A Battered but Still Hopeful Cleveland, Where the Promise of Idealism Endures

Superman was invented in Cleveland.

The world’s first rock concert was staged in the Cleveland Arena, a hockey venue, by deejay Alan Freed in 1951. After race riots in 1966, Carl Stokes became “the first African American to be elected mayor in a major city where white people were the majority. And also the last.”

These are just a few of the things we learn in Mark Winegardner’s sprawling, high-spirited novel about the Ohio metropolis that was America’s sixth-largest city in 1948, when the book begins, and had fallen to 12th largest by 1969, when it ends.

In those two decades, Winegardner (“The Veracruz Blues”) juxtaposes a fictional love story--that of Anne O’Connor, rich daughter of a Democratic Party boss, and David Zielinsky, middle-class son of a small-time labor racketeer--with Cleveland’s social and political history.

Like E.L. Doctorow (“Ragtime”), Winegardner mixes his imaginary characters with real ones: Eliot Ness, Bill Veeck, JFK, Satchel Paige, Jimmy Hoffa, murder suspect Dr. Sam Sheppard, pioneer TV anchor Dorothy Fuldheim, newspaper mogul Louie Seltzer and--boo, hiss!--Browns owner Art Modell.

In 1948, the Indians won their last World Series. In 1964, the Browns won their last NFL championship. The steel mills began to rust. White flight from the city center became a stampede. Oil slicks on the Cuyahoga--the “crooked river” of the title--caught fire several times. Lake Erie became so polluted that almost nothing could live in it except sludge worms. As Anne sees it, Cleveland changed from being like “her father: big, broad, productive, lightly cultured, hard-drinking, jovial and respected” to being “the subject of four-part articles in newspapers all over the world about America’s Urban Quandary.”

Why this happened remains something of a mystery. Anne, forever trying to succeed in a field where her wealth, beauty and connections don’t guarantee success, becomes a TV reporter. David, trying to live down his father’s bad name, becomes a reformist city councilman. They have ringside seats at political and media brawls, but their insider knowledge proves irrelevant. The real causes of Cleveland’s decline (and that of other U.S. cities at the time) were both too big and too subtle to be grasped.

Of course, the same corrosive forces make Anne and David’s romance possible. They meet as teenagers because of a mutual enthusiasm for what was just then morphing from “race music” (for the lower classes only) into rock ‘n’ roll (for everyone). They break up; David marries a suitable girl from his neighborhood. Later he and Anne have an affair, then separate again. In the end, change has dissolved so many social barriers that the two are no longer mutually exotic and can love each other as equals.

By then, like their city, they are battered and compromised but still hopeful. Winegardner’s warts-and-all defense of Cleveland is a metaphor for their idealism in the teeth of disillusionment, and vice versa. Mysteries in their own lives--did David’s father kill his mother? Did Anne’s father die in the arms of a mistress?--are as painful and insoluble as the city’s. But mysteries, David tells Anne, are to be endured, not necessarily solved.

“Crooked River Burning” brings Cleveland’s past to life on both an intimate and a sweeping scale. Winegardner describes weddings, funerals, dances, rallies, ball games, graduations, parties, elections, moments of domestic warmth and public violence with equal facility. But his main achievement is a narrative voice--not Doctorow’s, not Tom Wolfe’s (though Wolfe would surely applaud the documentary heft of this novel), but one that’s distinctly his own.

It’s a fast voice, a funny one, almost a stand-up comic’s patter, loaded with sarcastic interjections, parenthetical asides, even footnotes, so that Winegardner can be inside his tale, in Anne’s or David’s mind, in the ‘50s or ‘60s, yet speak directly to us at the turn of the millennium. It’s a voice that begins, “Here’s the deal,” and follows through so well on its promise of leveling with us that the 576 pages that ensue don’t seem too many at all.