The Washington Story
By Adam Langer
Riverhead, 400 pages, $24.95
On New Year’s Eve 1982, two college freshmen climb the sledding hill in West Rogers Park that they call Mt. Warren. They carry a shovel and a bowling bag, and on the summit they set to work depositing a time capsule of their teenage years. Between them, they inter a cassette tape of Heart, a copy of the book “Our Town,” a ticket stub for the movie “The Battle of Algiers,” a flier from the Youth Spartacist League, an empty flask of Wild Turkey, a diaphragm, a piece of hot-dog-shaped bubblegum from Fluky’s Red Hots, and letters of rejection and admission to college.
For both of them, college has flung open the borders of West Rogers Park, taking Michelle Wasserstrom to New York University with designs on an acting career and Gareth Over-gaard to the University of Chicago and ambitions to join the Peace Corps and emerge from the closet as gay. Giddy to leave the confines of the old neighborhood, Michelle says with mock gravity, ” ‘On this night, we bury our sins.’ “
Adam Langer operates with the opposite impulse in “The Washington Story,” the sequel to his much-praised debut novel, “Crossing California.” He wants to exca-vate the past, to recover in vivid detail the lives his characters led in their coming-of-age. Having brought most of his ensemble through high school from 1979 to 1981 in “Crossing California,” he traces them into college and the first steps toward adulthood during the subsequent six years in “The Washington Story.” While this choice requires him to extend his geography as far afield as Manhattan, the Hudson Valley and, briefly, a still-divided Berlin, he has once again written a book lovingly steeped in Chicago. The very title, after all, refers to the startling election and turbulent mayoralty of Harold Washington, the first black to hold the office in Chicago.
With such ambitious goals, Langer has produced a tender and generous book, one whose attributes outlast and outweigh some significant drawbacks. Those readers who cherish the characters from Langer’s first book will surely enjoy following their continuing misadventures here, for both novels are thinking people’s soap operas. Yet “The Washington Story” does not exclude readers new to this novelist’s work. A careful craftsman, Langer has woven in enough back story for the sequel to stand on its own merits.
And it has merits enough. Langer animates a wide array of characters, and though most share Jewish and West Rogers Park roots, his range stretches across three generations and includes black, Irish, fundamentalist Christian and sexually ambiguous individuals. First among equals, though, are Jill Wasserstrom and Muley Wills, who met and began a sort of courtship as preteens in “Crossing California.” Muley is the inward, artistically gifted child of a black mother and a Jewish father who deserted in the boy’s infancy. Jill is struggling to emerge from the shadow of her alluring and lascivious older sister, Michelle; she feels far more confident in her political beliefs than in the longings of her heart. As Langer writes in one deliciously observed passage, “Of course she had fantasies; most involved universal nuclear disarmament” or else lounging with a boyfriend in a hot tub “while having a deep, penetrating conversation about the disintegration of the Democratic political machine.”
Throughout this lengthy book, as Jill enters Vassar College and Muley studies filmmaking at the Art Institute, Langer skillfully orchestrates their fumbling courtship. Nowhere is his touch more supple than in this description of them on the eve of Jill’s departure for college:
“They spent the entire night at Lunt Avenue Beach, eating Levinson’s cupcakes and drinking Asti Spumante out of Styrofoam cups, swimming . . . in the ice-cold lake, then drying off and waiting for the sunrise. . . .
“Muley and Jill lay hand in hand, their heads cushioned by their crumpled summer jackets, looking up at a sky too cloudy for them to make out constellations or the path of space shuttle Discovery, which Muley said was passing above them. After the darkest part of the night had passed and a thin hula hoop of midnight blue was emerging at the horizon, they sat up, brushed the sand off their clothes, and Muley talked about all he would do in the future, while Jill spoke of all she hadn’t done in the past.”
Despite such moments, though, Langer fails to draw Jill and Muley as sharply as much of the supporting cast. (Especially striking are his portraits of Jill’s reclusive grandmother, Muley’s father, and their sardonic, self-destructive classmate Hillel Levy.) Jill is all yearning and timidity, a limited palette over the course of several hundred pages. Muley, even more so, seems like an unexploited opportunity for a writer with such evident empathy for the human condition. Langer presents us a mixed-race teenager with a white sort-of girlfriend at a time of spectacularly bitter race relations in a starkly segregated city and yet has little to say about how these internal and external forces affect Muley. The portrayal is too colorblind for its own good.
To say that implies a similar concern about the larger backdrop of the book. Langer plainly prides himself on meticulous detail and historical context. To this former Chicagoan’s delight, the book abounds in references to stores, radio stations, elevated-train stops and other minutiae. There are even pseudonyms alluding to the Lerner newspapers and the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant chain. Langer can anchor a reader in the 1980s with just the right invocation of a heavy-metal band (Nazareth) or a bit of slang (tubular). And just as the Iranian hostage crisis served as the framing device in “Crossing California,” so do Harold Washington’s candidacy, election and mayoralty here.
The question is whether these elements add up to more than the production design, to use a movie term. They do when Langer is capturing the sexuality and drug use of the 1980s, especially the rise of cocaine.
For a novel named for Harold Washington, however, this one only sporadically conveys the tenor of the city, especially the civic demons loosed during the campaign against Bernard Epton, a Republican who would have been the sacrificial lamb had he been running against any white Democrat. Some of us will never forget the sight of a bewildered, ineffectual Epton as crowds chanted “Ber-nie! Ber-nie!” out of the fevered conviction that no black ever rule Chicago. Somehow, Langer does not get the venom of that period onto the page. Knowing all the facts falls short of plumbing the city’s soul in the way we associate not only with masters like Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren–admittedly, a stratospheric standard–but also with Rich Cohen in his picaresque account of Chess Records, “Machers and Rockers,” and Bette Howland in her mournful fugue of essays, “Blue in Chicago.”
None of this criticism, though, makes “The Washington Story” any less pleasurable a read, for its wit and its eye and its capacious heart. Unearthing the artifacts of Jill, Muley and the rest was an effort well worth Adam Langer’s abundant talent.
