Everybody's Gonna Move Their Feet, Everybody's Gonna Leave Their Seat

Of all the characters in Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy, Detroit City Councilmember Monica Conyers is one of the best. LeDuff, who grew up in Detroit and returned to be a reporter for the Detroit News, features her throughout the book, as a sort of catch-all symbol of gross political negligence and tin-ear stupidity.

Conyers made a national name for herself after a verbal altercation with the city council president during a council meeting in which she called him "Shrek." I'm assuming it was based on his looks and not his character, because the character of Shrek actually seems like a pretty decent guy.

LeDuff then set up a meeting with Councilmember Monica Conyers and some eighth graders in a sort of public post-mortem about her calling the president of the Detroit city council "Shrek." The subtext is clear: When adults act like children, let's let children take the adults to task. It's funny, a stunt, and also something more at home on the Daily Show, which is kind of LeDuff's style, just minus the satire. Also, how does a newspaper get away with this? The video is here. You can see pertinent part of the video here. I can't embed it because they disabled the embedding feature. I'm not totally sure why.

One of the students does indeed take Conyers to task and Conyers, because she is apparently incapable of good political sense, proceeds to take the child to task. Suffice it to say, Conyers comes off like a huge moron. You can read about the event here, except that it's a Wall Street Journal link, so if you click it from here, you'll hit a paywall. If you Google the title, however, you should be able to access the story, which is titled "Detroit Politician Gets Lesson In Civility From a 13-Year-Old." I'm not totally sure I understand why it's somehow better for the Wall Street Journal to have people access stories behind a paywall via a search engine versus through, say, someone's email, but that's what they do.

Newspapers do a lot of stuff that is understandable only to people who work in newspapers. And with that, I just sort of effortlessly rolled out with the kind of knowing, faux-folksy aphorism that Charlie LeDuff likes to indulge in. I mean, I guess I understand the value of a soft paywall — maybe old people won't bother with Googling stuff and will just pay the subscription — but that kind of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other balance just gets in the way of a good story.

Which is kind of what I circle back to when I think about this particular incident: LeDuff agrees to meet Conyers at a cocktail lounge off of Eight Mile Road (you might remember "Eight Mile" from Eminem) because Conyers apparently can't prevent herself from repeating the negative. On the way he decides to stop off and visit the 13-year-old and her family. It's a great detail in a story, but it's too perfect. And it's too perfect in part because your gut tells you that he wanted to stop off on the way mostly because it's a detail that would make a good story. I can similarly see Aaron Sorkin "swinging by" the Lincoln Monument or, I don't know, Buzz Bissinger "happening upon" a high school football game: The detail flows seamlessly from head to steering wheel to eye to head to word processing program. And that's when writers become slightly sociopathic.

(As an aside, in the genre of non-fiction about dead or dying cities, Bissinger wrote his own about Philadelphia in the early 1990s, focusing on the achievements of Mayor Ed Rendell. This perspective makes Bissinger's A Prayer For the City seem much more hopeful. But there doesn't seem to be an Ed Rendell on the horizon for Detroit, and as Jen points out, Philadelphia always had advantages Detroit lacks: It's connected on the I-95 corridor with New York and DC, it has many universities, etc. Maybe it's the era — post-Iraq, post-whatever, people just think the world sucks shit — but Detroit — the book, not necessarily the city — is just a downer through and through.)

It's a small detail but it's something that for whatever reason I glommed onto. There's something about people who navigate their way through the world knowing that whatever they're doing would make for a good story. This of course happens all the time — if you're friendly with people who like to write, you'll hear them say it. And not just "this is good fodder" (look up the dictionary definition of "fodder" — it's illuminating), but making life decisions based on the output of said fodder (which, according to the definition would be the excrement of domesticated animals). I'm sure The Devil Wears Prada isn't the most egregious example of this but it feels like a watershed one that begat hundreds, if not thousands, of stupid fucking notions about what could become a book.

Which is all well and good (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out a meaningless transition meant to soften the barb at the end of the last paragraph), but if you take a second to consider what these people are like in real life, they come off like zombies. If John Howard Griffin came into my store or if Gregory Peck sauntered into my country club, I'd be like, "fuck you." Because that stuff begat the asinine Quiñonesism we are left with today.

And, sure, are we all guilty of in some way wanting to convert personal reminisces to literary gold? If you write on the internet, of course. It's just people need to go back to being embarrassed and fucked up about it. Less Foer and more semen-slurping macaque.

So anyway, I digress (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out a sorry-ass excuse for going wildly off topic).

I say all this in part because Detroit is good. The book, I mean, not the city. After reading the book, the conclusion you're left with is that Detroit (the city) should be converted to either farmland or a giant national historical park about America's industrial past. Or maybe just left to rot like portions of Auschwitz. LeDuff was on Bill Maher just after the book came out and Maher asked him if Detroit could come back. He said yes. But after reading the book, I'm not sure why.

Indeed (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out the worst fucking conjunctive adverb in the history of conjunctive adverbs), some books are like that: Writers come up with a really provocative premise and then when they're interviewed about it, immediately back down. What I wanted Maher to follow up with — and he couldn't because part of the idiocy of interviewing anyone about a specific book is that the interview is (often by design) mostly unaware about what the book actually says — was, "Really? Because what other conclusion are you left with besides the city should be converted to either farmland or a giant national historical park about America's industrial past or maybe just left to rot like portions of Auschwitz?"

Look, Detroit is good because LeDuff is a gifted storyteller. But we use a phrase around here a lot with Jen, and that's "Irish It Up," as in, Meatball's default is to take a mostly correct story and make it much more entertaining. It's not just the Irish: Different ethnic groups do this, of course. On NPR they even have a term for it, which is "David Sedaris." The only thing about these stories is that in the back of your mind there's that nagging doubt that the lady on the subway actually yelled "Tequila! Cointreau!" to her unruly children (what, no "Triple Sec"? Let's make it happen!) (actually, I don't doubt this story — it's just all the other times she's Irished It Up that makes me second-guess it, even if just slightly).

And I'm not specifically second-guessing LeDuff, either. It's just that the consistent tone of Detroit is that of a guy sitting next to you at a bar; it's not that I don't believe you that the term "bullpen" comes from single women in Durham flirting with relief pitchers by throwing them Bull Durham Tobacco, it's just that I want to try to remember to Wikipedia it later. In a book it can be a little frustrating.

Sometimes the tone resembles a treatment for the show Hardcore Pawn. Like on page 78, after his meeting with Conyers: "Where the hell was I? . . . The sign outside said 'Detroit City Limits.'" I don't think I'm being a pretentious dickhead to note that it's not exceptional writing. What it is is a great ending to a story someone is telling you — because if LeDuff is sitting across from you, he delivers that line with whatever appropriate inflection, self-deprecation and whatever other tool a storyteller uses to deliver good line. When a reader reads that line, they might hear something different — Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday, Leslie Nielsen, Kevin Bacon in JFK, The Fresh Prince, Garrison Keillor, their boring old Uncle Pete, whatever. I mean, I like that LeDuff writes like he talks. Sometimes it doesn't always translate though.

Ultimately (and with that I just effortlessly rolled out with another really lazy conjunctive adverb), I am in a position now where I must sum up my feelings about having read this book in the form of a conclusion, preferably a smartly written concise ending to what has stretched out for over a thousand words. Something along the lines of, Ultimately, Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy proves not only can you come home again but you can parley the sad fate of your hometown into a tidy 286-page memoir replete with gritty first-hand accounts of borderline journalistic impropriety, scrotum-caressing politicians, and subprime chicanery, not to mention flirtations with and near-apologies for spousal abuse amidst a backdrop of urban disaster porn where, amazingly, no one has yet quit smoking.

Posted: April 24th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: , , , , , , ,
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