Soft City
At least no one else has been able to come to terms with this hilly, histrionic, irrelevant, showery hell of a city, either. Mary McCarthy described Seattle as "hardly cosmopolitan." Nancy Wilson Ross called it "a hybrid" and "grandly beautiful" and "abnormally afraid of any intimations of the truth." A narrator in one of Matthew Stadler's novels sees it as "a virtual monument to indiscriminate nostalgia." Walt Crowley's impression of it, in the early '60s, was that it was "puny, provincial, and puritanical," and Emily Baillargeon Russin's, five years ago, was as "a vast personal playground that has become increasingly unsettling." Roger Sale asserts that it's "not a place that builds enduring structures" and Jonathan Raban thinks of it as "soft and pliant" and Timothy Egan defines it as "very tentative." David Shields writes that he loves Seattle, "sort of."
Sort-of love, and sort-of dread, and a lot of other permutations of ambivalence characterize the essays and stories and excerpts in Reading Seattle, a new anthology of work thoughtfully gathered by Peter Donahue and John Trombold and annoyingly introduced by Donahue and Charles Johnson. Johnson's forward is basically an extended blurb, and about as useful (it's composed of statements like, "Reading Seattle, like a cornucopia, overflows with insights into the city"), and Donahue's introduction, while overflowing, stops short of any such insights, except a couple of pedestrian ones: "The writers in Reading Seattle cover a wide variety of areas within the city"; the book is "a way for others to experience Seattle"; "These literary representations of the city will amplify, augment, and add to each reader's ever-evolving experience of Seattle," and so on. These insights, such as they are, get a little redundant ("the notion of a Seattle anthology came to us as a way to honor and celebrate the city") and a little overproud ("Seattle is so obviously the greatest city in the world"), and the conviction that Seattle literature is particularly achieved (in addition to being "significant and notable," this literature is, we are told, "genuine and vital" and "distinguished" and "exceptional") feels finally a little insecure. It's as if Donahue is trying to convince himself of it.
But a lot of the work is good, thankfully, if not in the celebratory way the editors insist. To get in the book, it seems, you merely had to mention a street or landmark or local company, so some crap by, for example, J. A. Jance, qualified: "Chilled by the damp, cool air, I was headed back inside the apartment for another cup of Seattle's Best Coffee when the phone rang." Some of the best pieces here (by Rebecca Brown and Matt Briggs in particular) barely allude to the city at all. Brown, in passing, mentions Swedish Hospital, and with the exception of mentioning Seattle Art Museum, the closest Briggs gets to a local reference is when he flatly writes, in an excellent, sad, un-grand story, in the voice of a knocked-up narrator: "I bought a bottle of red wine and a urine test at Fred Meyer."
