Crooked River Burning

If you ever have an itch to read the definitive novel about Cleveland, Ohio, I recommend Mark Winegardner's Crooked River Burning. If you want to read a very good book, then I would suggest you skip it. I read it because it was listed on Stephen King's Best 10 of 2006 list, a source that I am learning ends up disappointing me more than anything (and besides, this book is from 2001. King's list seems to stem from when he reads the book, not when it's published).

Cleveland is the main character of this book, and Winegardner chronicles the city's decline from 1948 to 1969, when the Cuyahoga River catches on fire and the once proud metropolis becomes the butt of late-night comedians for years to come. As with much narrative art, there is a love story around which the larger themes are presented. David Zielinsky is a boy from the hard-scrabble working-class side of town, while Anne O'Connor is the privileged daughter of a civic big shot. They meet as teenagers during an idyllic vacation on an island in Lake Erie, but then go back to their separate lives. David goes into the Navy, marries his high school sweetheart, and pursues his ambition of becoming mayor by first getting elected to city council. Anne aspires to become a journalist, hoping to do it without her father's help, and she ends up as anchorwoman on a local television station. Throughout the years David and Anne reconnect and drift apart again, while Cleveland changes.

What works best in this book is Winegardner's depiction of a city he clearly has affection for. The plight of Cleveland, which is similar to other rust-belt cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit, is that an urban area that was driven by industry and populated by rich families living in grand Victorian homes fell victim to a combination of factors (the migration of blacks from the South, which led to white flight to the suburbs, plus an increasingly service-oriented economy) and fell into shabbiness. These problems all came to a head during the sixties when riots ripped through most cities. Though this book ends in 1969, many of these cities have experienced something of a renaissance in the past ten or fifteen years, but there's a quality to life during the post-war era that can never be recaptured, except in books like this.

Winegardner also interpolates a heap of Cleveland history through the story. We hear about Alan Freed, the DJ who coined the term rock and roll, in an extremely well-written chapter about what is generally regarded as the first ever rock and roll concert. The Cleveland Indians are always in the forefront, especially when they win the World Series in 1948 (and never since then). Young David attends an exhibition game when the Dodgers come to town, and he experiences what it's like to be a minority (the crowd is largely black, come to see Jackie Robinson). The Sam Sheppard murder case, Jim Brown, and the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, Carl Stokes, are all part of the tapestry.

Unfortunately the love story wasn't very well handled. I never particularly cared whether David and Annie ended up together, and it seemed that many of the major events of their life happened off-stage. There was also a strangely handled subplot concerning the mysterious death of David's mother that was never particularly explained well. The result is kind of a shaggy dog story that meanders to a finish.

If you are from Cleveland, I would imagine this book would be great fun to read, as you will no doubt recognize many names and places, but for someone like me, who has never set foot there, it was a bit of tedious read.