Truth Like the Sun

April 30, 2012
Lynch (Border Songs) offers a new entry into the prominent "city portrait" novels with his newest, which aims to do for Seattle what Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City did for St. Louis or Erik Larson's nonfiction The Devil in the White City for Chicago. The split narrative opens with the unveiling of the Space Needle in 1962 and the rise of its charismatic young architect, Roger Morgan, then ahead jumps to 2001, when the 70-year-old Morgan is running for mayor of the city he helped put on the map. Unfortunately, he's hounded by Helen Gulanos, an ambitious reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who stumbles upon sordid aspects of Roger's past. As Lynch shuttles back and forth between early 60's idealism and contemporary political cynicism, a host of subplots are explored from the standpoint of Morgan's glory daysâhobnobbing with Elvis Presley and pursuing capitalist expansion by any means necessary, even if it means fraternization with Seattle's criminal underworldâwhich are then contrasted with Helen's hunger for truth and the Morgan campaign's attempts to bury the scandal in the days leading up to the primary. Executed at a heady clip, the book gets some special traction from posing capitalism under the menacing shadow of Khrushchev against pre-9/11 apathy. But characters like Morgan and Gulanos are ultimately no more than values, their functions and destiny foregone, in service of awfully small stakes.

March 15, 2012
Master politician Roger Morgan moves from crafting the 1962 Seattle World's Fair to running for mayor of the city 40 years later, but along the way a nosey newspaper reporter investigates his checkered past. Lynch moves the narrative along by alternating chapters focused on the young Morgan's brash ambition in putting obscure Seattle on the world map in 1962 and his decision to oust the sitting mayor in 2001. Hired by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to produce a feature focused on the 40th anniversary of the Fair--and of its iconic structure, the Space Needle--reporter Helen Gulanos starts to dig into Morgan's past. At first everything seems to check out. He was a young Turk determined to make a difference in Seattle's place in cultural history, and while in the '60s he was never in an elected office, he still emerged as a consummate politician, never forgetting names, dates or special occasions. (In one particularly telling scene he goes to talk to beggars on the Seattle streets to find out why they'd decided to move from Spokane--and he offers money to the one with the best story to tell.) But as Helen doggedly pursues the story, sordid details begin to emerge--the rumor that cops had been on the take, for example, and had used their graft money to invest in apartment buildings for which they'd received inside information from Morgan. And Helen starts to probe even darker secrets--that before a trial on this scandal a star witness had been murdered. It also turns out that Helen is no rose herself, for she's twice been accused of libel at her previous newspaper. A briskly paced novel that gives us an insider's view into both the politics of culture and the culture of politics.

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April 15, 2012

Lynch (Border Songs; The Highest Tide) is no stranger to the journalism field in the Pacific Northwest, having worked for the Seattle Times and the Oregonian. So one might suspect that the eager journalist in this novel, Helen Gulanos, might be more autobiographical than fictional. Covering a seemingly benign story about Roger Morgan, a rising candidate in the Seattle mayoral race, Helen slowly unravels the seedy underbelly of Seattle's early days and Roger's role in its corruption. Centered on the 1962 World's Fair and Roger Morgan's role in its success, the story unfolds through a series of flashbacks to a young Roger managing the spectacle of the fair while slipping away to gamble and drink. Lynch uses the World's Fair effectively as an entertaining atmosphere, introducing futurist thinking and bedazzling technologies, while illustrating the concealed, darker political moves that often push a city forward. VERDICT Lynch captures the essence of Seattle's World's Fair while providing a compelling commentary on the adage "The more things change, the more things stay the same." Readers who enjoyed Peter Bacho's Dark Blue Suit will enjoy this story of Seattle's Century 21 Exposition.--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

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