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The Washington Story

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The kids who filled the pages of Langer's debut, Crossing California (2004), with their passions, idiocies and dreams are leaving high school and stepping into the world. This second installment of their story is set during the Reagan years (1982-87). While the Iran hostage crisis served as a touchstone in Crossing California, here it's the election of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington. The style is still obsessively catalog-like, page after page laying out the Chicago terrain in exhaustive detail. You could practically draw a map of the city after reading this book, not to mention know what movies were showing at the time and what music was on the radio (on what stations, even). As in Crossing California, Langer appends a glossary of terms relevant to the time period. ("Genug," by the way, is Yiddish for "enough," and "Garfield," if you don't already know, is a "cartoon cat created by Jim Davis; ubiquitous in college dorm rooms circa 1984.") Characters, of course, are what matter here most. The battling Wasserstrom sisters, Michelle and Jill, have left Chicago for NYU and Vassar, to work toward careers in acting and politics, respectively, and the quiet genius Muley Willis (the true hero of both books) attends art school in Chicago, where he develops self-destructing art installations. Meanwhile, angry rich kid Wes Sullivan vies with Muley for Jill's affections, and a pair of mismatched impresarios try to kick-start the local film industry, with a disastrous gangster flick, Godfathers of Soul. Although the novel's scope has widened to include Florida, the East Coast and even Germany, the wind-swept streets of Chicago remain at its center. One hopes that a third installment, taking us into the '90s, is not too far off. Another richly detailed and overstuffed novel, both joyful and heartbreaking.

Authors who attempt sequels to successful novels risk a series of problems. Quirky or engaging characters lose their edge; intriguing conflicts become banal; what was unique appears repetitive. Happily, Adam Langer's "The Washington Story" avoids these pitfalls and emerges as a thoroughly enjoyable continuation of "Crossing California." The characters have matured (alas, the humor has evolved from prepubescent to collegiate); their conflicts mature them and the author's amazing attention to detail and nuance endures. Throughout the pages of this novel, Langer's love not only for his characters, but the human condition, invests his sequel novel with a dignity and authority cloaked adroitly in humor and satire.

Langer paints "The Washington Story" on a canvas much larger than West Rogers Park, the setting for his debut novel. Two of his adolescent characters are college-bound, and Langer follows them to New York City and Poughkeepsie, yet Chicago remains the northern star in their internal compass. Those who remain in Chicago encounter a city in transition and turmoil, its racial and class tensions bubbling in a cauldron of political change (Harold Washington's election as the first African-American mayor symbolizes the whirlwinds of a new era). Each character has his or her distinct personality; their interplay crackles with energy.

One of the consistent metaphors of the novel is space, which comes to symbolize expansion of personal universes, The mid-1980s were the years of the Challenger space shuttle and the return of Halley's Comet. Sensitive, reclusive and contemplative, Muley Wills determines to convert his dissatisfaction with traditional film into a provocative but evanescent medium. The Wasserstrom sisters, Michelle and Jill, expand their orbits by attending college in New York. The acerbic and frenetic Michelle grabs life by the throat and squeezes unrelentingly. Lacking self-confidence and perpetually second-guessing herself, Jill retains her sense of social conscience while struggling to discover a way to influence the world. Both grapple with the disorienting, befuddling and thrilling possibilities of love.

Adult characters, who had a larger role in "Crossing California," chafe against their limited domains. Frustrated filmmaker Mel Coleman throws himself into a film project and watches with angry disillusion as it is bastardized into a background music video; falling in love with two women doesn't lessen his ever-present insecurities. Carl "Slappit" Silverman, biological father of Muley, faces a mid-life crisis, indicts his spiritual bankruptcy and initiates a quest to alleviate his existential angst. Hapless Charlie Wasserstrom stuns his family and emerges as a literary star.

Even minor characters retain their piquancy. Diedre Wills emerges one of the few well-integrated personalities of the novel; she somehow manages to parent, teach and write, all with an understated seriousness and ethereal calm. Larry Rovner marries, divorces and reinvents himself as a rock star whose rap-like "music" catapults him, unbidden, to national fame. Hyperactive and hypochondriacally challenged Hillel Levy, sadly relinquishes his ubiquitous phallic "mushroom people" drawings and sets out to discern the true meaning of art.

Devotees of Langer's obsession with detail, nuance and language will not be disappointed. Bathroom humor has a collegiate flavor, yet its simplistic, sophomoric quality remains. The author's microscopic attention to detail could serve as a burdensome drag to the narrative, but Langer's focus strengthens rather than weakens. And does he ever love the wonderful beauty of language. "The Washington Story" continues the inclusion of Yiddish in our national letters, and the author's introduction of Kenny Melnick provides Langer a chance to delight his audience with a New Yorker's vernacular.

Adam Langer would be embarrassed if critics were to read too much into his novel, yet "The Washington Story" compels readers to ponder several serious themes. His characters yearn for connection, community and coherence but often encounter chaos, confusion and conflict. Each searches for meaning and purpose, only to be confounded by murky and unpredictable circumstances. Langer trusts that we will discern our own truths in this wonderful stew of politics, art and personal maturation.

When I reviewed "Crossing California" for Amazon, I wrote that, to me, at the end of a great novel, I wanted to call up the author and beg him or her to write more about the same characters. Well, I never actually did call Langer, but he did what I wanted him to do.
He wrote a sequel to "Crossing", and, so far, "The Washington Story" is as great a read as "Crossing".

So, thanks Adam, for continuing the story. Can we dare hope for a trilogy?

Adam Langer read at the West Side YMCA Writer's Voice (along with the actress Anne Jackson) on September 8, 2005. The is from my introduction to the event:

In "The Washington Story," Adam Langer has given us a world full of characters to cheer for: Cheer for them to attain their desires and dreams, and to avoid pain and sorrow. Simultaneously, he also presents them as hugely capable of frustrating us with actions that at first seem out of character, designed to drive them away from what we think should be their destiny, but slowly over the course of this novel, these situations turn out to reveal depths--in both senses--that are only hinted at early on.

Adam Langer has us fully experience the development of the main characters in the story--Jill, Michelle, Muley, Mel--and witness both the gradual and dramatic and sudden turns their lives take. At the same time, there are myriad characters who when they first appear, you think that they can't be that important to the story--perhaps they are comic relief, or a red herring, but one of the gifts that Adam Langer possesses is to take a seemingly ancillary character, and have them grow on the page into something essential to the telling of the truest story.

Through a deftly controlled, multi-layered series of interactions and divergences, we wind up caring--deeply--for what happens to these people--joyful at their successes, sorrowful at their setbacks, and wanting very much, as happens with all great works of fiction--to know what happens to them next. Adam Langer beautifully mixes humor, high and low, a natural ability to weave real history into his fictional world without overemphasizing it, and a knack for getting at the heart and essence of his characters with apparent ease, to create a world worth visiting and revisiting.

First of all, I loved Crossing California. I thought it was a beautifully written and insightful slice of an era. That being said, this book is really pointless. The characters are no longer new and fresh and the whole novel feels forced. Why did the author not leave well enough alone? If he had something new to say, this could be excused. But the book seems to have no reason to exist except to make money.

What a disappointment. Crossing California was a wonderful book, full of interesting characters rooted in a specific time and neighborhood of Chicago. Washington Story reads as if Langer's publisher asked for another book just like the first, demanded it within a 6 month time period, and then didn't take the time to have it edited. This book should have been reduced by several 100 pages, whole story lines cut out. It rambles and makes pointless references to historical events and places in Chicago. The central story is forced and unsatisfying. This may be an overly harsh review, but I expected so much more after Crossing California!