The idealism of youth as persistent beacon

For a sturdily Midwestern, realistic writer, Adam Langer has a penchant for off-center titles. The title of his first novel, “Crossing California,” doesn’t refer to the Golden State but to a street that divides the richer from the poorer side of West Rogers Park, a mostly Jewish suburb of Chicago.

The sequel, “The Washington Story,” isn’t about our nation’s capital but about the continuing lives of younger members of the Wasserstrom, Wills and Rovner families from 1982 to 1987, shadowing the period when Harold Washington was Chicago’s first African American mayor. Now an almost forgotten interlude between the reigns of the Richard Daleys, father and son, Washington’s triumph over the city’s Democratic machine once aroused extravagant fears and hopes.

And even this reference proves to be misleading, just as the hopes and fears were. Harold Washington has only a cameo role in “The Washington Story.” He is part of a swarm of historical and pop-cultural references -- a Langer trademark -- that surrounds student journalist Jill Wasserstrom; her older sister, Michelle; Jill’s boyfriend, artist-inventor Muley Wills; would-be rock star Larry Rovner; and the other major characters like a flickering cloud of gnats. The swarm -- which includes Yiddish slang, the names of hot bands and DJs of the time, Halley’s comet and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger -- is dense but evanescent. Nothing in it is life-shattering, as the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement were for the previous generation. It’s simply what was going on when these youths happened to come of age -- the raw material of nostalgia.

Langer tells their story in five interlocking novellas, the “Spheres” of his subtitle.

Like most classic coming-of-age stories, “The Washington Story” moves out and back -- out to Cape Canaveral, New York and Germany, then back to a West Rogers Park that has changed profoundly in only a few years. Langer’s characters, who as teenagers expect the political and sexual liberalization of the 1960s to continue forever, are blindsided by what the ‘80s actually bring: Reaganomics, AIDS and a surge in conservative religion.

In the beginning, Jill and Muley wonder if their chaste but loving relationship will last after they leave high school. Earnest, politically minded Jill falls for the editor of her school newspaper, Wes Sullivan, a rich boy whose rebellion takes the form of journalistic fraud. Meanwhile, Muley, the calm center of the book, sleeps with another girl and creates artworks that celebrate evanescence by destroying themselves.

Later, randy Michelle considers having an affair with Mel Coleman, the boyfriend of Muley’s mother, Deirdre. Mel casts Michelle, an aspiring actress, in a movie, “Godfathers of Soul,” that he hopes will revive Chicago’s film industry. The movie is financed by Muley’s white father, Carl “Slappit” Silverman, who left Muley’s black mother to become a music mogul in Hollywood. Carl, who still feels like a soul brother at heart, wants to get back with Deirdre and, paradoxically, believes that subsidizing his rival is the way to do it.

The roads to artistic success are potholed, but Langer’s characters, a gifted lot, do better than most. Mel’s movie bombs, but he recycles the footage for music videos. Larry, who, like Michelle, is in his early 20s, was once so hungry for fame that he named his first band Rovner! Now he must divorce his wife, lose her wealthy family’s backing and perform incognito before he can find his true groove. Student cartoonist Hillel Levy seems bent on destroying himself with prostitutes and drugs, but his malaise, unlike Wes’, is curable. One of Langer’s achievements is to distinguish between types of youthful self-absorption. Michelle is selfish but likable, Hillel selfish but pitiable. Wes harms others as well as himself; even his attempts at redemption, Jill thinks, are suspiciously theatrical.

Yet Wes, like the others, is a rounded and convincing character. If the swarm of period detail is one thing at which Langer excels, a second, equally misleading and playful, is his way of rendering dialogue mostly in paraphrase, with only brief snatches of direct quotation, as if a newspaper reporter were transcribing conversations from hastily jotted notes.

The effect is ironic, often humorous. It distances us from his people just enough so that Langer can get away with portraying them in all their sweet, messy adolescent idealism. (Even Mel and Carl have never grown up.) “The Washington Story” presents itself as a document preserving the memory of a specific time and place, but it’s really an acute and sympathetic account of what it’s like to be young -- anytime, anywhere.

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Michael Harris, author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon,” is a regular contributor to Book Review.