Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday June 23, 2010
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THE WAGON And Other Stories from the City
Martin Preib
Univ. of Chicago
ISBN 978 0 226 67980 8
167 pages
$20
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
The wagon of Martin Preib's title will be familiar to any city dweller: an enclosed truck, slightly bigger than a van, with "Police" on its sides and rear. The wagon in Chicago, where Preib has been a cop for several years, is painted white, with a blue stripe and the slogan "Preserve and Protect" on both doors of the cab. It's often used to transport newly arrested suspects to the police station for questioning or lockup. It's also used to carry dead bodies to the morgue. The first three essays in Preib's fine book - the title essay, "Body Bags," and one called "Studio Apartments" - are about this singularly uncongenial task and the occasional surprises it yields.
Preib was two decades out of college -- he never finished, in large part because he was more interesting in reading what he wanted to than what his professors assigned -- when he quit his job as a hotel doorman and joined the police force. He wanted to write about Chicago:
"I never aspired to haul the dead from their death places. I only wanted to be a writer, a Chicago writer, but now I am picking up dead bodies on the North Side of Chicago. The irony is a terrible weight. I look back at how I have struggled in this city, working every menial service job the city offers by the thousands: waiter, doorman; the thousands of bags I have carried, the train rides downtown looking for work with only five dollars in my pocket, applying for jobs so I can pay rent while I finish a story that won't get published and hear the personnel manager ask, 'Where do you see yourself in five years?' I remember long days in studio apartments wondering what I was doing wrong. Here in the city where my parents were born and raised and my family began, I see them seeing me, my father's disgust at my announcement that I wanted to become a writer, that I wanted to become a police officer as a means of seeing the city as it is, as a means of giving me the time and money to write on my own. I look at myself in a basement opening a body bag, and perceive the disconnection of my life from my most intense passions, and I can feel a weight descend upon me and spill over me."
As that searching passage suggests, 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, "the place for muddled worldviews, unclear ambitions, blunted desires, and other people who just never got it, or thought they had it but didn't: the divorced, alcoholics, the new age philosophers, dopers, the indolent, the criminal." That's a stern view of the life in which Preib spent two decades -- longer, if one considers the police force as part of the "service industry" -- but it is tempered by a deep sympathy for the ways in which these invisible, or at best semi-visible, people are exploited and tossed aside by the system for which they labor. Preib is no sentimentalist -- far from it -- but he believes that "the distracted life of the service worker (is) the most authentic in the city."
When he joined the police force, Preib "imagined the most glorious aspects of the job." As he says, "Everyone does. You are filled with this imagery in the (police) academy: catching murderers and gangbangers, working together with other units in stings, becoming a detective, getting promotions. Hauling dead bodies was rarely mentioned." Yet that's just what he found himself doing, entering "the world of the dead" as an inescapable part of the job. That it often caused revulsion is hardly surprising, given that most of those whose bodies he was called upon to remove were residents of "the unadorned city," the Chicago that's rarely glimpsed from the beaches of Lake Michigan or the condominiums and luxury stores of Lake Shore Drive.
As Preib hauled these unfortunates to the morgue, his emotions ranged from revulsion to pity with various points in between, but in one especially moving passage he describes something of an epiphany, the case of a "woman, in her forties, somewhat heavy with dark hair, (who) died in the bathtub, rolling into it in the spasms of a cardiac arrest." The scene as Preib describes it is terrible -- far too much so to be quoted further in this newspaper -- but as the cops wait around to make their reports they find heartbreaking evidence of "a family torn apart, her children and siblings no longer in contact with her," and on the walls they find "quotes from the New Testament, reminders of the power of God and prayer, of ultimate forgiveness and peace." Preib writes:
"We feel as if this apartment has been transformed into an altar as the fading autumn sun illuminates it. The filth and degradation of her body in the bathroom appears (sic) heroic from her struggle to rise up. A gentleness, a humanity, and a sincerity linger in the apartment in the quotes of the New Testament on the wall, statements about endurance, faith, and love, the kind of conviction that exudes and sustains a deep humanity. There is none of the judgment, spitefulness, or condemnation of the Old Testament, nothing in the apartment that is left to condemn the estranged family, no bitterness at a life ended too early, no rage at the cruelty of the employer or the coldness of the disability insurers, or the failures of the medical people to save her. In the things present and the things absent, the elements of a living religion linger about the body: endurance, faith, forgiveness, purity of heart."
That's a remarkable passage, but there are many others of comparable power in the pages of "The Wagon." Mostly Preib is meditative, but he also can be funny and/or angry. One especially vivid passage occurs when he and his partner see "three yuppies on the sidewalk" harassing "the African driver" of the taxi that has brought them from Lincoln Square to Clark Street. The yuppies -- two young women and a young man, all transparently drunk -- are refusing to pay the fare because they claim, inaccurately, that the driver cheated them. The women are nasty and abusive. One of them says to Preib, "I'm not paying anything. ... I've got more education in my finger than you'll ever have." Preib finally gets the young man to listen to reason, they pay the cab driver and the confrontation ends, but Preib allows himself a most gratifying fantasy in which he arrests the three, handcuffs them, takes them to the processing room and sends them to the dreaded county jail. Too bad he didn't.
Apart from writing about police work -- taking the reader into a world few of us are likely to know -- Preib also writes about the literature he loves and the writing he's been working away at for years. He's a devotee of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville: "What calls me to them is their strong conviction, a faith in their writing, a religious sense." For himself, "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 can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE UPPER HOUSE: A Journey Behind the Closed Doors of the U.S. Senate
Terence Samuel
Palgrave
ISBN 978 0 230 62361 3
255 pages
$26
Reviewed by Bob Kerrey
One of the great challenges of serving in the U.S. Senate is balancing the demands of the Capitol with those of your constituents. In 1994, during my campaign for re-election, my oldest son underscored this point when he warned me, "Dad, if you say 'with all due respect' one more time, I'm going to vote against you!" His point was that while certain language can help you succeed in Washington it can also make you a failure at home.
Terence Samuel's "The Upper House" explores the inner workings of the U.S. Senate through the lives of several current senators, including Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, Tennessee Republican Bob Corker and Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar. He describes the near impossibility senators face in fulfilling all the promises made during a campaign and explains why voters get frustrated when an election does not produce the immediate change for which they worked, voted and hoped.
Samuel, who formerly covered Congress for U.S. News and World Report, approaches his topic by way of the midterm election of 2006 and the presidential election of 2008. Both were decisive Democratic victories. In 2006 Democrats won control of the House and the Senate, as well as a majority of governorships and state legislatures. Post election-excitement and expectations were quite high. Nancy Pelosi had become the first woman speaker of the House. No incumbent Democrat had lost a seat in the House or Senate. In 2008 the Democratic caucus in the Senate increased from 51 members to 60 by the time Al Franken was finally declared the winner in Minnesota.
Many opponents of the policies of President Bush expected the new Congress to effect dramatic changes. In particular, they hoped it would bring the war in Iraq to a relatively quick end. To explain why that did not happen, Samuel follows the course of two Iraq-related amendments to their eventual defeat -- one that set withdrawal time tables and another that imposed deployment restrictions. The process of deliberation highlighted the difficulty of overcoming the combined barriers of Senate rules and partisan opposition. As the book develops, however, the author's strong opposition to the war in Iraq becomes much too obvious. It gets in the way of the story he really wants to tell, which is about how the Senate works. At times the book reads like a long opinion piece, distracting us from what is otherwise a well-told account of the day-to-day work of the Senate.
Samuel lets his personal politics overwhelm his story in other areas, too. For example, of the Senate as it stood in 2007, he writes: "It was easy to understand the skepticism about Democratic motives. After all, too many of them voted for the war, and for the Bush tax cuts, and for No Child Left Behind, and for the flawed prescription drug benefit in Medicare -- all of which struck the Democratic base as hideously expedient capitulations, the typical Democratic cave-ins. It was lucky that the next thing the president wanted to tackle was Social Security, or we might never have seen Democrats walking upright again."
This leads him to make what I consider his most wrong-headed assessment, in speaking of Democratic senators who are more conservative than he is. "This notion of having to play on Republican, or at least conservative, terms has been a hallmark of Democratic politics for much of the last thirty years, and it explains the difficulty they often have winning elections." This reflects the cynical view that moderate to conservative Democrats are really liberals who are afraid to let their constituents find that out. Republican moderates are subjected to similar attacks from the opposite end of the political spectrum.
This belief that moderation must be some kind of copout is what is driving Democratic voters to the left and Republican voters to the right. But the fact is that a growing number of voters are in the middle -- moderate to liberal on social issues, conservative on the economy, strong on national defense and worried about the environment -- and our political polarization leaves them feeling that neither party represents them. The rush for the extreme ends of the spectrum also leaves a list of stubborn problems, caused by demographics or patterns of consumption and impossible to solve because the ideological pressure on Congress from both sides is too unforgiving. Compromise has become a dirty word. Suspicion has replaced trust, as can be seen in the author's attitude towards Republicans with whom he so clearly disagrees: "Republicans during the Bush era had been only serving their ideology and their own narrow self-interest."
Despite my reservations about the book, I think "The Upper House" will help Americans understand how the Senate works -- and why it often doesn't. The book's portraits of senators at work should spread the word that they are just people like all the rest of us. And the book's greatest value just might be in giving guidance to those who aspire to serve in what is still the world's greatest deliberative body.
Bob Kerrey is president of the New School in New York City and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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