The Corner
the historically underrated Khandi Alexander as Fran Boyd
[NB: When I refer to “Simon” or “Simon’s” hereunder, co-author Ed Burns is also implied. I don’t know which man was responsible for which portions of the narrative, and while I suspect Simon is in fact the engine driving the ones I’ll be focusing on, I can’t know that for sure. I apologize for any attribution mistakes that may proceed from my assumptions.]
The Corner is probably a better read if you haven’t seen The Wire in its entirety, which I have. While it’s entertaining to see the real-life names David Simon and Ed Burns appropriated for characters on The Wire, the narrative itself is at times frustrating reading. It’s not weak or ineffective writing by any means; it’s as riveting as Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Simon’s execution is not always elegant, in terms of the diction, but few people working in non-fiction do a better or more efficient job of setting a scene, building a complete mental picture for you and taking you into it for several hundred pages.
But Simon’s genius is for setting that scene and letting it speak for itself; he does the first part so well that the second part ordinarily is unnecessary. Unfortunately, as he started to do more often in the final season of The Wire, in The Corner Simon seems to feel compelled at certain points to pause the real-life narrative, plant his feet, and declaim to you what you’ve got in front of you — what it means that you might not have grasped; ways you should react to it that you might not have felt initially — and while he’s not incorrect on the facts, he’s lecturing the reader, at some length. It’s usually superfluous, it’s often patronizing or presumptuous, and it’s an unintended invitation to skim the sermonizing on entrenched social ills until he returns to the real people that give dimension to the abstractions. Showing is more effective than telling, almost always, and Simon has showed us many of these breakdowns and vicious circles, with heartbreaking subtlety, on The Wire — traditional familial structures replaced by the “family” of the corner; the hopelessness of the schools; politicians missing the point — and it worked because he put faces and names to institutional problems. He’s an outstanding storyteller, but he doesn’t use quite the sort of prose that can get the grander big-picture rants over; here, he repeats himself, overburdens his image structures, and doesn’t always control a tone that sometimes unfairly implicates the reader in the problems he’s describing.
On the other hand, those shortcomings appear to proceed from a righteous, palpable anger — even horror — at the situation, at the way the world and its generalized establishments have failed the individuals whose lives he takes us into. And that anger or horror is worth something. David Simon is pissed, and getting pissed means you still hope for better. Only that kind of spluttery fire ever leads to any substantive progress or gets anyone’s worthwhile attention. You could see it in the newsroom bits of The Wire S5; a lot of people considered those plots overly didactic and bitter, and while I don’t disagree from an execution standpoint, it also looked to me like raging at the dying of the light — simplistic and heavy-handed though that story turned out, it’s Simon refusing to accept “well, things change” as an answer or explanation. “It is what it is” is, many times, the only response we can reasonably have, without losing our minds, to the way the world works us over, but now and then you have to decide that “what it is” is not good enough, and make some noise about the fact. The orations on Baltimore’s social failures don’t quite work in The Corner — they aren’t utterly without merit, but they needed a sterner edit — but if they fail, it’s a noble failure, especially contrasted with my previous book entry, a story that suffered from the opposite of Simon’s overinvestment.
Tags: books TV
I’m a librarian who’s in LOVE with the Wire and all things Wire-related (just finished “Lush Life” by Richard Price solely because he wrote eps for the show–it was very good), and I was able to order both “The Corner” (which is sitting in my office waiting for me to read) and “Homicide” (which is downstairs on the new bookshelf, waiting for me to check it out) for our community college library collection. I can totally justify why they’re good additions to our collection because of their subject matter, and I get to throw a little love David Simon’s way at the same time. And I get first crack at them! It’s a win-win. Sometimes I love my job!
I am a social worker by trade. This morning we were in a meeting looking at RFP’s and the buzz words are youth initiatives. So we’re writing this thing up and I think “Are we doing the same program they did with street kids vs corner kids?” It’s hard because many of us start with good intentions, but have to play a numbers game to get funding.
So when I read about Simon’s anger I understand a bit. It may not make for great tv, but or those of us in the trenches, I think I understand it.
“historically underrated Khandi Alexander ”
No kidding. She has been so excellent in everything I’ve seen her do, from “NewsRadio” to “What’s Love Got to Do with It” to “CSI.”
Thanks for the review, Sars. That sort of “let’s rub the reader’s nose in it” writing is off-putting. I actually LIKE it when I have to backtrack in a book for something I missed!
@Ann: It *did* make for great TV; the problem is the book version (I haven’t seen the miniseries version of The Corner; I adore The Wire). In the text, he’s freed up to rail on for sometimes eight or nine pages all “I know what you must be thinking but you don’t understand these people’s lives,” when in fact, thanks to his excellent reportage elsewhere in the text, I do understand their lives much better than before I began reading.
It makes great writing, too; the subject matter is very compelling, and whether these are real issues is not in question. What I don’t like is the supplemental haranguing about how, for instance, Tyreeka’s attitude towards her pregnancy may be unavailable to me emotionally because I come from a more privileged background.
I absolutely understand, and share, his anger. I applaud it, in fact, as it would be very easy to become cynical instead, as I think I made clear in the write-up. My objection is a stylistic, tonal one. Repeated, lengthy iterations of “here’s why y’all white liberals reading this book don’t get it” is not a choice that served his material.
Sars,
you have to keep in mind that “The Corner” was written a good 5 years before the Wire even aired, and two years before the eponymous miniseries. At the point in time during which “The Corner” was being written, Simon had quit the Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns had just quit being a cop and a schoolteacher. Those three experiences combined would explain the disillusioned “you just don’t understand” tone of the book, as they were trying to reach an audience whose only connection with reality came from reading incomplete accounts of life in an impoverished neighborhood that came from their newspaper and TV coverage. Essentially, their success with publishing “The Corner” and eventually working on an adaptation of it into an HBO miniseries freed both of them into giving us faces that go with that account.
In that sense, I feel that “The Corner” was Simon & Burns’ first attempt to tell, and if they are saying “you don’t understand”, that statement is entirely justified by the fact that there was nothing like “The Wire” on print or TV or what have you to enlighten the readers who would have read their book.
I think I get what you are saying. I was one of the ones who “got” what the newspaper story arc was supposed to be telling us, but thought it was so overdone that it became little more than an annoyance. I also agree David Simon occasionally comes across as if he thinks he’s the only white man on earth to understand the blight of the inner city. It’s a fine line to walk and I don’t think Simon always does it successfully, but I applaud his efforts
I know exactly some of the passages you’re describing. (I read the book 2-3 times, before I saw any of The Wire, not again since.) Macro rants on US drug war policy in the abstract, rather than just showing us how that’s working out at Monroe and W. Fayette, stand out most clearly in my memory. But personally, I sort of wanted to stand up and clap sometimes.
I can’t really fault the guy for feeling like, when dealing with certain key issues, a little expository help-along is needed: “well, if establishment America were able to just look at this and see it for what it is they’d have fixed it already, or at least they wouldn’t be so loudly ignorant about it, so let me try while I have this soapbox to make it clear.”
Re: Tyreeka, I think no amount of purely narrative prose craftsmanship could get past the kneejerk judgment and disgust that would be many people’s reaction to her pregnancy without their being explicitly asked to think differently about it. People who would file her away under “welfare queen” without a moment’s thought may just need a lapel-grabbing and “seriously, try to imagine that this baby is all you’ll ever accomplish in your life; imagine that you know that, at the age of 14; imagine what on earth you could possibly be saving yourself for instead.” I guess it’s arguable, though, that those people are probably not the ones sitting down to read this big old book about the lives of Tyreeka and her babydaddy.
Maybe I’m saying that I feel you on the sense of interrupted flow—for sure these digressions are lengthy and somewhat jarring—but in the face of such never-ending dysfunction as the world of this book, I’m willing to forgive the occasional messy lapse into frustrated editorializing. If pure narrative or anthropological detachment were the goal, then sure, it’s got no place, but pretty obviously that’s not the way Mr. Simon operates. He’s not hiding his agenda, or the chip on his shoulder. If he weren’t making books and TV, he’d be one hell of a blogger, no?
Oooor, maybe I just have a personal sympathy for the self-righteous & long-winded.
I read “The Corner” over several months during my first year working in a Baltimore City public school (I had to take it slow as it was so close to home). Coming from the rest of the world to the corner world, for lack of a better term, I felt the same rage and sense of isolation. Didn’t anyone care that generations never even had a chance to experience the promise of American life? I’m quite sure I also annoyed my friends and family members with my righteous indignation and rants, and I understand these quite well in the book and series. Haven’t seen S5 yet though, so I can’t say whether or not it worked in the story. I have to agree with Sars that the anger is vital enough to be almost admirable – from my perspective, the effect on the story almost doesn’t matter.