The Washington Story

by Adam Langer

Book Overview

More than a year and a half has passed since Jill Wasserstrom tried to catch up to Muley Wills in West Rogers Park in Chicago. Now, in The Washington Story, we meet up with them again. Over the course of the next five years-from 1982 to 1987-their lives will change as they move beyond the boundaries of West Rogers Park. Jill will go off to college in Poughkeepsie, New York, while Muley will enter art school, rooming with manic cartoonist Hillel Levy; Michelle Wasserstrom will study acting in New York, and experience love for the first time; Larry Rovner will cut his first album; Charlie Wasserstrom will have a baby and a new career; and Mel Coleman and Deirdre Wills will attempt to form a family. Intertwined with their individual fates is the larger, ever-shifting world around them. Together they will live through the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev; the death of the Chicago political machine and the rise and fall of Chicago mayor Harold Washington; the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the return of Halley's Comet. They will travel from Chicago to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to New York, Europe, and beyond. And once again, Jill and Muley will find themselves on a street corner in a very different Chicago from the one they first knew. As he did in Crossing California, Adam Langer brilliantly brings to life the hopes and realities of a group of young people coming of age in a particular time in America's history. He shows us how each of us is inextricably linked to the circumstances around us, and yet holds out hope that dreams are worth pursuing-even if they don't lead us to where we expect they will. Book jacket.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573223247
• ISBN13: 9781573223249
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.6"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Characters and a Writer to Care About

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.

Characters evolve and mature (but not too much) in delightful sequel

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

From Kirkus Reviews

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.