Adam Langer, Crossing California

Adam Langer's new novel Crossing California was reviewed by James Atlas in last Sunday's Chicago Tribune (not posted online). To say that Atlas reviews it lavishly is putting it rather mildly:

"Crossing California" is the most vivid novel about Chicago since Saul Bellow's "Herzog" and the most ambitious debut set in Chicago since Philip Roth's "Letting Go."

Atlas' enthusiasm is at least partly (and perhaps primarily) due to the fact that he grew up in the same neighborhood as Langer and where the novel is set, Chicago's West Rogers Park. Despite the bold statement quoted above, Atlas also notes:

At times, Langer is too detailed. Faced with still another discourse on Rogers Park geography...I had the implulse to cry out "Enough already!"

...Toward the end, thinking the novel needs a plot, Langer loses his otherwise firm grip...the events he contrives...are awkward and unnecessary.

Atlas' basic premise is that the novel's greatness is in "the way it visualizes the physical landscape its characters occupy" and the "rich, place-ridden portraiture" of the sharply-drawn characters. And what may be a bit more hyberole, Atlas praises its "exuberant verve and an ethnic humor unmatched since 'Portnoy's Complaint.'"

Admittedly, I have not yet read the book, which may very well be as great as Atlas claims. But the fact that he also cites problems with the plot and the conclusion makes me wonder. It's understandable for a reviewer or reader to get caught up reading well-written fiction which is set in the neighborhood one grew up in--I myself would become positively giddy in the unlikely event that somebody wrote a novel set in Cary, Illinois during the 1970s--but the reviewer's nostalgia may very well be clouding his overall judgement of the book's merits.

In lamenting Langer's decision to contrive a plot to bring about a conclusion, Atlas says "It's not a book where anything needs to happen." Maybe, if you're a reader who happened to have grown up in West Rogers Park. For the rest of us I'm not so sure.