Friday Book Review: Richard Serrano's My Grandfather's Prison
By Peter Rugg in Lit
Fri., Oct. 9 2009 @ 10:35AM
Former Kansas City Times reporter Richard Serrano's new book, My Grandfather's Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City, never quite lives up to its opening scene. But those first paragraphs are a tough act to follow.
The book opens with a guard at the Municipal Farm, then the Kansas City jail, finding Serrano's grandfather in solitary confinement dead from a snapped neck. Decades later, Serrano tries to uncover how his grandfather -- a drunk with dozens of arrests on record -- died in that cell.
From there the historical narrative splits its time between the post-Pendergast Kansas City and Serrano's present day investigation into the darker side of his family history. This is where the problems start, so let's start with the good.
The best stuff is almost entirely contained in the sections covering old Kansas City. Some descriptions, like those of lost people living in once-posh sections of town abandoned by the wealthy, make you shake your head at how little has changed. A lot's been written about Pendergast, but based on what you'll read here, not nearly enough has been written on how the city fought over any little scrap of power the political boss left behind.
Losers and drunks struggling to stay alive and keep some humanity in towns of corrupt, venal politicians and police are fertile territory. Nelson Algren probably mined it better than anyone else in the 20th century. But where Algren lingered, almost lovingly, on small moments of guilt and compassion between his characters, Serrano breezes past people and events so quickly that it's hard to feel like you're reading anything more than exceptionally good reportage.
Whenever the book cuts back to Serrano searching for records, which happens much too often, it loses momentum. I understand that researching this was incredibly difficult, and Serrano is a tenacious, smart writer for being able to carry it as far as he did, but when it comes down to it, a guy looking for records without any tangible stakes to finding them other than his own personal satisfaction ... sorry man, it's just not interesting.
I suspect Serrano's tendency to run through things at such a pedal-to-the-floor velocity is symptomatic of many writers who learned as newspaper reporters. Too often they write as if they only have 5,000 words to tell their story rather than ten times the limit for the longest special feature. Which is a shame in My Grandfather's Prison, which teases so many different angles on such a little-discussed time in Kansas City.
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The book opens with a guard at the Municipal Farm, then the Kansas City jail, finding Serrano's grandfather in solitary confinement dead from a snapped neck. Decades later, Serrano tries to uncover how his grandfather -- a drunk with dozens of arrests on record -- died in that cell.
From there the historical narrative splits its time between the post-Pendergast Kansas City and Serrano's present day investigation into the darker side of his family history. This is where the problems start, so let's start with the good.
The best stuff is almost entirely contained in the sections covering old Kansas City. Some descriptions, like those of lost people living in once-posh sections of town abandoned by the wealthy, make you shake your head at how little has changed. A lot's been written about Pendergast, but based on what you'll read here, not nearly enough has been written on how the city fought over any little scrap of power the political boss left behind.
Losers and drunks struggling to stay alive and keep some humanity in towns of corrupt, venal politicians and police are fertile territory. Nelson Algren probably mined it better than anyone else in the 20th century. But where Algren lingered, almost lovingly, on small moments of guilt and compassion between his characters, Serrano breezes past people and events so quickly that it's hard to feel like you're reading anything more than exceptionally good reportage.
Whenever the book cuts back to Serrano searching for records, which happens much too often, it loses momentum. I understand that researching this was incredibly difficult, and Serrano is a tenacious, smart writer for being able to carry it as far as he did, but when it comes down to it, a guy looking for records without any tangible stakes to finding them other than his own personal satisfaction ... sorry man, it's just not interesting.
I suspect Serrano's tendency to run through things at such a pedal-to-the-floor velocity is symptomatic of many writers who learned as newspaper reporters. Too often they write as if they only have 5,000 words to tell their story rather than ten times the limit for the longest special feature. Which is a shame in My Grandfather's Prison, which teases so many different angles on such a little-discussed time in Kansas City.
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