In this reflective essay collection, writer and police officer Prieb recounts, at the age of 40, a life of honest work and literary aspiration in Chicago. The title refers to the police wagon that hauls bodies to the city morgue, a shift he worked as part of his rookie indoctrination, leading naturally to contemplation of death and life in the city. Verging on the self-conscious, Prieb nonetheless renders a variety of very personal city stories with gritty, hands-on honesty and poetic insight; Prieb explains to his partner how writers like Whitman and Melville used "their dark labor"-serving in field hospitals and on whaling ships-as a "means of seeing clearly," forcing them "to acknowledge things as they were." Ultimately, he argues, it's "better to be annihilated by something compelling than to be self-satisfied." Prieb's interaction with gang members is fascinating, and he showcases the softer side of a veteran cop in a lovely nursing home vignette. Appealing and strange, this is a fine meditation on life in and of the big city.
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“Martin Preib worked as a bartender, a hotel doorman, a lowest-level cop (carrying out the dead). He filled his dresser drawers and his pockets and the patrol cars he drove with his scribblings, looking for his own form, his own voice. He believed he failed and he punished himself, but he kept on and the writing grew weightier, like the dead when they grow holy and sink into the earth. His language and thought escalated, he found a voice, and those fragments of street talk and cop-think took shape as comic or ugly but true stories of what Chicago does to its people. Now this indestructible writer has fused his stories into a remarkable first book—an essay that is a memoir, and also something else that is very like a prayer.”—William Kennedy, author of Ironweed
(William Kennedy 20100307)
“Chicago cop Martin Preib is Exhibit A for the dictum that nobody can write about a cop’s life the way a cop can. And very few can write any kind of nonfiction with the startling directness and poetry that Preib brings to this memoir-in-progress. Preib has been with the Chicago Police Department, working in the 24th District, the most diverse community in the city, for five years. He works the wagon, a job that the police union will soon make extinct. A wagon man retrieves and transports the dead to the morgue; it’s considered both the lowliest and the most challenging job on the police force. Preib lifts this task to the level of moral philosophy: he shows us around various death scenes, pointing out how the accumulation of collection letters or platoons of pill bottles are part of the “narrative of death.” He talks about how an experienced wagon man can feel or see the dead weight in people still alive but sliding, and he wonders what started the slide. He infuses poetry, in an entirely natural way, into his work with the dead. The dead are personified; he speaks of them as if they have will and intent (especially intent to end up in bathtubs, on floors, or in basements, all low places). He sees the dead as a Greek chorus, speaking to the living and forcing us to size up the themes in our own lives (as he does himself throughout the book). Preib may wheel his wagon to some very low places, but in doing so, he opens up the world.”—Booklist (starred review)
(
Booklist 20100422)
“[
The Wagon is] about the real Chicago, the city of tribes, the city many of you know, not that fictional metropolis sometimes offered in magazines and TV shows. . . . So there are no blondes in red dresses. No detectives with cleft chins. It hooked me right there. And if there''s a hero, the hero is an intelligent man trying to figure things out.”—John Kass,
Chicago Tribune
(John Kass
Chicago Tribune 20100423)
"The book is anchored by ‘The Wagon,’ the piece honored by the Virginia Quarterly Review as one of the best essays published on its pages in 2005. In it, Preib details his work on the vehicle the CPD uses to pick up dead bodies. It seems incongruous to describe such a gut-wrenching story as gorgeous, but gorgeous it is; Preib''s musings on the recently, often ignominiously departed are particularly affecting, with flashes of morbid humor for relief. Other trenchant essays touch on the trials of police work, his years as a doorman and a union organizer, his hitchhiking escapades as a young man, and his observations of Chicago. One thing''s for sure: Preib isn''t a cop moonlighting as a writer. He''s a writer who happens to work as a cop."—Jerome Ludwig, Chicago Reader
(Jerome Ludwig
Chicago Reader 20100511)
"The darkness pervading the title essay of Martin Preib’s new collection of stories, The Wagon and Other Tales From the City, is rooted in an exploration of death and loneliness seen through the eyes of a writer who is also a Chicago police officer assigned to haul dead bodies to the morgue. The essay . . . lends a lyrical voice to the grimmest angles of Chicago, the harsher world that police officers see every day."—Chicago Tribune
(
Chicago Tribune 20100607)
“Police thrillers are so widely read and police dramas so commonplace on television that many people think they have a good understanding of what a cop’s world is like. But in truth that world is seldom revealed with anything approaching verisimilitude. We get it with The Wagon.”—Daniel Horan, Wall Street Journal
(Daniel Horan
Wall Street Journal 20100613)
"Martin Preib, now a 46-year-old, eight-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, does not invoke force of law for compliance, rather a powerful force of language developed over a lifetime of studying classical literature and Greek — but few writing classes."—Jeff Johnson, Chicago Sun-Times
(Jeff Johnson
Chicago Sun-Times 20100708)
"Preib’s is a voice that has almost never been heard in American writing: not merely the voice of an ordinary policeman, which is rare enough, but the voice of someone whose working life has been spent in the service industry. . . . For [Preib], ‘there is a kind of faith that lingers in realism, a belief that knowing the city will lead somewhere beyond the city.’ He has justified and realized that faith in The Wagon, a quite remarkable book that is much larger than its slender dimensions."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
(Jonathan Yardley
Washington Post 20101217)
"Preib’s been around. He knows writing—and he knows the city’s darkest corners. . . . Preib is a promising writer, someone who we’ll undoubtedly hear from again, someone we need to hear from again. I for one will read whatever he writes next."—Alex Kotlowitz, Barnes & Noble Review
(Alex Kotlowitz
Barnes & Noble Review 20091008)
“The depiction of what it is really like to be a cop - in all its sadly hilarious glory - is what makes this book work so well.”—Sarah Weinman, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
(Sarah Weinman
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind )
“From its aptly noirish title on, Martin Preib’s The Wagon has rightness of authenticity about it. From the perspective of a cop he fashions a compelling view of the Chicago Algren once called ‘the dark city.’ There’s a unique quality to his essays which manage to be broodingly meditative even as their narrative drive keeps you turning pages.”—Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan
(Stuart Dybek )
