Customer Reviews

Crooked River Burning

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Don't let the description of the basic plot of this novel make you think in any way that it is derivative or ho-hum...the basic "boy from the wrong side of town" plot. It may seem to start there, but it is so much more by even just the first 25 pages.

This novel does what I look for in a book: tells a unique story, creating a time and place, with characters which live. To this extent The Albany Trilogy by Wm Kennedy comes closest to a reference on the literary map. The historical setting of the start of the second half of the 20th century, Cleveland (of all places, but it works!) gives a window to America, baseball, emerging women's and race issues, social classes, politics, life lived then in full color rather than black and white.

The real and true strength of the book though is in the mastery of language, playful and otherwise, astonishing, the explicit presence and voice of an author that is not intrusive to the story, but woven into the telling. Just as Lethem and Auster have their own unique voices and styles, so too does Winegardner.

There are other novel coming out right now. I personally am looking forward to new Delillo, and another from Norton titled Death of Vishnu, Peter Carey's newest. None of them can be stronger than this one though.

Here's that rare animal -- a hugely ambitious novel in which the ambitions of the author are hugely realized! Winegardner has got it down bigtime! His depiction of Cleveland (I speak as a long-alienated native) is as good as it gets and his blend of real people and fictional protagonists really works. He made me care deeply about his two leads characters, drew them so well I felt I knew them. I cannot fault his writing, his concept, his delivery in any way. I only wish this book were better packaged in terms of cover art, to attract the readers it so richly deserves. If you think Cleveland is a bore or a joke, when you finish CROOKED RIVER BURNING you'll find you have a new vision. Bravo for the author! My highest recommendation!

I have a friend who used to run a big independent bookstore here who says this novel is the worst-promoted great novel he's ever seen. Word of mouth on this book was good (my bookseller friend says a lot of independent stores really loved it), and I guess in the end it did do fairly well. But his publisher seemed to think that no one outside of Cleveland would want to read this, which is really weird, espcially when you see how fellow rustbelt books THE CORRECTIONS and MIDDLESEX did. I like both those novels a lot, but CROOKED RIVER BURNING lacks the sophomoric lapses those books fall into from time to time and has a much bigger scope than either one. I think that the best American novels published in this century are those three, Michael Chabon's THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY and Jonathan Lethem's THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. They're all great and they deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. (They're all by writers who are about my age, too, for what that's worth.)

Anyway, when Winegardner's sequel to THE GODFATHER comes out, he'll probably finally get his due Somewhere in the hereafter, I bet Mario Puzo is thrilled such a talent agreed to take on the "family" business!

Aside from an airport connection in Cincinnati, I have never set foot in Ohio so I can confidently state that one need not hail from Cleveland, or be a Drew Carey fan, to appreciate this ambitious novel. I couldn't wait to get back to it every night, and thought Winegardner's ambitious tale brought the city to life in my eyes.

The novel tells the story of Anne O'Connor and David Zielinsky, a mismatched couple from divurgent backgrounds who drift in and out of each other's lives over a long span of years. She is wealthy, daughter of a high-ranking politian, and a polished debuttante bored with the snobby rich boys she is expected to date. David, on the other hand, is politically ambitious, awkward, and the son of a colorful hard-drinking union man whose mother took off years earlier to Hollywood where she went chasing a movie career. The scenes in which David and Anne meet and get together at a vacation island in the lake, where David is visiting with his Aunt and Uncle, are wonderful and memorable.

The story of David and Anne is compelling, but not what I really remember and enjoyed most about this novel. Instead, I remember details of the Sam Shephard murder case (David's uncle is an investigator hired by the defense team, and David works on the case for awhile). I also remember lengthy cameos by Alan Freed and his first rock n roll shows; the effort by the Cleveland Indians to integrate baseball (their African American player, Larry Doby, entered the league just after Jackie Robinson, the Dodgers' celebrated player who broke the color barrier);cameos by newscaster Dorothy Fuldheim and black mayor Carl Stokes, etc. I loved the description of Art Modell buying the Cleveland Browns, pushing Paul Brown out to pasture, and essentially guaranteeing a title in a "win now or else" mode a la George Steinbrenner and the Yankees years later. David is a huge music and sports fan, gets his feet wet in politics, and since Anne becomes a newswoman all of these historical figures and events are woven effortlessly into the plot.

The only thing I disliked about the book, and it DID get annoying, was the frequest bizarre second person asides which the author inserted. In a chapter about a newscaster, for example, Winegardner would add footnotes indicating what the future holds in store for the character, as if the novelist were reading to the real-life Fuldheim and telling her what awards she would win, and when she would retire. I don't remember ever seeing anything like it in any other novels.

Otherwise, I thought there was little to quibble about, and a lot to enjoy, in this grand novel. Winegardner's generosity of spirit, his ability to manage a large canvas, and his sharp dialogue will serve him well as he writes a sequel to Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

I have lived in Cleveland for 10 years, and I truly enjoyed this book. Mark managed to actually put me back in time in 1948 when Rock and Roll was just getting started in America. His description of the World Series game that the Indians won that year was exciting, and I don't even like baseball. I loved the love story in the book, and I loved the way it ended.

This book is not just a book about Cleveland. It's a book about an era in American history. It's about life in the 50's; the birth of rock and roll; politics of the time; and love, not so different from what you and I experience today.

About the river: It's hard to believe that the river was so polluted back then when it's so clean now -- hard to imagine. We really have come a long way. Cleveland rocks!!!

I hope Mark's next novel will come out soon.

Come and see us in Cleveland!

I grew up in the fifties, about 80 miles outside Cleveland; I had relatives living there. this book, in addition to being an arresting work of fiction, is a wonderfully evocative "history"--subjective and quirky--of that time and place. winegardner writes with a marvelous style, which just (but only just) manages to skirt the edge of slick and over-written. This style works well for the narrative, perhaps a little less well for the dialogue, which at times is too clever by half. But the package as a whole is intelligently conceived, shaped to hold our attention, and a very satisfying read. It's also one of the few contemorary novels whose ending is not too little, not too much, but just right. The author will have a real challenge making his next book measure up to this one. It deserves to stand just behind the best of DeLillo, Doctorow, Russo and Tom Wolfe; it's reminiscent of all of them.

A thoroughly enjoyable modern epic! Fast-paced and evocative narrative woven around two very likeable main characters. The text has a wonderfully theatrical quality to it as well.

Mark Winegardner's epic novel takes Cleveland as not only its setting, but also as an integral character, in Crooked River Burning. Taking place over more than twenty years in the city's history, the characters weave in and out of touch with factual events and legendary figures (Allen Freed, Carl Stokes) in a way that's both self-conscious and proud. In the midst of Cleveland's terrible problems with pollution, race riots, and corruption there is always a sense that the author loves this city right along with its mistakes.

The two main characters, Anne and David, come from opposite sides of the city (which, in this case, might as well be opposite sides of the world). David is poor and dreams of a day when he will be mayor of his city and Anne is rich and trying to be a society girl without giving up her career-mindedness. Without giving anything away, it's really refreshing to see how these two keep going in and out of each other's lives without the novel spiralling into hopeless romantic mush. After all, this book isn't about them, not really. It's about Cleveland.

Enjoyable and surprisingly informative, I breezed through Crooked River Burning without much to complain about. Winegardner lets his literary tongue wag a little too much as the book goes on, perhaps, and it's not without pretense. The footnotes he uses get in the way and seem lazy...not to mention the most unreadable typeface I've ever seen (in the hardcover edition). However, tackling a subject like this and keeping it enjoyable is quite a task to begin with, and it's pulled off with much style.

Historical fiction at its best...Winegardner's ability to deliver historical fact in the context of a compelling love story, while at the same time exploring the midwest attitudes about race, gender, social class, family, politics and sport in the middle of the last century, seems impossible. But he does so with grace, wit, charm, and amazing depth. Winegardner's tip-of-the-hat to such giants as DiLillo are classy and smart. There's something in this book for everyone.

Before there was Drew Carey, the Baltimore Ravens or the "Major League" franchise, there was a big, boisterous, proud city that was neither Northeast nor Midwest. This book ends where my recollection of Cleveland begins -- the fire on the Cuyahoga River -- and in my mind for years, it was all downhill from there. I saw Cleveland as the largest of this country's many burned-out, boarded-up, hunkered-down mill towns, covered with road salt and coke ash, an industrial mistake glaring my state in the face and daring us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.

Mr. Weingardner showed me the vibrance, the beauty, the exuberance of a Cleveland in her prime through the lives of his two ironically fashioned and perfectly representative main characters. He chronicles Cleveland's transition from a city where anything seemed possible to a city where nothing much seemed probable anymore, with pit stops on the way for delicious and delectable memories of people and places which were gone before I was even born. This book made me feel as though Cleveland's story -- and David and Anne's story -- was also mine, and everyone else's. It shys away from the homefront forties, the Leave it to Beaver fifties, and the Woodstock and Berkeley sixties to show us how middle America actually lived for twenty-five years, from upper-middle class to lower-middle class and points between and beyond. This book is for all of us because it immortalizes a time an place far-too-often overlooked and ridiculed.