Asshole of the Century

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

In Search of My Own Private Sangamon

My “career path,” such as it is, has been scattered, leading me into some unexpected cul-de-sacs over the past 25 years. From wanna be rocker to copy editor to teacher to journalist and now analyst of the grain markets, I’ve made several rather abrupt shifts during my life. In this, I guess that I am just another product of the post-modern age. But underneath all of these somewhat odd career moves, you could say that, at my core, I have been, am, and will presumably always be, a writer. It is how I define myself. More importantly, it is, in one form or another, how I’ve made my cash (and I am typically American in my belief that internal bullshit like my own “self-definition” is a lot less important than the facts on the ground. To paraphrase the immortal words of Sergeant Joe Friday, just give me the facts, ma’am.)

Today, the fate of the writer is both exalted and imperiled. While I could blather on, suffice to say that, while paying gigs can be hard to come by, writers as communicators have a privileged position in this, the “information age.” However you slice it, though, the status of the contemporary novelist has fallen on hard times. Sure, there are the rare outliers like J.K. Rowling, making hundreds of millions while writing about her expansive fantasy world. But the idea that a novelist can express something relevant, let alone necessary, about the state of our planet has pretty much gone the way of the two-martini lunch. In fact, I need look no further for evidence of this irrelevancy than my own apathy towards contemporary fiction. Which is all the more reason why the first novel that I have really enjoyed reading in months, if not years, caught me by surprise. It’s titled “Left of the Loop” and is by a former Chicagoan named Tim Brown.

I don’t think anyone would describe “Left of the Loop” as a highly polished work. It is self-indulgent, erratically written, and essentially devoid of plot. Entire sections seem like they were plucked out of an entirely different narrative, in particular a chapter on meeting the ghost of the Haymarket bombing, which seems to exist simply to allow the author to discuss the history of the labor movement. A few of the characters are memorable, but even they are allowed to pontificate randomly, often about predictable things like their hatred of yuppies or how horrible it is to work in a corporate office. But these faults don’t obscure what I like about this book: its directness, its headstrong unwillingness to follow tried-and-true narrative methodologies, or to play with the narrative as a way of showing off, of proving how well the author absorbed the lessons of post-modern fiction. I love “Left of the Loop” for its sincerity, the sense that this is a work by a writer who really means it, who is following his own narrative path because this is what he needs to say.

And out of the blue, like an overmatched middleweight suddenly catching the champ with a haymaker, changing the entire nature of the bout, there are a handful of really nice passages in this book. For instance, this line on the joys of living amidst the decaying edge of a city: “Grandeur lies not in the environment, but resides in the archetypal man, one who can open the mind’s eye round enough to encompass the entire horizon and claim it as his own.”

This is from a chapter titled “Philosophical Roots of Outer Bohemia,” which gets at the essence of the novel. What does it mean to live amongst the detritus of the city? And why is this so important to Spungkdt, our narrator? A common thread of the novel is the idea of Sangamon, which is not only the name of the street where Spungkdt lives with his buddy in a decrepit, mostly abandoned loft building, but Sangamon is also the name of a river and a county in central Illinois. The name stitches together all this stuff, urban and rural, a native vein running through this section of the Middle West, from the Sangamon interregnum, a warm period between the Illinois and Wisconsin ice ages, through the Native American notion of “sangamon” as a well-played stroke of bad luck that just misses its target by a little, to the urban moonscape that Spungkdt and company called home.

This thin tome touched a lot of things that are close to my heart: the beauty of decay, of the city, of man-made things, and of wide open prairie; the “dissipated” quest, to use a term from the novel, that all of us seemed to be on in the late-1980’s; and how we seemed destined to fail.

I can’t quite say that this book gives me hope in the ability of the modern novel to mean something, to be transformative, but it does point to why I find most contemporary novels so boring. At least in part, I think it is because much of this writing reeks of the worst kind of professionalism. Brown’s book is a breath of fresh air because it plays the story as it lays, unvarnished, awkward, like an otherwise worthless piece of secondhand furniture that nonetheless calls to me. He may not be a Laxness, a Whitman, a Dostoevsky, from that small tribe of folks who can bring me to tears with the power of their words, but I’ve got to say, “Thanks, Mr. Brown.” Your “hardscrabble Sangamon” as you put it, has become an indelible part of my internal geography, adding another facet to the city I call home.

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