#45: Work Song

Work Song, by Ivan Doig (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010).

Summary:
"An award-winning and beloved novelist of the American West spins the further adventures of a favorite character, in one of his richest historical settings yet. "If America was a melting pot, Butte would be its boiling point," observes Morrie Morgan, the itinerant teacher, walking encyclopedia, and inveterate charmer last seen leaving a one-room schoolhouse in Marias Coulee, the stage he stole in Ivan Doig's 2006 The Whistling Season. A decade later, Morrie is back in Montana, as the beguiling narrator of Work Song. Lured like so many others by "the richest hill on earth," Morrie steps off the train in Butte, copper-mining capital of the world, in its jittery heyday of 1919. But while riches elude Morrie, once again a colorful cast of local characters-and their dramas-seek him out: a look-alike, sound-alike pair of retired Welsh miners; a streak-of-lightning waif so skinny that he is dubbed Russian Famine; a pair of mining company goons; a comely landlady propitiously named Grace; and an eccentric boss at the public library, his whispered nickname a source of inexplicable terror. When Morrie crosses paths with a lively former student, now engaged to a fiery young union leader, he is caught up in the mounting clash between the iron-fisted mining company, radical "outside agitators," and the beleaguered miners. And as tensions above ground and below reach the explosion point, Morrie finds a unique way to give a voice to those who truly need one. "The most tumultous, quirky, and fascinating city in the American West of the last century has finally found a storyteller equal to its stories. ... Ivan Doig brings to life the core of humanity, and a hell of cast, amidst the shadows and sorrows of Butte, Montana -- a city that could say it never slept well before New York made a similar claim."

My Take:
Interesting setting and plot, especially as I'm a sucker for anything having to do with labor issues -- but something about this one just left me wanting more. Maybe it's that I felt like I should have read The Whistling Season first to really "get" the characters of Morrie and Rabrab, which I haven't. As a standalone novel, it's good enough but nothing exceptional.

#44 - The Given Day

My latest read, The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane (HarperCollins, 2008), was awesome, but a darned tough one to review. That's not a bad thing -- just a reflection that this is a big, sweeping book with tons going on, and it's hard to capture all the essential points without wearing out my keyboard. This was the first book I'd read by this author, but I thought I knew what I was getting into. Janet Maslin's New York Times review describes the pre-Given Day Lehane as "an author of detective novels that make good movies and tell devastatingly bleak Boston stories" (referring to Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River). While The Given Day is both cinematic and bleak, it's also a lot more than that; it's a vivid story of family, identity, race, class, and social change. (Did I miss anything? Can you tell I really liked this book?)

The Given Day is set in Boston beginning in late 1918, as the Great War is winding down, and a virulent flu pandemic is ramping up. It tells the story of Danny Coughlin, the eldest son of an Irish-born police captain who, though a cop himself, has some doubts about the life and mileu his father inhabits:

"Thomas Coughlin alternated between a variety of demeanors and all coming and going with the speed of a spooked horse that it was easy to forget that they were all aspects of a man who was certain he was doing good. Thomas Coughlin was its servant. The good. Its salesman, its parade marshal, catcher of the dogs who nipped its ankles, pallbearer for its fallen friends, cajoler of its wavering allies.

"The question remained, as it had throughout Danny's life, as to what exactly the good was. It had something to do with loyalty and something to do with the primacy of a man's honor. It was tied up in duty, and it assumed a tacit understanding of all the things about it that need never be
spoken aloud. ... It was above all, as far as Danny understood it, committed to the idea that those who exemplified the good in public were allowed certain exemptions as to how they behaved in private."

Danny's independent streak, coupled with the sting of his recent breakup with long-time Coughlin family servant Nora Shea, have led him to move out of his family's comfortable home into a modest apartment in the Italian-dominated North End. In the novel's early chapters, two chance events occur that will irrevocably change Danny's life: a flu-carrying Army ship is quarantined in Boston harbor, and and unwed pregnant neighbor goes into labor while home alone. After Danny and his partner, Steve Coyle, are assigned to inspect and escort the infected ship, Steve contracts a case of the grippe, and miraculously survives ... only to find himself too weak to work, denied disability benefits, and thus penniless. Moved by his plight, Danny begins accompanying Steve to meetings of the embryonic police union, the Boston Social Club, and finds himself questioning the conventional wisdom about unions being radical and un-American. "Danny couldn't understand why most of the outlawed or targeted unions deserved their fate. Time and again what was renounced as treasonous rhetoric was merely a man standing before a crowd and demanding to be treated as a man."

At the same time, after saving his neighbor's life by taking her to a nearby clinic, Danny is befriended by her father, Federico, and embarks on a secret affair with Tessa herself. This ends abruptly when he learns that Federico and Tessa are not only married, but lead a particularly violent band of radical anarchists. Seizing their opportunity, Danny's father and godfather convince him to go undercover, and infiltrate Boston's underground leftist organizations. While Danny quickly notices that these organizations are far less dangerous than they're made out to be, and have far more in common with the Boston Social Club, these distinctions are lost on his superior officers, as evidenced by an outburst that may sound oddly familiar to 21st-century Americans:

"You say 'Bolsheviks' or 'Communists' like there are nuances here the rest of us are too thick to grasp. They're not different -- they're f-----g terrorists. Every last one. This country's heading for one hell of a showdown, Officer. We think that showdown will happen on May Day. That you won't be able to swing a cat without hitting some revolutionary with a bomb or a rifle. And if that occurs, this country will tear itself apart. Picture it -- the bodies of innocent Americans strewn all over our streets. Thousands of kids, mothers, workingmen. And for what? Because these
c---------s hate the life we have. Because it's better than theirs. Because we're better than them. We're richer, we're freer, we've got a lot of the best real estate in a world that's mostly desert or undrinkable ocean. But we don't hoard that, we share. Do they thank us for sharing? For welcoming them to our shores? No. They try to kill us.'"

As Danny's foundation begins to shift, a crack African-American baseball player named Luther Laurence independently sees his own life turn upside down. When his girlfriend Lila gets pregnant, the two flee Ohio for good jobs and prosperity in the oil boomtown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Lila's devout and appearance-conscious aunt hastily summons a preacher to set things right. The weight of sudden marriage and impending fatherhood sits heavily on Luther, though, and he gets caught up in the drinking, drugging, and gambling lifestyle of his friend Jessie Tell. When ruthless crime boss Deacon Broscious catches Jessie stealing from him, he blames Luther for not snitching, and sends the two men out with orders to collect from his debtors in grippe-afflicted households, Or Else. They comply, but at too high a price. When they return with their booty, a fight breaks out, and both Jessie and Deacon are killed. Luther escapes with his life, but bereft of Lila and their unborn baby, and ultimately makes his way to Boston.

And that's just setting the stage. Luther's and Danny's personal stories, along with those of several lesser actors (Danny's father, Captain Thomas Coughlin; brothers Connor and Joe; godfather Ed McKenna) and a smattering of famous guest stars (Babe Ruth, Eugene O'Neill, a young J. Edgar Hoover) play out against a backdrop of tumult and social upheaval. The Great War and Russian Revolution loom large in the public consciousness; a flu pandemic is sweeping the country; urban disaster takes a turn for the surreal when a molasses tank explodes , and then the police go on strike. "It was a crazy summer. no predicting it. Every time Babe thought he had a grip on it, it slipped free and went running off like a barnyard pig that smelled the ax." For a history buff, this is an interesting reminder that social unrest wasn't invented in the 1960s, and the Red Summer of 1919 predated the long hot summer by nearly half a century. And for a reader, it's intriguing to find a story set in an era that's not as popular with writers as some others, but is nonetheless chock-full of dramatic narrative potential. "It was like they were all walking through this crazy world, trying to keep pace but knowing they couldn't, they just couldn't. So a part of them waited for that world to come back up behind them on a second try and just roll right over them, send them -- finally -- on into the next one."

As you might expect of a book that's (partly) a book about a union and a strike, social class and the difficulty of defining one's place in a rapidly-changing world are recurring themes. Some of the tension arises when World War I veterans return from defending American ideals against the old Europe, only to find that those ideals don't really apply to them after all:

"In the war, they'd died by the millions. For nothing but real estate. And now, in the streets of the world, the same battle continued. Today, Boston. Tomorrow, someplace else. The poor fighting the poor. As they'd always done. As they were encouraged to. And it would never change. He finally realized that. It would never change. He looked up at the black sky, at the salted splay of dots. That's all they were. That, and nothing more. And if there was a God inveigled behind them, then He had lied. He'd promised the meek they would inherit the earth. They wouldn't. They'd only inherit the small piece they fertilized."

Closer to home, Danny reaches a similar conclusion about his father's crusade against the leftists. As he confesses to his priest after shooting Federico:

"I can't shake the feeling ... The feeling that we -- me and the guy I shot? -- we're just living in the same barrel? See? ... There's this big barrel of s--t. See? And it's -- ... --- where the ruling class and all the Haves don't live, right? It's where they f-----g throw every consequence they don't want to think about. And the idea -- ... -- the idea is, Father? The idea is that we're supposed to play nice and go away when they're done with us. Accept what they give us and drink it and eat it and clap for it and say, 'Mmmm, more, please. Thanks.' And Father, I gotta tell you, I've about had my f-----g fill.'"

Lehane also underscores another ugly truth about human nature: In times of turmoil, we often define who and where we are by defining and demonizing who we are not. Most often, as Luther is well aware, it's black Americans who find themselves the victims of such scapegoating:

"'Can't win against that type. If they say the sky's green and get their buddies to agree with them, say it a few more times until they believe it, how you going to fight that? ... Sky's green from then on. ... World ain't changing," Luther said. "Ain't ever going to, neither. They tell you the sky's green until you finally say, 'Okay, the sky's green.'? Then they own the sky, Danny, and everything underneath it."

This awareness, however, doesn't stop Luther from turning around and demonizing the leftists when for once, it's their group and not his that's being blamed for Boston's troubles. "For a few, strangely joyous hours, Luther didn't feel like a colored man, didn't even feel there was such a thing as color, only one thing above all others: He was an American." Nor, as Thomas Coughlin's reaction to the post-strike riots demonstrates, does the need for a scapegoat fade after you've climbed a good way up the ladder:

"His people, the faces nearest him as Irish as potatoes and drunken sentiment, all twisted into repulsive, barbaric masks of rage and self-pity. As if they'd a right to do this. As if this country owed them anything more than it had handed Thomas when he stepped off the boat, which is to say nothing but a fresh chance. ... [T]hey came here, one of the few cities in the world where their kind was given a fair shake. But did they act like Americans? Did they act with respect or gratitude? No. They acted like what they were -- the n----rs of Europe. How dare they? When this was over, it would take Thomas and good Irishmen like him another decade to undo all the damage this mob had done in two days. Damn you all, he thought as they continued to push them back. Damn you all for smearing our race yet again."

Ultimately, the story ends on a fitting note: neither happy, nor bleak, nor wholly ambiguous. In some respects, tremendous changes have happened, and lives will never again be the same. In others, they haven't changed half as much as we or Lehane's characters might have expected. As Thomas muses, beside Connor's hospital bed after the riots, "Maybe this, of all things, was the true price of family -- being unable to stop the pains of those you loved. Unable to suck it out of the blood, the heart, the head. You held them and named them and fed them and made your plans for them, never fully realizing that the world was always out there, waiting to apply its teeth." The world is indeed still waiting, fangs bared, for Danny and Luther ... and I'm still waiting (minus the fangs) for my next crack at a Lehane book. Definitely a keeper.

#26 - The Big Squeeze. Ouch.

So, #26 was The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, by Steven Greenhouse. A well-written, convincing book that packs a punch, but probably isn't the most uplifting thing to read if you're on the job market. In a nutshell, Greenhouse's thesis is that conditions for the American worker have declined across the board over the last 20 years or so, and workers at all but the very top of the career ladder are working more, earning less, and enjoying far less security. If you're at all interested in labor issues and inequality in contemporary America (yep, this means me), much of what he's written won't be terribly new or surprising ... but the way he puts the data together, extends the argument to include white-collar workers, and uses compelling case studies to illustrate his points without implying that these individual stories are wholly representative makes for a gripping, if somewhat unsettling and depressing, read.

The first few chapters draw heavily on the anecdotal: stories of maltreated workers which are, agreeably, pretty horrific, but fairly easy for the average (read: college-educated, white collar) reader to dismiss as non-representative and/or things that only happen to workers in the lowest-paid, lowest-skill jobs. There's a Wal-Mart security guard who gets fired after he's injured in pursuit of a thief; an exploited call center worker who, repeatedly forced to work without clocking in, ends up paid even less than her already-measly $7-an-hour wage; several Wal-Mart stockers and security personnel who are locked in stores overnight to prevent "shrinkage" (a/k/a employee theft), and threatened with losing their jobs if they open the door for anything less than a fire; and so on -- all scenarios familiar to readers of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and/or any of the myriad of anti-WalMart books and articles out there. You start to think this is stuff you've seen and heard before.

Where Greenhouse's book stands out, though, is when he discusses the way white-collar workers are getting squeezed as well, and puts the pieces together to convince the reader that yes, we really are in the same boat. Many books on contemporary labor and workplace issues miss this mark (or perhaps never aim for it in the first place); either they go the Nickel and Dimed route, and paint a grim picture of how bad things are for the lowest-paid workers, or they make the mistake that The Sexual Paradox and many other work/life books do, and wring their hands about how stressed and overworked people (usually women) with higher levels of education and more occupational choices are. Greenhouse addresses both groups, and does so equally capably. For example, he argues that globalization hurts workers at all levels: employees in a Carolina slaughterhouse, where a large population of immigrants (mostly Mexican and Central/ South American, many of them undocumented) allow the employer to pay obscenely low wages for what really is a grueling, disgusting job; virtually the whole town of Galesburg, Illinois, where the closure of a Maytag factory that's relocated to Mexico has ripple effects throughout the entire community; and software engineers in Seattle, who are surprised to find themselves un- or underemployed as increasing number of high-tech jobs are exported to highly educated, low-paid workforces in India. He draws similar parallels between the experiences of vastly different workers when it comes to our increased workweeks -- whether that's the hotel housekeeper who's forced to come in early and off the clock just to get a day's work done, or the middle manager who's expected to work 12-hour days and still be available 24/7 by Blackberry. I was also impressed by Greenhouse's delicate navigation of the immigration issue; he calmly breaks it down into several sub-issues, tries to present all sides of controversial arguments, and is firm about laying the blame squarely on the employers who exploit undocumented workers, rather than the workers themselves. Similarly, the chapters on the difficulties specific to younger and older workers makes it very clear that this isn't an "us vs. them" issue -- unless it's one of CEOs vs. the rest of us.

Interspersed with the gloom and doom are several examples of companies which buck the trend. Of these, Greenhouse goes into the most detail about Costco, offering an extensive comparison of their far-more-generous wages and benefits compared to Wal-Mart's, and suggesting that they're able to afford this largely through what they save in employee turnover costs (though I think a bit more attention should have been paid to their comparatively modest executive compensation packages). I would have liked to see a bit more detail about some of the other "good" companies; the book touches only briefly on Timberland and Patagonia, and it would have been nice to see a bit more detail about how other companies in other industries manage to do right by their employees and still remain competitive.

No pithy summary or advice here, but it's an interesting, maddening, and sad book. Read it, but keep something soft nearby to throw when you feel the need.

#22 and Deja Vu

OK, it's been a while since this happened. I got about a third of the way through my 22nd book of the year, The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap, by Susan Pinker, and realized, "Wait, haven't I read this before?" Yep; I had. Admittedly, I churn through books on this subject (gender roles and gender differences, especially in the workplace) about as quickly as I find them, but still ... it was kind of funny.

All right, then -- tangent aside, this book put forth some interesting ideas about the extent to which biological differences between men and women may explain some of the persistent difference in their career choices, but it also overreaches as to the importance of these differences, and often makes the mistake of confusing compelling anecdotes with solid evidence. Pinker's thesis is twofold: first, that many boys who struggle with ADHD, dyslexia, and the like during their school days end up out-earning and out-achieving the female classmates whose performance in school was far stronger, and second, there are biological and developmental differences between males and females that explain the persistent differences in their career choices and trajectories. If the second piece sounds like a hot-button issue, it is; in fact, it's what cost Obama economic advisor Lawrence Summers the presidency of Harvard several years back. And I'll admit straight-out that it's a sensitive issue for me, and that I had to try really hard to read Pinker's book the whole way through (again) with an open mind.

I'll start with the good stuff: some of Pinker's arguments are well-researched and -articulated. Perhaps the most solid is her chapter on males as the more fragile sex, both in terms of increased mortality at every age, and increased risk for difficulties in school. I was also intrigued by her chapters on dyslexia, autism and Asperger's syndrome, and ADHD, and her suggestion that in some ways, these disorders (all of which are far more prevalent in males than in females) each represent extreme examples of traits and behaviors that, in moderation, have historically been advantageous to men -- that's not to say that I'm fully convinced by this book alone that this is the case, but it's an interesting idea and one I'd like to see more research on.

That said, I think the book is far weaker when it delves into the traits and behaviors where women have traditionally had the advantage, and what this means for their career choices. In short, Pinker argues that the reason there are still so few women in the highest echelon science, math, and engineering careers is that their superior verbal and empathetic skills, coupled with their preference for intrinsically-meaningful work over that which is purely lucrative, motivate them to leave these fields (or leave the most prestigious, highly paid jobs in these fields) even when they've gotten the credentials and the jobs, and haven't been victims of discrimination. Again, I'm trying really hard to be objective here, but I think the following quote from the beginning of Chapter 3 illustrates two of the key fallacies in her reasoning:

"At the beginning of 2005, the choices of educated women became the focus of intense public scrutiny. ... [Harvard president Larry Summers] had offered some ideas about why there might be fewer women than men in high-flying academic science, math, and engineering careers. Could one reason be innate sex differences at the very extremes of performance? Or was discrimination still keeping women out? ... I thought about the high-achieving women in science I'd met over the years. They hardly seemed deficient at math, or in any academic area, for that matter. In fact, they seemed to have an array of options due to their native talents and their educational opportunities. Had they drifted into medicine, psychology, and teaching as consolation prizes after having been discouraged from pursuing physics or engineering careers? The answer, as it turned out, could be seen from my front porch."

Problem number one: Pinker seems to be trying to convince us that sex discrimination is a thing of the past, and that therefore, the differences between high-achieving men's and women's career choices must be due to innate differences between the sexes. Even if we accept for the moment her suggestion that discrimination's no longer a problem (and though I don't think it's that simple, I do believe that especially in the positions she profiles, it's probably far less prevalent than it was 25 or 30 years ago), I don't think it automatically follows that innate sex differences are the other explanation available. Sure, some women leave these fields because they decide the money and prestige just aren't worth it, and they find other work more meaningful ... but so do some men. She also seems to be a bit too quick to shrug off women's choices to leave these fields for other, more meaningful work because (oversimplification alert) "after all, it was her decision and she's much happier this way" -- glossing over the issue of whether a profession that requires 60- to 80-hour workweeks in order to succeed might itself be a problem.

Problem number two: Perhaps we should call this one the Belkin fallacy, after New York Times writer Lisa Belkin's infamous "Opt-Out Revolution" article from the early 2000's. The plural of anecdote is not data, and I'm always leery of arguments that seek to extrapolate from "people I know or know of" to society at large -- especially when the people one knows tend to fall within a pretty narrow socioeconomic spectrum. I know no one book or author can address every issue remotely connected to their topic, but I find it interesting (though not surprising any more) that Pinker doesn't even mention how different male-female occupational choices might play out among plumbers, firefighters, day care workers, secretaries, et al. It's easy to feel like it's no problem for women to be underrepresented in science and engineering if they chose to go into other fields and are still making a pretty darned comfortable living, even if it's not quite as lucrative as it might have been. However, what's going on toward the blue- and pink-collar realms? Are women really beginning careers as plumbers or mechanics or carpenters, but then leaving them because they find day care work more rewarding? And if so, are we still comfortable with the "intrinsic meaning for better pay" trade-off when it leaves them (in most cases) unable to earn a living wage?

As I said, I'm a big nerd about this stuff and could go on in this vein for quite a while, but I think you've got the idea -- worth reading, and has some interesting ideas, but I'm not sure I buy the big picture Pinker's trying to stitch together out of these threads. I'm off to do something sterotypically female and start dinner now.