By Jack Garvey
May 26, 2008 03:16 am For a novel as entertaining as any guilty pleasure and as enlightening as any PBS "American Experience," let me recommend "City in Amber" by Jay Atkinson (2007, Livingston Press). With a caution: Along with your beverage and sunscreen, bring a fire extinguisher. No, not for the R-rated scenes, although there are a few of those, but for scenes of arson. Since this epic spans the 160-year history of Lawrence, there are enough of these that, for a native Lawrencian such as myself, "Amber" could well be titled "Arsons R Us." Half of the 24 chapters are "Present Day," opening with a retired banker's erratic drive down Tower Hill, along Broadway (as "motorists whizzed past on both sides, cursing in Spanish and Portuguese"), past Lawton's historic hot dog stand, and across the bridge, stopping for an unlikely negotiation with gang members, all of it as swift as shooting rapids. With an undercurrent of menace, the constant motion is so visual that it recalls the opening scene of Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" with Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh making their way through the chaos of a Mexican border town. And hasn't Lawrence always been another kind of border town? "Amber" is a narrative that, like Fannie Flagg's "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe," layers present with past. Through half the book, even-numbered chapters focus on the founding of the "New City" in 1848 before telescoping turning points in the city's history. Most surprising are the chapters set in 1910. With this choice Atkinson skips the well-documented story of 1921 in favor of mill-owner William Wood's anticipation of war in Europe. When Wood hears that President Taft has ordered a change in Army uniforms from Civil War blue to olive drab, he's immediately on the phone — a new invention requiring a few operators to connect various lines — with a low bid, then impatiently to his chemist to make good on it. Subsequent preparations in the mill and demands on the workers are increasingly relentless. Rather than re-loading the oft-told tale of the Bread & Roses strike heard 'round the world, Atkinson reveals the seldom seen trigger. The remaining historical chapters link Lawrence's past prosperity with shifts in American fortune: FDR's election in 1932, Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the local paper's heart-rending obituary of the first Lawrencian casualty of war in 1942. Present day chapters observe the survival of Lawrencians who are loyal to family and retain any sense of right vs. wrong. Among the most compelling is a young, compassionate priest caught between the turmoil of a single mother, pregnant again, who has "been trying to outrun poverty (her) whole life," and the absolutism of a doctrinaire, elderly monsignor. In a passage that offers a taste of Atkinson's style as well as his penchant for comic relief, it occurs to father Tom that "a church in downtown Lawrence is like a shop in the middle of the desert that sold bathing suits." Early reviews compare "Amber" to "Bonfire of the Vanities" for its ambitious undertaking of themes, conflicts and wide range of characters — and Atkinson's gritty realism to Ernest Hemingway's "muscular" style. Though true, both compliments fall far short of describing a work as biblical as it is historical and contemporary. Like Melville's whale, Twain's river and Steinbeck's crops — and Sinclair's oil in the recent film, "There Will be Blood" — Atkinson's Merrimack plays the decisive role in a pursuit of riches at all ragged cost, invoking or provoking God depending on which side you're on. Call it the Tower of Babel, Golden Calf and Sermon on the Mount ("Who by worrying can add a single hour to his life?") rolled into one and stretched over a century-and-a-half 25 miles upriver: "City in Amber," past and present, is an American Testament. Like "Blood," it has a cryptic backstory that hints at a surprising finish I won't divulge. For full disclosure otherwise: I made Atkinson's acquaintance 15 years ago at U-Mass Lowell and, in recent months, have gained his generous, if forceful, advice on a project of my own. However, I paid full price for his book and am therefore free to trash it, if I so choose, pitching it into any of its own many fires. Instead I'll be passing it on to my daughter, a "good book" to let her know the "invisible foundations" and "deep roots" of her paternity, great and grand. Jack Garvey, a projectionist at the Screening Room, watched "There Will be Blood" 12 times in 14 days.
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