Jet City Lit:

So Many Seattle Writers, So Few Seattle Books

Article for Wire, May 1991

When I was a kid in a typically underfunded Washington school district, we were always hearing or reading stories about exotic lands like Korea or Harlem. But except for the incisive children’s books of Oregon’s Beverly Cleary (the Ramona series, etc.), we read nothing that took place in our own region. Without it ever being openly said, it was made clear that we were a forgotten corner of the world, stuck out in the west-coast-that-wasn’t-California, the region that didn’t count for anything.

When I was 12, the hope of every young male Washingtonian for national respect, the Seattle Pilots baseball team, left for Milwaukee. I remember national sports writers saying things like “Seattle, with its small-town country atmosphere, is clearly not ready for major league baseball.” Even from the perspective of a country boy who only got into Seattle occasionally, I knew that was mistaken as hell.

In the early ’70s, I discovered Ken Kesey’s two major novels. In the years since, a whole scene of “regional” novelists took inspiration from one of those novels. Unfortunately, they all chose the wrong one. Instead of Cuckoo’s Nest, with its bleak, wry humor and its portrayal of universal themes with a regional twist, they all chose to imitate the stoic machismo of Sometimes a Great Notion.

Nowadays, according to literary scene-chronicler Mitch O’Connell, there are at least a dozen guys (and, in a contrast from most fiction genres, they’re almost all guys) churning out what I consider to be Great Notion clones. (O’Connell actually gave me two dozen names, but he counts rural eastern Montana as “Pacific Northwest;” I don’t.) They’ve got titles like A River Runs Through It, Yellow Fish, and Honey in the Horn. They’re about hard, quiet men who live off The Land. Mainly, they’re romanticized fantasies of how noble and stoic Western farming is supposed to be. They’re upscale Westerns, and like most Westerns they’re fantasies created for Eastern consumption. The only member of this crew I’d recommend is Craig Lesley, who uses Native American mythology to contrast the romanticized memories of his people’s forbearers with the often harsh realities of modern Native life.

From what I’ve been able to piece together about my grandparents’ existence on the wheat ranches before World War I, it was a milieu of despair, disease, alcoholism, the frustration of staying married to somebody you hated, and the madness or weirdness that derives from all of that and gets passed on to future generations. It’s no wonder pre-WWII Eastern Washington seemed to be all Calvinist, Lutheran, Catholic and Mormon. Only people who believed in an eternal reward for present suffering would stick around. That solemnness was not a mark of centeredness but a mask hiding a world of unfulfilled desires. Housekeeping, Marilyn Robinson’s eastern Washington saga that became a 1988 film, shows this off quite well. So does This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, set in the beer-guns-and-cars teenage scene in the town of Concrete.

The Egg and I, Betty McDonald’s 1946 comic novel of a city slicker trying to make it as born-again farmers, not only tells a lot about the area as it was then but also launched the legendary low comedy of the Ma and Pa Kettle movies.

Oh yeah, there’s also that Tom Robbins guy, whose books contain at least portions set in the back-to-nature fantasy that his fellow ex-hippies think Puget Sound and the Skagit Valley are or were.

So far, all the stories we’ve talked about had to do with Oregon, Idaho, and rural or pseudo-rural areas of Washington. I asked O’Connell if anybody wrote about places like Seattle and Tacoma; he was confused about why I’d even ask. “This is a literature about man and the environment. If people want to read about a city, there’s a million books about New York.” (As if that pair of islands off the Atlantic coast had anything in common with any mainland American city!)

In recent years, the Seattle area has become the home for many bestselling writers of stories set elsewhere. In the cases of Charles Johnson, Mark Helprin, and Pete Dexter, I’m proud that writers of their stature and quality are here. I hope they can inspire young writers to stick around. Writers who leave Washington tend to leave virtually no fictional record of their having been here. There’s little or no area content in the works of Frank Chin or the late Richard Brautigan, who both became known (in different decades) as San Francisco writers who happened to have lived here prior to their fame. Thomas Pynchon wrote much of his first novel, V., while living in a cheap U-District rental unit. (Surprisingly with the district’s recent massive development, it’s still standing.) The only piece of Seattle that’s in it, though, is the Yoyodyne Company, a lampoon of Boeing (where Pynchon worked as a technical writer).

I know of a 1987 local playwrights’ workshop at the New City Theater, where the instructor specifically told the writers not to set anything in an identifiable Seattle, because it was such a “given” that Seattle wasn’t worth talking about. Compare that to the situation in Portland, where novelist Katherine Dunn andfilmmaker Gus Van Sant aren’t afraid to confront the urban realities around them.

I don’t know more than a couple of people who are even trying to write fiction or drama set in Seattle, other than formula romances and mysteries with fill-in-the-blanks local landmarks. It’s refreshing to read a J.A. Jance or Earl Emerson whodunit just to read about fictional characters eating at the Dog House, but I soon tire of the mystery genre’s predictability.

There are also a few romantic histories, such as Jane Adams’ Seattle Green, or Seattle by Charlotte Paul (“a passionate American saga of men and women fighting for the wealth and power of their chosen land…by the bestselling author of Phoenix Island“). Both feature the sort of billowy, porcelain-skinned woman who wouldn’t have lasted three weeks on the frontier. The early local white women were more like Norman Reilly Raine’sTugboat Annie stories in the Saturday Evening Post. While the stories (set in the fictional city of Secoma) really creaked along in Raine’s proto-sitcom style, the Annie character is quintessential Seattle: a woman who can work and drink as hard as any man, without needing to make a fuss about it.

Any look at the scores of nonfiction Seattle books shows a wealth of stories and story ideas. There’s quite a lot that remains to be documented about the last “real” city built in America before the suburban era, about a city just over a century old whose history is already being forgotten, about a city now considered a role model of tolerance but which was the birthplace of the officially racist Elks lodges, about a region that was a hotbed of radical labor movements (violently crushed) but later became obsessively middlebrow with the rise of Boeing’s corporate culture, a place that in the midst of being turned into a laid-back yuppie theme park has spawned the angry, passionate rock music discussed in other pages and issues of this magazine.

One of the most enduring nonfiction Seattle books is Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, the story of the Pilots. The economic forces that led to the birth and sudden death of that team tell a lot about a city trying too hard to become “world-class.”

I’ve met Weekly cover boy Jonathan Raban, whose new book of travel essays, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, includes a passage on why Seattle would be an ideal setting for a novel (its size, youthfulness, ethnic mix, Far East connections, last-frontier dynamic, etc.). Raban is a tall, affable middle-aged fellow with a Masterpiece Theater London accent. He offered several observations that would make great story fodder, such as the ludicrousness by Euro standards of a city whose “oldtimers” go back no more than three or four generations, whose “classic” era of architecture means the 1920s.

While “serious” writers disdain local subject matter, area cartoonists such as Portland’s John Callahan and Seattle’s Peter Bagge have no problem telling vibrant, personal stories of dark humor about themselves and the societies around them. The foremost of these cartoonists, ex-Seattleite Lynda Barry, has built her memories of her multiethnic Central Area childhood into a weekly comic strip, a bimonthly short-short story in Mother Jones magazine, and her novella The Good Times are Killing Me. A play based on her book has been running to good reviews in New York, where nobody apparently minds that it takes place in a mainland city.

Indeed, for the past year or so an obsessive cult following has gathered around a TV series about (among other things) the social structures of a typical Washington town. My sawmill-town home overlooked the mouth of the river fed by the Twin Peaks waterfall; I can assure you that virtually all the characters and stories on that show are a lot more naturalistic than you’d ever believe. While the show’s future is uncertain at this writing, it has proven that there is a culture here worth discussing and people eager to hear about it. It also showed me how to appreciate my culture in ways my grade-school teachers never dreamed.