Jerry Herron

I'm reviewing this, and at some slight length, because it's an academic text that I think gets few casual readers, and fewer casual reviews.

I've long thought that the decline of Detroit from a proud jewel of America to a devastated symbol of our problems is really the history of America itself writ large. That Detroit has lessons for us which we ignore at our peril. What's gone wrong in this city, and how? What's the path forward? This particular book was recommended to me as source for such lessons. This really is not that book. It's really more a meditation on what Detroit is and how it functions in its environment.

I wouldn't poorly review a book just for not meeting my own particular hopes or expectations for it. And heaven knows that Herron's effort is an earnest one. Further, since it's an academic book, it's unfair to criticize it for being being written in academic prose. Even so, I think it fails on its own terms.

My first criticism is that the book goes out of its way to skirt any practical questions or discussions about interaction between the city and the middle class (his opposition, not mine, particularly). The middle class, he says in essence, choose not to take part in the urban narrative. Now, I said I didn't want to judge the book for failing to live up to my desires, so I can't complain that he doesn't examine in depth whether "middle class" desires to avoid the city are, for example, realistic fears for personal and property safety or simply unstated racism. But to wholly dodge the question is disingenuous, and weakens the thrust of many of his arguments, since he can't directly address alternative explanations for the phenomena he examines.

Secondly, I've called it a meditation, not an argument or a set of essays. but even a meditation -- unless the author literally intends the reader to treat it as a sort of koan -- should make its subjects explicit. Herron has a maddening propensity for never highlighting his subjects. Take, for example, the first essay: "The Sign in Niki's Window." Here Herron uses the window of a cafe, and the sign painted there, as a metaphor for the city, or at least parts of it. Herron never straightforwardly describes the sign, never tells us what it says. Instead, he merely obliquely hints at this or that aspect of it.

Thirdly, and exacerbating the problem of refusing to name his subject, he constantly assigns special, new, and nuanced meanings to common words, and uses them repeatedly without ever informing the reader of what the new meaning is that he has assigned to them. Throughout the second essay he talks of "coverage." He never defines it and I wouldn't personally venture to tell you just what he means by it even now. Similarly, he never tells us the idiosyncratic meanings he gives even to "afterculture" or "humiliation."

But by far the worst problem is sections of the text in which the prose is simply impossible to reliably parse. Let me quote an example here:

"What they fail to consider, however, is the totalizing impulse inherent in their description and the relation it bears to social class. Derrida is not so much a reader of the city, in other words, he is a concurrent product of experiences that have rendered problematical the middle-class projection of "certain fixed relations and shared values."

Now I can do a couple of things with an excerpt like that. I can wisecrack that perhaps it is a universal law that paragraphs referencing Derrida must, by universal law, tend asymptoticically towards complete incoherence. I can reflect on it, and assign it some sort of guess-work meaning that syntactically fits it. But what I can't do is decode the meaning that the writer intended.

Perhaps he doesn't mean me to. But I'm not inclined to meditate on such mysteries without some greater faith that there's a profound insight waiting. Lacking that faith, I find Herron's book lacking in interest.… (mais)