Crooked River Burning - Hardcover

Winegardner, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151002940 ISBN 13: 9780151002948

Publisher: Harcourt, 2001

Synopsis

In 1948 Cleveland was America's sixth largest city; by 1969 it was the twelfth. For Easterners, Cleveland is where the Midwest begins; for Westerners, it is where the East begins. In the summer of 1948, fourteen-year-old David Zielinsky can look forward to a job at the docks. Anne O'Connor, at twelve, is the apple of her political boss father's eye. David and Anne will meet-and fall in love-four years later, and for the next twenty years this pair will be reluctant star-crossed lovers in a troubled and turbulent country. A natural-born storyteller, Mark Winegardner spins an epic tale of those twenty years, artfully weaving such real-life Clevelanders as Eliot Ness, Alan Freed, and Carl Stokes into the tapestry. His narrative gifts may bring the fiction of E. L. Doctorow to some readers' minds, but Winegardner is very much his own man, and his observations of Cleveland are laced with a loving skepticism. His masterful saga of this conflicted city is a novel that speaks a memorable truth.

About this title

Review:

Any novel that takes Cleveland for its subject has a long legacy of ridicule to live up to. Yet Mark Winegardner's funny, tough, and elegiac Crooked River Burning is up to the task, tracing the city's devolution from steel-making powerhouse to the butt of an entire nation's jokes. Along the way the author manages to work in a number of peculiarly American (and, as it turns out, peculiarly Clevelandian) preoccupations: rock & roll, civil rights, labor, organized crime, JFK, professional sport. Mix and match themes like these with a star-crossed romance, and you have all the makings of a Big American Novel, complete with its own stoic, sad-sack refrain: "If a thing like this is going to happen, it just figures it'd happen here."

And a Big American Novel it is--perhaps self-consciously so. The hero, David Zielinsky, is the earnest young product of Cleveland's ethnic, blue-collar West Side; his dream girl, Anne O'Connor, hails from snooty Shaker Heights and is smarter, prettier, and richer than anyone she knows. It's no surprise when these two fall in love, but they spend many years tiptoeing around this inevitability. In the interim David marries, starts a family, and nurses political ambitions, while Anne forges her own career in local TV news. Winegardner, meanwhile, has other fish to fry. He devotes entire chapters to such local luminaries as Dorothy Fuldheim, the city's woman broadcasting pioneer; Carl Stokes, its groundbreaking black mayor; Alan Freed, the DJ who credited himself with naming rock & roll; and more sports heroes, seasons, and individual games than you can shake an American institution at.

These are fascinating stories. It does, to be sure, take some time to get used to the constant, hectoring intrusion of the second person: "You lived in the present, dreamed of the future, and, until you were an old man, thought little of the past. And in a country with a fascist's love of victory, few understood that you rode into history on a rocket called defeat." In the end, though, all stylistic quibbles pale next to the wisdom and generosity with which Winegardner has drawn his characters--including the city itself. Anne loves her hometown "the way one loves a loyal family pet during its arthritic, bad-smelling final years," but one senses that for the author, the sentiment goes much deeper than that. Its very failures are lovely to him, and its persistence more lovely yet. As Anne herself might paraphrase Beckett: It can't go on. It goes on. --Mary Park

Book Description:

Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2001, 0-15-100294-0

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0151002940
• ISBN 13: 9780151002948
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 572