All in the Family

In Pauls Toutonghi’s debut novel, a coming-of-age tale that spans generations and cultures.

By Elisabeth Crean

The “fun” in family dysfunction often pulses at the heart of a modern comic novel. But gritty Milwaukee, circa 1989, is not your typical setting. And Rudolfi and Yuri Balodis are not your average, all-American alcoholic father and troubled teenage son. Along with mom Mara, this Latvian family forms “a small roost of Soviet immigrant pigeons ... huddled together amid the urban decay.”

In Red Weather (Shaye Areheart/Random House, 2006)—certainly the first coming-of-age story about a Latvian-Wisconsonian teen—Pauls Toutonghi ’98 has conjured a world of flawed yet endearing characters. Dad works as a night janitor at a car dealership, hides bottles of bourbon all over the apartment, and dresses like Stalin for Halloween because it’s “the scariest thing” he can think of. Mom, a mild-mannered librarian, still utters “guttural and malicious” Old Country curses to get what she wants at the Polish deli. At 16, born-in-America Yuri often chokes down embarrassment at the behavior of his parents.

When Yuri develops a crush on his high school classmate Hannah, he flirts with the socialism that she and her father espouse. Yuri can toy with socialist theory because his parents have shielded him from the Iron Curtain brutality they escaped. Rudolfi, who is missing three fingers from his time in KGB custody, is more dismayed than angry with his son: “I chose to raise you as an American. You are free to make stupid choices, my darling.”

Delving into Trotsky is just one unwise choice Yuri makes. Hormone-driven capers include stolen cars and stolen kisses, a combustible mix—literally.

But suddenly, just when Yuri has made a twisted teen mess of things, the arrival of four relatives from Riga—under somewhat mysterious circumstances—sobers him up and spurs a new curiosity about his heritage. He learns from a cousin that his grand-father survived 10 years in the Siberian gulag and then walked 4,000 miles home. To his Midwestern ears, the Latvian language sounds “impenetrably beautiful—like the ghostly face of a model in a fashion magazine.”

Yuri begins to question his own perceptions of his family history. What is the real story behind Rudolfi’s dramatic departure from Riga many years ago? Can a son ever really know his father?

The joy of this debut novel comes from the luminosity of Toutonghi’s language, whether used to poetic or comic effect. Yuri describes Milwaukee at night: “The city felt like a gelatin silver print, black and white and a little mysterious.” Gossiping, Yuri and Hannah “tear verbal holes in the fabric of Alexander Hamilton High.”

Yet the poetry always serves the story. When a poignant coda casts the entire tale in a new light, the characters have seeped deep into your consciousness. And the surprising final twist makes you care about them even more.

* * *

It’s a humorous cliché: the automobile-happy American, circling a parking lot like a hungry shark, in search of the space closest to the entrance of the mall or grocery store.

But the scenario’s comic sensibility pales as gas prices climb above three dollars a gallon and statistics of an obesity epidemic assail us. Burgeoning energy consumption and expanding waistlines are just two of the problems associated with the dominant 20th-century alteration of the American landscape: suburban sprawl. In the smart and engaging This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Anthony Flint ’84 takes a clear-eyed look at how we got into this traffic-choked mess and how we can get out of it.

The book’s opening gallop through the history of settlement in America casts Thomas Jefferson as the founding father of sprawl. Viewing cities as “pestilential” and corrupt, Jefferson thought that a “yeoman citizenry” cultivated liberty in addition to crops. His Louisiana Purchase, Flint argues, “set the stage for the country’s first real taste of spreading out and following dreams.” When Henry Ford’s Model Ts began rolling off the assembly line, America’s new organizing principle for development became a universal craving for the “freedom to move around” on four wheels of one’s own.

Other major historical contributors include zoning laws and federal mortgage subsidies for single-family homes. All these factors came together to accelerate suburbanization. Sprawl was not a master plan, but a self-perpetuating snowball of personal preferences and public policies—with some devastating unintended consequences.

Flint, who covered planning and development for the Boston Globe, distills complex debates and clarifies arcane details with energetic and entertaining prose. He outlines positive movements for change, such as “smart growth,” that aims to steer development “away from the countryside and farmland” to areas that are already built up. And along the way, Flint introduces an amusing lexicography such as boomurbs (“Levittowns on steroids that pack a potent, demographic punch”) and snout houses (oversized houses with oversized garages).

Not so amusing is the powerful backlash against limiting growth. Sprawl has become a “bread and butter issue” for businesses with a vested interest in the unfettered expansion of suburbs, exurbs, and shopping centers, as well as the roads that feed the building beast. These industries fund lobbyists and lawyers who link smart growth to liberal elitism. Labeling themselves “defenders of the American dream,” they are “as media savvy and ruthless as any political attack machine.”

Despite everything, Flint remains optimistic, knowing that pragmatism drives change much more effectively than ideology. Soaring gas prices may finally succeed in overturning the false calculus of expansion that was based on cheap oil. Nothing like a little pain at the pump to get Americans thinking about the joys of living in the city.