Crooked River Burning
By Mark Winegardner
Harcourt, $27
ISBN 0151002940

Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller Find it in a WorldCat library Compare prices at major online bookstores

Send this review to a friend

Mark Winegardner, a writing professor at Florida State University, is the author of several nonfiction books on baseball and the well-received baseball novel, Veracruz Blues. His latest novel, Crooked River Burning, may well be his breakthrough work. The novel tells the story of two doomed lovers, who after years of turmoil, find their way to each other. Although it sounds like dozens of other works of contemporary fiction, in the hands of this gifted storyteller and literary stylist, a rather pedestrian and archetypal plot becomes a work of art.

The city of Cleveland, Ohio, plays a major role in the novel, often upstaging David and Anne, the star-crossed lovers. Indeed, much of the book involves the history and infamy of that undeservingly maligned city on America's North Coast. What Sandburg did for Chicago in poetry, Winegardner does for Cleveland. The author's research is impeccable and his fully fleshed characters accurately display Midwestern attitudes, reflected not only by place, but by era as well.

Baseball again plays a substantial role here, but the novel absolutely teems with the persons and concepts that are Cleveland, from Eliot Ness to Paul Brown to Superman. The very first rock concert ever begins the story; an environmental disaster, one of the first to draw national attention to such issues, ends it. In between, there's a bit of a murder mystery, much political intrigue and the quirky love story.

This plot is full of engaging contortions and asides. A lesser writer would have left many of these unresolved, but Winegardner adroitly weaves them together into a nearly seamless whole.

How rare to find just the right amount of literary style in a highly readable grand romp of a story. Fans of Doctorow, Vidal and Malamud will find lots to love about this one, but aficionados of more popular fiction by De Mille, Dunne and even Steel will also admire Winegardner's skill at splicing history and fiction.

Stephen Richmond, writing from Tyson Library in Versailles, Indiana, formerly lived in Ohio and has visited Cleveland many times.