'Grant Park' mixes racial history, thriller

     Had Leonard Pitts Jr. entitled his new novel "Central Park" or "Golden Gate Park," had he set it in New York or San Francisco, it never would have touched my hands.
     But he called the book "Grant Park," prompting an editor to pluck it out of the endless slurry of galleys that flows into the newspaper, and jam it into my mailbox, where petty local pride made me agree to read it, if only for the pleasure of flagging the howling errors that Pitts, who lives in Maryland, would try to pass off as genuine Chicago color.
     Pitts is a syndicated columnist, and my first thought was: columnists can't write novels. I sure can't. They create a supercharged version of themselves and jiggle the resultant marionette through some improbable adventure. My sight was no doubt clouded by painful memories of Bob Greene's execrable "All Summer Long," with its cuties blundering up to SuperBob and confessing their admiration for his high-quality journalism.  Then I thought of Pete Hamill — his novels are nearly literary, meaning that they carry a whiff of actual existence. And Bill Granger's skilled thrillers. And Carl Hiaasen's funny Florida gothic.
     Hope bloomed. I possessed exactly two facts attached to Pitts' name when I opened the book. First, he wrote a strong, defiant column immediately after 9/11. And second, he's black, and it's an indication of the sort of white obliviousness so infuriating to Pitts that, even knowing this,  I was still mildly surprised to find his novel is about black people.
     At first it seemed like Pitts had fallen into the Bob Greene trap. His hero, Malcolm Marcus Toussaint, is a successful, almost adored columnist who has two Pulitzer Prizes, one more than Pitts himself. His newsroom includes people like Amy, a "20-something white girl" who tells him, "You're the whole reason I'm here," as if a career in journalism were a good thing. (I've had students share a version of that sentiment, closer to, "You led me to believe I could get a job," hissed through tears).
     It is Election Day, 2008. The book serves up surprise after surprise, and it's difficult to relate the plot without spoiling what, I'm glad to say, is an enjoyable cliffhanger. But I'll try.

Leonard Pitts Jr.

      Toussaint is tired of "white folks'
 bullshit" and writes a column saying so. Most papers in America would wave it into print it with a sigh and a few dashes, but the column is rejected, so Toussaint contrives to have it published anyway. He and his boss Bob Carson are summarily fired from the Chicago Post, the newspaper Pitts conjures up, perhaps not realizing that doing so risks pushing his book into the fantasy genre (while he's giving Chicago a third major newspaper he might as well add orcs and flying brooms and complete the effect.)
     Then Toussaint vanishes and Carson sets out to find him. There are too many coincidences—how did the guy on the tour boat wind up in that bar so quickly?—and the writing never soars, though Pitts does a solid job of navigating the perilous dilemma, heartbreak, frustration and irony of  being black in 2015.
     What redeems "Grant Park" is  Toussaint's backstory, delivered in textured flashbacks of Memphis, 1968, where his father was a garbage man in the midst of the sanitation workers' strike. Toussaint is there, at Martin Luther King's elbow, and so is Carson—his interracial love affair with fellow student Janeka unfolds poignantly. Their lone sex scene—we journalists are squeamish about sex—conveyed with all the fumbling and humiliation of real life.
     Back in 2008, we meet a pair of Carl Hiaasen-grade white supremacist low-lifes, one named Dwayne, which seems a requirement of some sort, who have a mad scheme to kill Barack Obama at Grant Park that night.
     Speaking of Grant Park. I did find my howlers, most geographical. "A place on Michigan Avenue," is described as being "about two blocks from Grant Park" which is akin to describing somewhere as being on Sheridan Road, two blocks west of Lake Michigan. In an afternote  Pitts claims such mistakes are intentional, and one does nudge the plot forward, but most have no use, plotwise, so that seems disingenuous. Chicago is a lot bigger than the shoebox diorama Pitts seems to have in mind.
     The Chicago Post newsroom also doesn't jibe with newsrooms as I understand them. As the popular Toussaint is abruptly shown the gate. I kept thinking of the stern don't-do-that-again finger wagging the Chicago Tribune gave Clarence Page in 2012 after he accepted $20,000 and was flown to Paris to speak at a rally for an Iranian terrorist group. His Post bosses never pause to worry about Jesse Jackson picketing the paper, a reminder to Pitts that it isn't only whites who can have trouble recognizing their own privilege.
    But those are quibbles. The bottom line is that ... here comes the money shot ... Leonard Pitts has written a taut thriller that weaves together a stark look at America's tortured racial past with a fast-paced tale of terrorist conspiracy and love rekindled.  

Leonard Pitts, Jr. will be speaking at the Harold Washington Public Library, 400 S. State Street, Wednesday, Oct. 14 at 6 p.m.

Fall color

Fall, 2014

     "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago," the Chinese proverb tells us. "The second best time is now." 
     On that scale, planting a  tree a year ago seems the worst of both options. Not long enough to show much discernible progress. Not recent enough to carry any afterglow of the optimistic act of planting a tree.
     But planting this sugar maple 20 years ago was not an option; the proper time travel technology is not available.  Besides, I lived in East Lake View then, in a walk-up condo. I wasn't planting any trees anywhere.
     I moved to the suburbs, inheriting a bunch of trees, including a mammoth sugar maple that was perhaps 150 years old. And it was only last year that I finally came to grips wit with the idea that our beloved old behemoth was really going to go, that all the arborists in the world could not save it. That even even trees get old and die. So it was in the fall of 2014 that I  planted a sugar maple across the walk from the doomed tree in our front yard.  The new tree didn't even have leaves.  I considered the sapling not so much an act of hope as a rude gesture at cruel nature. You're taking this one? Fine, Mother Nature, fuck you, I'm just going to plant another one just like it. Howdya like that? 
     It was, by comparison, a broomstick of a tree, a pathetic pole I could fit my hands around. 
    "It'll be really something," I told my wife, "...in about 100 years. We won't be around then of course. But someone will." 

Photo by Shelly Frame

     To be honest, I sort of forgot about it. The thing wasn't much to look at, more of a reminder of what was lost than anything else. 
     Winter came and went. Then summer—I reassured myself that it was alive,  kept it watered so it stayed that way.  My expectations were minimal.
     As mankind so often does, I had underestimated nature. 
     We were on the East coast last week, traveling from Boston to Philadelphia, when one of our neighbors—we have wonderful neighbors—emailed us this photo of our new tree, which marked its first full autumn in our yard with a spectacular display of the deepest, richest orange I have ever seen on a tree. 
     I can't tell you how comforted I was by that blaze of fall color that popped unexpectedly from our new stick. A reminder that nature is neither cruel nor kind, it just is. Cruelty or kindness are human constructs that we layer upon nature's regular and perfect activities. 
    It is humans who label, who interpret. And what that little tree's virtuoso display reminded me was while individual trees, like individual people, certainly grow old and die, that trees and people, as a class, both endure, and the new generation, though smaller, at the moment, still has wonders aplenty up their sleeves, and will deal them on their own timetable. We just have to be patient and wait for them. 

Your flight's canceled, but you can set a spell

     A line of white rocking chairs are scattered along between Terminals B and C at Boston's Logan airport. Giving people a place to sit, and relax, and momentarily escape the exhausting slog of air travel. My eye was caught by this older couple, watching the planes come and go. There was something incongruous about them, the white haired man and wife, I assume, turning an anonymous airport causeway into their front porch or local Cracker Barrel, watching, not the mule nibble on kudzu, but a phalanx of vehicles through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window. 
     Turns out that rocking chairs in airports is common, as documented on the web site, The Verge, which traces the phenomenon back to 1997, when a photo exhibit on front porches at the Charleston Douglas International Airport included rocking chairs as props. When the exhibit ended and the chairs were removed, flyers complained, and the chairs were returned. 
      The chairs took off, so to speak, after the 9/11 attacks, as a low cost, low tech way to encourage calm among travelers.  Now they are found in a number of airports around the country. Sacramento's are made of teak. 
     This is really a new twist on an old practice. Introduced in this country in the 1700s, rocking chairs found their way into institutions in the 1800s—"Rocking Chair Therapy," it was called. 
     There is some science behind the idea of rocking chairs to battle stress. A 2005 University of Rochester School of Nursing study found that seniors who rocked in rocking chairs grew less anxious, and calmed down more quickly when they were upset, cried less, and asked for less medication. 
     "Our goal is to keep people out of institutions," said the program director at an senior day program that participated in the study.
     Not that the chairs help keep anyone out of the institutions of airports; just give them something to do when stranded in one.
     I didn't sit in the chairs—I had a rental car to pick up—but will give them a try next time I've got a few hours to kill waiting for a delayed flight.
     So, a charming idea, but a charm that might also be worth resisting. It's as if the airport is saying: We can't spare you the time-killing TSA security theater. And we can't keep a third of the flights from being delayed. But we can set out a few rocking chairs to blow off the stress our poor performance causes. I'm not sure if that's something to feel good about.

Book Week #8: "Upon breach of my late vows"

     Book Week concludes today with a glance at my upcoming book. 
     The day before we left on vacation, I handed the copyedited manuscript of "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery" over to my co-author, Sara Bader. The book will be published next fall by the University of Chicago Press. It's an unusual book—we use quotes, from poems, from literature, from songs, movies, letters, journals—to walk the reader through the recovery process. The quotes are not just grouped, but mortised together, one leading to the next, so they form a mosaic, tell a story. Historical figures also appear, almost as characters, to help explain certain aspects of recovery. For the key issue of relapse, we use Samuel Pepys, the 17th century English writer. This is the beginning of the introductory essay starting the relapse chapter, called "Upon Breach of My Late Vows." When we began writing the book, I didn't know anything about Pepys except his diaries contain a candid account of his life. I assumed there would be drinking, and I was right. This is the first sample of the book to appear anywhere; I'm interested to hear what you think of it.

                             . . . and so the pewterers to buy a poore’s-box

                                   to put my forfeits in, upon breach of my late vowes

                                                    —Samuel Pepys, diary entry, March 5, 1662

     The vows that Samuel Pepys, the famously frank English diarist, had solemnly made to God a few days before, and would make time and time again, were to stop drinking wine and attending plays, two pleasures entwined in his mind. Putting aside the lure of the theater—then considered practically a mortal sin—Pepys offers ample evidence that long before there was the word “alcoholism,” there was the snare of drinking and its damaging effects, the struggle to resist and the tendency of that resistance to eventually collapse.

 

Samuel Pepys

   Two and a half weeks after buying a slotted box to hold the coins he fined himself for submitting to wine, Pepys is back at it. “And so to supper and to bed,” he writes, on March 22, 1662, after reveling with several ship owners, an alderman, and a captain, “having drank a great deal of wine.”

     The problem started early with Pepys, as it often does. Almost all that is known of Pepys’s college years at Oxford is a written reprimand chiding him and a classmate for being caught “scandalously overserved with drink the night before.”

     The lure of the wine shop would dog him well beyond his college years. In his diary, which covers most of the 1660s, when he was in his late twenties and early thirties, he presents a detailed portrait of a busy bureaucrat—he was a high official in the British navy. Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) was a prominent figure in Restoration London—acquainted with both Charles II and Isaac Newton—a man consumed with desires: to earn a lot of money, to grope every pretty maid or underling’s wife who crossed his path, and to engage in a steady rondo of drinking then swearing off drinking. No detail was too trivial or too self-absorbed to escape Pepys’s attention, and shame seldom caused him to halt his pen, creating not only an invaluable historical record but also a unique portrait of a man in the throes of addiction. If there were ever a writer who conveyed the maddening, tiresome, head-on-a-board repetition of relapse, it is Samuel Pepys.

     Then and now, relapse is perhaps the thorniest problem in recovery. To acknowledge that it happens—that addicts routinely toss away their hard-fought-for sobriety—can sound to the desperate drunk trying to pick the lock on the cellar door like a kind of permission: Oh, I’m supposed to do this? It’s expected of me? Thank merciful God.

     But to ignore relapse invites the user to completely surrender after a single aborted attempt at sobriety, when usually it takes more than one, if not many tries. The mountain trail is steep and slippery. Few get it right the first time. And having gotten it right is no guarantee of future success, which is why people generally say they are “in recovery” and avoid claiming to have “recovered.”

     So the trick is to learn about relapse, then tuck the knowledge away and forget about it, like an insurance card in your wallet to be taken out in case of emergency. Hopefully you never use it. It’s far easier if you don’t have to. Then again, “easy” is not a concept of much practical use in recovery.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

    This is why I hate most modern public art. The impulse to embellish public spaces that once created this amazing tableau, today would be channeled into some kind of irregular surface of broken chunks of concrete with plastic dolls embedded in them, wrapped in concertina wire and given a fey title intended to be evocative.
     I suppose it's easier, and cheaper that way....
     That said, where is this thing? I'll state the obvious: it's not in Chicago, but somewhere else. Normally I'd harbor hopes that it being outside of Illinois would be enough to gain me a few hours. But I know my Hive, and my hunch is, you'll solve this before breakfast, alas.
     Place your guesses below. Winner gets one of my 2015 blog post posters. Good luck. Have fun.

Book Week #7: "I should like to have been at Chicago a year ago"

      When the University of Chicago Press asked me to write a book about Chicago, my first thought was: "But I live in Northbrook ... and I was born in Cleveland!" Which sort of dictated how the book was written, from an outsider's perspective, about newcomers who arrive at Chicago and try to make their way.   The result was my seventh book, "You Were Never in Chicago." One essential quality is that, no matter when you arrive at the city, you are always made to feel you just missed the Big Moment. Trying to explore and, perhaps, debunk this notion, I took what were considered essential moments in Chicago history and began leaping back to see what they actually thought about the place. Guess what: they tended to look backward toward some mythical better time, too. 

     The carnation-wearers, the bamboo-cane leaners, the nudge-and-winkers, the organ-grinders, the First Ward Ball revelers, in grand procession headed by Bathhouse John Coughlin, proudly leading his “harlots and hopheads, his coneroos and fancy-men, his dips and hipsters and heavy-hipted madams” to use Nelson Algren’s piquant description, “coneroo” being slang for a con man.
     That city, that world, is gone—or so the common wisdom goes—replaced by the dull, packaged, homogenized present, our tepid moment of compromised mediocrity. The funny thing is, people always feel that way—pick whatever era in history seems most exciting, most distinctive, real and alive, then examine that period closely; you will find that Chicagoans of the time were also nostalgic, also troubled by what they considered society’s decline, also confronting a problematic present while mourning some imagined superior past. Take 1927—a giddy whirl of bathtub gin and tommy guns and flappers in sheer silk dresses doing the Charleston. Chicagoans back then were aghast at their city’s criminality.
     “We are known abroad as a crude, ill governed city. We are known for our ugliness,” Chicago treasurer Charles S. Peterson bemoaned in December 1927, when forming a committee to bring another world’s fair to Chicago—1933’s Century of Progress—in an attempt to dilute the city’s gangland reputation by recapturing the lost promise and excitement of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a grab at the fading memory of innocent joys: the White City, the Ferris Wheel, and Cracker Jack.

   Leap back to the 1893 world’s fair, however, and Chicagoans, while certainly basking in the glow of their renewal, also despaired whether the city would prove worthy of all the attention. They worried about disease, about being up to the task of hosting multitudes, and they steeled their resolve by remembering the city’s courageous, unified, and tireless response to the Great Chicago Fire.
     “Our first duty, gentlemen of the City Council of Chicago, is to keep the city in a healthy condition, so that when the world comes here it will not enter upon a charnel house,” said mayor Carter Harrison Sr., in his inaugural address on April 17, 1893, a month before the fair opened, calling it, “the most trying period of Chicago’s history, except when the besom of destruction passed over it at its mighty conflagration.”
     Yet at the time of the Great Fire, in October 1871, Chicagoans saw not only heroism, but also a sinful city scourged. “Fleeing before it was a crowd of blear-eyed, drunken and diseased wretches, male and female, half naked, ghastly, with painted cheeks, cursing and uttering ribald jests as they drifted along,” the editor of the Chicago Tribune wrote to the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, describing the fire. For strength, beleaguered Chicagoans recalled the difficulties of the city’s founding. “The rain that helped put out the flames created pools of mud, reminding survivors of the city’s swampy foundation,” wrote historian Ross Miller.
     But at the city’s swampy foundation . . .
     Charles Fenno Hoffman approached Chicago on a frigid New Year’s Eve 1833, five months after Chicago had incorporated as a town, at a meeting where 12 residents voted yes and one voted no. The night before Hoffman’s arrival was spent twenty miles away, east along the lakefront in “a rude cabin built of stems of the scrub pine, standing behind a sandy swell about 200 yards from shore.”
    The twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker lay huddled in a buffalo skin, with his saddle for a pillow, listening to experienced Chicago hands trade stories of the money to be made, of the “meanness, rapacity, and highway robbery (in cheating, stealing, and forcibly taking away) from the Indians.” Hoffman felt “indignation and disgust” at the practices described, but also a certain regret.
    “I should like to have been at Chicago a year ago,” he told his cabin mates.
     You get the picture. Hoffman hadn’t even gotten to Chicago yet and was already wishing he had arrived sooner—a common sentiment in an era when real estate prices could soar by the hour. There is a tendency to denigrate the present, whatever it is, because we know so much about it, while romanticizing the past, whatever it was, because its less pleasant details grow fuzzier with each passing year, accentuating the cherished highlights even more. This impulse can be particularly acute for newcomers, who missed the great era of the day before yesterday, arriving, as they must, in the confusing, compromised swirl of today, and so can be left with a permanent sense that the party is always ending just as they show up. The party is never now.

Book Week # 6 -- "The twirling universe stops dead."

     I'd never have thought to write a recovery book. Then again, I'd never have thought to go into recovery. But circumstances forced my hand — 10 years ago last week — and landed me in the middle of it. If I've learned one thing from reading Dante, it's that if you find yourself in hell, take notes.
     So I did, and wrote "Drunkard"—originally titled "Death of the Drunkard," based on a line I spied on the vaulted ceiling of a Vilnius tavern. But the geniuses at Dutton didn't want to have "death" in the book's title, not that it mattered. Not a best-seller. Though I still hear from people who were touched by the book, and that is enough. I've also heard that it's one of the few recovery books that makes a person want to drink, due to passages such as the following:

     I don't drink right away. No, no, no. That would be wrong. Overeager. As frantic as I sometimes am, staring intently at other, lesser bartenders, who often lag, too slow to notice me, too slow to get off the phone, too slow to find the Jack—there, you idiot, right there!—so slow I want to slap the bar and snarl, "Hurry the hell up!" As eager as I sometimes am, moving down the bar and dipping my head to catch their attention. As carefully as I track the composition of the drink—the glass, the ice, the booze—once it has arrived, I always pause to gaze for a rapt moment at the filled glass, the ice, the Jack, the square napkin, the dark linoleum bar. The twirling universe stops dead, the Jack its motionless epicenter. I pick up the glass and take a long draw.
     You probably do not drink whiskey. You might not drink at all—a third of the country doesn't, a statistic that astounds me, the way I am astounded by the fact that one-third of all Americans believe in UFOs and two-thirds believe in angels.
    But whiskey tastes wonderful—sweet and smoky, cold and comforting. The first sip doesn't do much but reassure you: the overture, the fugue, the opening beat of the orchestra saying, "Just wait; you're in the right place." Soon—two sips, three—the glass is half empty and the grating clank of the day begins to soften and fade. I've made it. I am rescued, plucked from the icy chop and flopped gratefully into the lifeboat, covered with a wool blanket and heading for home.