Alfaro Siqueiros 4500 sq. ft. mural housed in its own room off the Castle depicting the revolution against the dictator Porfirio Diáz.

More history, more art, more walking, more irony.  It turns out Siqueiros was personally involved in the first unsuccessful assassination attempt against Trotsky. And what we call the Mexican-American war included a famous battle here in 1847 in which U.S. General Winfield Scott stormed a garrison of cadets at the castle and six of them jumped to their death on the rocks below. The U.S. Marine Corps has commemorated the battle in its official anthem (“From the halls of Montezuma”) while Mexicans honor the six fallen cadets with a monument to the Niños Heroes who refused to surrender.

La Palma

As you can imagine, we don’t come off too well in these murals.

The Avenida Reforma is a magnet for development.

A new condominium tower

High rises incorporate the new style of Mexican architecture and the Museum of Modern Art has beside the usual array of famous artists works by contemporary artists in a decidedly more whimsical vein.

The Centro Histórico

Although Chapultepec Park encompasses a half dozen museums, the Centro Histórico is where museums sit side-by-side in a broad path from the Parque Alameda (a once gated park for the rich like Gramercy Park still is in New York) to the vast concrete space of the Zócalo.

I walked the square on a Sunday when the National Cathedral, which faces out on the plaza, had scheduled masses one right after the other. The museums are all free on Sundays and they were full, none more so than the incredible Palacio de Belles Artes.

The Palacio de Bellas Artes

This Art Nouveau building sits on a corner across from the Alameda Park. Its art deco interior is made of Italian Carrera marble. A central sculpture by Italian Leonardo Bistolfi celebrates “Harmony” surrounded by pocket alcoves with other sculptures representing “Pain”, “Rage”, “Happiness”, “Peace”, and “Love”. But its true magnificence lies in the three floors above covered floor to ceiling with murals by Mexico’s finest artists. Once again Rivera and Siqueiros tell their stories of reform and revolution in paint, but here they are also joined by Rufino Tamayo and José Clemente Orozco whose murals tell an equally dramatic history of Mexico.

Diego Rivera's "Man at the Crossroads"

The most famous Rivera mural lies at the west end of the 3rd floor. “El Hombre En El Cruce de Caminos” (Man at the Crossroads) was originally commissioned for New York’s Rockefeller Center in 1933 and features a giant vacuum sucking up the riches of the earth to feed the factories of card-playing, hard-drinking white capitalist thugs. One of the thugs is John D. Rockefeller himself and the standard-bearer holding the red flag of socialism is Vladimir Lenin. When Rockefeller saw the work in progress, he ordered him to stop so Rivera recreated the painting here in 1934.

Surprise at the Post Office

The Old Post Office

As I walked from the Palace of Fine Arts toward the Zócalo, I found myself unable to resist stopping at every open door to every old building along the way. The National Post Office was an abandoned building preserved to in every respect.

Mailcyles waiting for riders

The brass of the customer windows, elevator cage, and railings of a sweeping open three floor staircase glittered in the skylight sunshine.

Somebody was keeping the place up even though surface mail is all but non-existent in Mexico any more. It never was very efficient, but cell phones and the Internet have made this edifice, preserved in its original state, a museumpiece in its own rite.

National Museum of Art

Also not to be missed in the Centro Historico is the Museo Nacional de Arte with its open courtyard in front and the imposing 19^th century façade of the former Palace of Communications. Both contain not only more work by the big names in Mexican art, but also that of the lesser known artists from the early history of Mexican art. This was art that migrated from the obvious copycat European portrait and religious work to the bold modern look of the muralists. The majesty of the Mexican landscape of mountains, coasts, and deserts is all there and, even more interestingly, the cantinas and pueblos where the people really lived.

The Zócalo

The Retiree Resistance Movement

Finally the narrow museum street opened on to the famous Zócalo where so many revolutions and political movements started (and ended). Sure enough, the big square (close to Red Square in size) was filling with some kind of labor protest. The sidewalk held a makeshift monument to Jubilados Resistencia (Retiree Resistance) and, sure enough, the military arrived to move the crowd along.

A McDonald's on Wheels pushcart

On Sunday mornings, Zócalo Square belongs to the street vendors and churchgoers. Those not given to formal services can nonetheless find shrines on card tables along the side streets, ornate headstones in sequestered little cemeteries, or abstract sculptures that invite your worship.

If every child in Mexico is raised on corn tortillas, he is also raised on a history of great art…and Mexico City offers the best of the best. Much of it has been collected in literally dozens of museums, but the joy of walking Mexico City’s streets is the random discovery of a corner sculpture or mural next to a flower market celebrating the twin deities of the Mexican people: religion and revolution.

Want to see more of the art? CLICK HERE to go to our Picasa Gallery of Mexico City art.

“Rodin’s Debutante”

As a new mayor sweeps into Chicago’s City Hall and Detective Jarek Wysocki teams up with Police Superintendent Teresa Colvin to expose and unseat a corrupt alderman in “The Chicago Code,” veteran novelist Ward Just returns to Chicago for his latest atmospheric story of intrinsically good people trying to navigate the thin veneer of a civilization ruled by politics, money, violence, and art.

Lee Goodell is a young man trying to break free of his provincial North Shore, private school roots to craft an independent life as a sculptor and good citizen of Hyde Park. He spent his grade school years exploring the wrong side of the tracks of post-World War II New Jesper, a small steel mill city settled on Lake Michigan somewhere north of Chicago. (Think Waukegan.) His father is the town’s probate judge. He and his business owner cronies pretty much run things to protect the town from the urban barbarism of crime and corruption to their south. “New Jesper would not go to the dogs on my father’s watch and therefore his son and his son’s friend could roam down below the hill as much as they liked.”

Of course, such innocence doesn’t last – neither that of the town nor that of Lee with his freedom to explore the wild marshes beyond the city streets. A railroad tramp is found murdered and sodomized near the train trestle, a girl is raped and killed in the high school gymnasium, the mill closes…Lee’s mother insists that they move to the homogeneous safety of the North Shore suburbs.

There, Lee’s rebellious streak makes him a poor fit for the public school; so his parents send him off to Ogden Hall. (Think Lake Forest Academy.) The school sits on the former hunting estate of railroad magnate Tommy Ogden. While Ogden wanted to establish a local alternative to the tony private schools in the East, the school has become, in fact, a boarding school for the spoiled recalcitrant children of the North Shore elite.

Lee nonetheless thrives at Ogden Hall and develops his self-confidence and ambition through the influence of the school’s Melville-loving, alcoholic, romantic headmaster; an historically losing football team which finally goes undefeated under Lee’s leadership; and the library’s striking Rodin sculpture of the bust of a debutante. He graduates, enrolls at the University of Chicago rather than his parents’ preference (Northwestern), and rents a small studio flat in a black south side neighborhood to practice his growing skills as a marble sculptor. That is where he falls in love and marries a professor’s daughter, sells out his first gallery show, and settles into Hyde Park as a successful artist.

Chicago Then and Now

While this may sound like the rather typical “coming-of-age” autobiographical novel more often found in the first effort of new novelist, it is the 17^th novel from a seasoned and well-regarded pro. Shifting time frames and points of view ­––we don’t even meet Lee until a third of the way into the book and he only occasionally appears in the first person –– allow Just to explore the whole mid-century history of the Chicago region and the people and institutions that sustained it, and he packs the relatively short novel with a colorful assortment of characters who not only influence Lee’s development but also give his world a social and historical context.

Coarse talking Tommy Ogden sold his railroad holdings for huge profits before the highway system replaced trains, and promptly disappeared to indulge his love of prostitutes and big game hunting. His one brief encounter with Lee after the season ending football game provides one leg of Lee’s education:  “…his open Cadillac and his chauffeur, his whiskey flask and his sneer, his disdain of the Great Books, and his advice on the way of the world. You don’t learn a goddamned thing from defeat, a chain around your neck. Win always. Keep it to yourself. The world doesn’t give a shit.”

Melville’s Inspiration

Every class at Ogden Hall is subjected to Headmaster Gus Allprice’s annual lectures on Melville, and particularly one about “Omoo,” Melville’s tale of mutiny and imprisonment. Unlike the other bored students, Lee is drawn to Allprice and taken with Melville: “…his seamanship, his endless curiosity, his sympathy, his mastery of the English language, his profound understanding of the black heart, his exemplary life with its inevitable disappointments at the end. The unknown was never to be feared or despised but embraced. The unknown was life itself. The unknown made men of boys.” After Lee leaves Ogden, Allprice also disappears to run off with his lover to Patagonia.

Long a chronicler of the ways of Washington DC, Just is famously adept at presenting the complex underpinnings of political cities. He spent his early years around Chicago and knows how the city works. “City Hall loomed large,” Just writes. “The building was one of the least distinguished of the Loop, a coal bucket of a building, but appearances were deceiving because the coal bucket concealed the Hope Diamond – a political apparatus so costly, so exquisite, so multifaceted, so blinding in its flash of fire, that it had secured tenure for scores of Illinois political scientists over the years…You walked into City Hall and you knew exactly what had to be done, where the payments went and to whom and what was expected in return. That was the beauty of the city, its clarity – and balance.”

“Rodin’s Debutante” covers a lot of time and territory. Just never quite loses sight of his protagonist, but he also is not afraid to stray from Lee’s story when a particular character or scene strikes his fancy. Although disconcerting at first, this broken narrative approach, with all its nuances and digressions, becomes part of the charm of the novel. It takes a novelist with self-confidence and experience to turn the tired story of a young man’s “coming-of-age” into a profound reflection on an entire region’s coming of age. We are lucky to have Ward Just still writing great novel after great novel in a world where 140 characters just won’t do it.