James Hynes

(Note: If you don't want to know what's happened in the next-to-last episodes of The Wire—say, for example, you're still working through season two on DVD—then don't read any further.)

(I'm serious, Steve. Stop right now.)

(Don't say I didn't warn you.) 

Over here at the Cultwriter Institute of David Simon Studies, we're all too blue about the death of Omar to craft a complete eulogy for him. We saw it coming, of course: Omar was made reckless in his final days by grief and by his lust for revenge, and it's possible that living the good life in the islands may have dulled his edge a bit. But it's also telling that he didn't get got by any of Marlo's seasoned and well-drilled killers, but by a member of the next generation of damaged children from the streets of West Baltimore. And it's also telling that in the end, Omar was killed, in large part, because of his sense of honor. If he hadn't come back from the Caribbean to avenge the death of Butchie, he'd be alive today. But then if he hadn't come back, then he wouldn't have been the Omar we all came to know and love.

These twin inevitabilites—that Omar would be forced to avenge his friend, and that his righteous anger would get him killed—are further evidence of Simon's debt to Greek tragedy, which he invoked when talking about the show in the New Yorker. On the other hand, there was something a little Shakespearean about the death of Snoop last night, which was a tad reminiscent of (bear with me) Henry IV, part II, in which Prince Hal, on his way to becoming Henry V, has to renounce his old mentor and drinking buddy, Falstaff. I realize I'm stretching a point here, since Hal and Falstaff never intended to kill each other, but still, Michael's killing of Snoop was a Shakespearean act of generational war, intimate ("You look good, girl") and brutal all at once. Sooner or later we all kill our teachers, even if we don't literally shoot them in the back of the head.

One more thought, preparatory, perhaps, to a full-blown eulogy for the whole series after the last episode next Sunday. Not that it was ever much of a mystery, but David Simon's politics are clearer than ever as all the plotlines are resolved and all the characters' fates are made clear. There's no doubting his liberal credentials, I suppose, but on the other hand, it's also clearer than it's ever been that he and his writers have no faith whatsoever in institutions or institutional solutions, which is a curious stance for a liberal. The only redemption in The Wire is individual and hard-won, either the result of an act of Dickensian (yeah, I know that Simon sneers at the adjective) charity, such as  Bunny Colvin saving Namond from a life on the streets (and turning him, apparently, into a National Merit Scholar), or the result of a supreme act of will. The two main examples of which, of course, are the amazing Bubbles, aka Reginald, who has bootstrapped himself up into nobility, and Cutty, who has earned a measure of nobility himself. Even McNulty cleaned up his act for a time, and though he's fallen back into his drunken, narcissistic ways, and appears to be taking a lot of folks with him, these last couple episodes have shown that he has a conscience, even if he still needs to work on his impulse control. Not to go all Aeschylus or anything, but it's all about hubris, finally. Or as Snoop might say, if she were still alive, payback's a bitch.

John Marks has a fascinating post about Mark Bowden's Atlantic article about David Simon. John's a journalist as well as a novelist, and his take is vastly more knowledeable than mine.

And David Simon himself writes about his days at the Baltimore Sun in Esquire.

Mark Bowden has an interesting piece about David Simon and The Wire in this month's Atlantic Monthly. Bowden explores the despair and futility that underlie the brilliant storytelling, but then the piece turns into something more ad hominem and less interesting. Now that Simon's taking on big city journalism as well as big city police departments and public education, a number of journalists—tentatively, regretfully, while still expressing their love and admiration for the show—have begun to express some skepticism about Simon and his motives. You can see it in the two guys blogging the show in Slate, and you can see it again in Bowden, and what's unfortunate in both cases is how much their argument depends on an ad hominem judgment of Simon himself, rather than a critique of what he's saying (though there's some of that, too). Which is ironic, because part of what they're accusing him of is being overly ad hominem himself, in his attacks on some of his old editors at the Baltimore Sun. The upshot of Bowden's article seems to be that Bowden considers Simon a brilliant artist who is entitled to say what he likes, however dark, about Baltimore, journalism, the state of the world—unless he says something nasty about one of Bowden's friends, in which case David Simon is a bitter, cynical hack.

Now it's entirely possible, of course, that Simon is a brilliant artist and a complete asshole—he wouldn't be the first—but what interests me more than the personal comments about Simon (or Simon's simultaneously reasonable and prickly response to the Slate discussion) is that Bowden's piece reveals a rather naive understanding of what fiction is and how it works. Take this paragraph, for example:

Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.

Reading the last line of this, my first response was, "Gosh, you say that like it's a bad thing." Maybe it's because I'm a satirist, but being unfair in fiction isn't a dirty little secret, it's an article of faith (see the Kingsley Amis quote in my Commonplace Book, which I wrote out on an index card and taped to my computer monitor while I was writing The Lecturer's Tale). And honestly, I don't think it's just satirists who think this way, I think it's pretty common to most, if not all, fiction writers. Two of my other favorite quotes about writing come from Joan Didion, who said in The White Album that "writers are always selling someone out," and Graham Greene, who wrote that every writer has a little sliver of ice in his heart. I think it's this willingness—no, this eagerness on the part of fiction writers to play unfair, and play it gleefully, that makes professional journalists uncomfortable, especially when one of their own switches sides. To reinforce his point, Bowden gives an example in the next couple of paragraphs:

In a session before a live audience in Baltimore last April, for a local storytelling series called The Stoop, Simon was asked to speak on a topic labeled “My Nemesis.” He began by reciting, by name, some of the people he holds grudges against, going all the way back to grade school. He was being humorous, and the audience was laughing, but anyone who knows him knows that his monologue was, like his fiction, slightly overstated for effect, but basically the truth.

“I keep these names, I treasure them,” he said:

I will confess to you now that anything I have ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, as anything I have ever done in life down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up and wrong and that I was the fucking center of the universe, and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be … That’s what’s going on in my head.

Again, in the context of the article, Bowden seems to be quoting this with a feeling of alarm, or at least profound disappointment. But what may seem like an appalling display of bad faith to a journalist is, for a creator of fiction, just another day at the office. Simon sounds just like me here, in an unguarded moment, and like nearly every other fiction writer I know, and it's hard to work up any outrage over it. (My chief response to the passage above was relief that I'm not the only fiftysomething writer who carries forty-year-old grudges. And yeah, I can name names.) In fact, compare what Simon just said with this passage from Orwell, one of the most famous journalist/fiction writers who ever lived, from his essay, "Why I Write," item number one of his famous list of four reasons for being a writer:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen--in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all--and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

It's not necessary to agree with everything Orwell says here—take it from me, serious writers are every bit as interested in money as journalists, maybe even more so—but the main thrust of this is pretty self-evidently true. Bear in mind that this isn't the only reason to write—Orwell goes in to list three other, less objectionable reasons—and bear in mind as well that I'm not saying that this attitude is admirable. Nobody talks more bullshit about the Nobility of the Narrative Craft than fiction writers do, especially in those moments when they're promoting a book, applying for a grant, or trying to get tenure, so perhaps we have it coming when outsiders (even writers in other genres, like Bowden) are alarmed when we say what we really think in public. The result of our art often is noble, but the making of it isn't, and the plain truth is, writing fiction is like (pardon the cliche) making sausage: readers, even fans, may not want to know about the mixed motives, desperation, bad faith, and just plain mean-spiritedness that invariably, hell, inevitably goes into the creation of even the greatest works of narrative. No one will ever really know, of course, but I'll bet you anything that some of the nastier characters in Shakespeare, especially the ones in the comedies (I'm thinking in particular of poor, pompous, cross-gartered Malvolio in Twelfth Night), represent Shakespeare's mean-spirited and utterly entertaining vengeance on people who pissed him off in real life.

No, it's not fair, and maybe those hapless Baltimore Sun editors David Simon's sticking pins in don't really deserve it. But if you want an artist to be passionate and ambitious and furious about injustice, then you have to live with the fact that some of his fury may slosh over onto people you know and like. Life is unfair and so is art.


 

The fifth season of The Wire has started, and not a moment too soon. But in a couple of months fans of intelligent, layered, brilliantly plotted, morally complex, politically engaged, and world-encompassing narrative will be faced with a existential dilemma:  what do we watch now? From the looks of it, HBO doesn't seem to be planning anything similar—most of the new shows seem to be about unhappy middle-class folks whining to their therapists. Battlestar Galactica, which scratches most of the itches listed above, starts up soon on Sci Fi, but not everyone is willing to make the leap from the drug corners of Baltimore to the Twelve Colonies on the run.

So why not return to The Wire's original inspiration (sez the midlist novelist) and pick up a book? It's a commonplace by now that The Wire is more like a novel than an episodic TV show, and the show's fame has (I hope) introduced many of its viewers to the work of the novelists who write for the show, namely George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Richard Price. Price's novels especially were a big inspiration for David Simon and Ed Burns, in particular the drug war epic Clockers. And I noticed in the credits of last night's show that the crime novelist (and David Simon's wife) Laura Lippman had a cameo (I think she was the blond woman in the scene where some journalists at the Baltimore Sun are watching the smoke from a fire in East Baltimore). I haven't read any of her Baltimore-based mystery novels, but they have been very well-reviewed.

It would also be great if all the comparisons of The Wire with the novels of Dickens would lure a few viewers to some of his darker, more ambitious later novels, like Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. Laura Miller makes an interesting argument that The Wire isn't really like Dickens at all, and while it's true that The Wire is much bleaker and vastly less sentimental than Dickens, I still think the comparison holds, for two reasons. One is that both narratives cut a longitudinal slice through an entire city, from top to bottom, showing us the lives of a vast range of colorful characters. It's not too much of a stretch to see the drug lord Marlo Stansfield as a postmodern (one of David Simon's favorite words) version of Fagin, in that both characters recruit desperate boys to commit crimes. And minus the casual obscenities, you could lift Proposition Joe, name and all, out of The Wire and drop him straight into a Dickens novel. The other reason is that both Dickens and Simon and his writers are motivated by a righteous rage at a system that grinds up the poor. Dickens may goad and hector his readers in a way that Simon doesn't, but there's no mistaking the similar fury in both men.

Simon himself has invoked the playwrights of classical Greece as an influence; he's been quoted in The New Yorker as saying that “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.” It gives this middle-aged midlister (and occasional college professor) a bit of a thrill to think that at least a few viewers might be tempted to read something by Aeschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles after The Wire shuts down. They're not as gritty, of course, and are considerably more sytlized and elemental than The Wire, but they are also (in the right translation) eminently direct and readable. Robert Fagles, whose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey were so celebrated in recent years, has also published some well-regarded translations of Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Simon's idea of fate being embodied by social forces rather than wielded by gods isn't new, of course. Another place viewers might go after there's no more Wire is back to the great social realist novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The French novelist Emile Zola wrote from a similar stance, creating dark, complex, HBO-ready stories about ordinary characters made to dance like puppets by social and economic forces. Zola's Rougon-Macquart series of novels follows the effects of the industrial revolution on five generations a family; like The Wire, his novels are large scale, with lots of characters, and full of street slang and carefully observed details (Zola researched his novels like a journalist). I've only read one, Germinal, about a coal miner's strike, but his other masterpieces include Nana, L'Assommoir, and La Bête humaine. If you like Zola, you might also like his American contemporary Frank Norris (who died a month after Zola in 1902, but was 40 years younger), and who left behind at least two memorable realist epics, McTeague, about the rise and fall of a San Francisco dentist, and The Octopus, about the struggle between wheat farmers and a railroad monopoly, a storyline reminiscent of the dockworkers' plotline in season two of The Wire.

There are also the great American realists of the early 20th century, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos. Dreiser, I hope, needs no introduction, but I'll mention An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie for the record. I gather that Lewis is undergoing a bit of a revival after being looked down upon for many years; I read Elmer Gantry, his novel about a shady evangelist, in high school and still remember it pretty vividly. Dos Passos's USA trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money) is sort of modernist lite, with the straight narrative passages interspersed with "newsreel" chapters, basically prose poems concocted from headlines and clips from news stories. As I recall, Dos Passos's trilogy was informed by his Marxism, an ideology which he rejected in later life.

As Simon understood when he hired Pelecanos and Lehane to write for him, a certain type of crime writer also creates narratives in the dark realist tradition, and one of the best is the Scottish writer Denise Mina, who is (along with Louise Welsh, Val McDermid, and others) one of the chief creators of what some people are calling Tartan Noir. I haven't read her earlier trilogy of mysteries yet, but I have read her recent books about the young Glasgow journalist Paddy Meehan, and while the mystery plots themselves are clever, the real appeal of the novels, for me, anyway, is the vivid and exhilerating-in-its-grittiness evocation of Glasgow in the 1980s. Meehan herself is a wonderful creation, a tough young woman from a Catholic family who is struggling to succeed in the almost entirely male, and almost entirely alcoholic, world of Glasgow journalism. The first two Paddy Meehan books are Field of Blood and The Dead Hour, and there's a new one, called The Last Breath in the UK and soon to be released as Slip of the Knife here. After The Wire's over, I may go back and read her Garnethill trilogy, which (so I'm told) has many of the same virtues.

The most Wire-ish recent novel I know of, however, is one I started just last week and am finding entirely engrossing in the same way The Wire is. It's Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, an epic crime saga about cops versus gangsters in contemporary Mumbai (aka Bombay). Chandra's evocation of Mumbai is nearly as thrilling as Simon's Baltimore; there's a detailed description of one cop's kholi (basically, a one-room house where he lives with his wife and two sons) that told me more about everyday life in urban India than any number of documentaries. The cops face the same bureaucratic pressures as Simon's, the criminals as every bit as complex and charismatic, and, it turns out, both cops and criminals in Mumbai are every bit as poetically foul-mouthed as their Baltimore counterparts. There's a very useful glossary, in fact, from which you can learn how to say "motherfucker" in several different South Asian languages (aaiyejhavnaya is one way, if you must know, and maderchod is another). I've only read the first 130 pages, but I'm completely hooked, and it will help me get through the week between each new Wire episode.

And finally, a naked plug for an old Michigan friend of mine, Dean Garrison, who is a crime scene investigator and who has written several self-published crime novels. You can order them at Amazon—his titles are Box Job, Mad Badges, The Blood of Losers, Backstab Blues, and Snowblind Justice—and what they lack in high literary gloss they more than make up for in vividness, verisimilitude, and bitter humor. He's also (just to prove his bona fides) the author of Practical Shooting Scene Investigation, and the closest thing I know personally to a real-life Lester Freamon.

These are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head today; somebody else would probably have a whole different list, and so would I on a different day. But, ten weeks from now, when we're all jonesing like Bubbles in rehab, at least we'll know we have options.

And this just in: Maud Newton, that lucky girl, got to party with the cast of The Wire at the premiere party. What I wouldn't give to have my picture taken with Clarke Peters!