Book Review: Pete Hamill's Tabloid City

By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Marcia_K_Applegate]Marcia K Applegate
Review: Pete Hamill's Tabloid City: Murder & a Newspaper
Hamill knows the newspaper business. He knows New York City, and the kinds of people who live, work and die there. In this short novel (214 pages in my Nook), he pulls together a dying NYC newspaper, its staff and its "murderers;", a cop and his son, a homegrown Muslim with terrorist dreams; an angry wheelchair-bound veteran; an aging artist; a wealthy woman with charitable instincts; a seemingly senseless murder, and a diverse cast of supporting characters so compelling and intriguing that I can't begin to describe them. But Hamill can.
His characters come to life on the page-corny as that sounds, I can't think of a better way to describe it-and they stay alive until they meet whatever end, good or bad, that he has selected for each of them. This is not a book about ordinary people living orderly lives. It deals with complex people caught up in a variety of messy situations, often of their own making, some of them agonizing, a few potentially horrific.
Hamill's writing is active and strong, vivid not only in color and clarity, but intensity. This is a tale that moves quickly, but builds each character and action in a measured, logical, almost what-else could-he-do-under-the circumstances way. The intensity of the action on many fronts begins early on and doesn't let up until the last sentence. We see the characters make choices based on their perceptions, in some cases misperceptions, and it becomes increasingly evident where each is likely to end up. I say "likely" because I missed completely in one case, having decided too soon how one story line would end. I was wrong. And glad of it.
Another of Hamill's gifts is his ability to build a sort of rationality into seemingly irrational actions; furious as I was at a couple of the characters for the choices they were making when there were better options, I understood their thinking and, from their internal monologues, where their actions came from. He pulls no punches. At one point, when the NYC cop realizes what his son is intending, Hamill takes the story where it logically should go-to its almost inevitable sad end.
I spoke earlier of the newspaper's "murderers." I chose that term because the "World" newspaper was killed by a confluence of today's technological advances, and the times and culture we live in. A disgruntled former employee, fired by the editor, starts a website and uses it-effectively-to discredit the paper and does other dirty deeds. This in the midst of a recession and a continuing drop in ad revenue, increasing costs of printing and delivering, and the upward trend of electronic publication not only of books but of newspapers and magazines, and you see why the owner of the "World" elects to go to all-online publication. And to ask all the present staff to apply for e-jobs. No promises, though. Can't take 'em all...
All that is background as the paper prepares its last gasp, its final issue, its complete transition from print to the electronic realities, played out side-by-side with the happenings in the lives of all the characters in the almost Naked-City organization of this gripping tale. Could anything in the journalism business be more current than what is happening in the "World's" world? While dealing with so many tangled lives, the tale works its way to a conclusion that is painful, maybe inevitable under the circumstances Hamill has set up for the characters, overlaid by the pressures and problems of trying to navigate the undercurrents of today's treacherous and scary world.
When the final issue is put to bed-maybe coffin is a better word-not wanting to allow their newspaper, their livelihood, their coworkers and competitors in the business pass from the scene unremarked, friends of the deceased hold a memorial service, maybe a wake, in the city room. Here's a taste of how Hamill describes the final party for their beloved and soon-to-be last afternoon newspaper in the City:
He sits there gazing into the city room, which is full of rowdy laughter, people slapping fives, shaking their heads, telling lies and war stories and doing anything to hold back tears. A few are wearing the fake page 1 on their chests, held by tape or pins. Briscoe knows what he is seeing. A wake. He notices now that some of them are wearing black armbands.
Then he faces the dense circle of people that has formed around the city desk, more than two hundred of them, many sipping drinks, chewing pizza, some with arms folded, others with hands jammed in pockets. Men, women, some in the rear standing on desks, photographers making pictures, some old reporters taking notes from the habit of a lifetime. Briscoe clears his throat and begins to speak.
When all is said and done in Hamill's story, the characters are left to find their own way through the rest of their lives. Hamill makes clear that life goes on, that in reality all is not yet said and done for those with the courage and the desire to look ahead, see where their particular future lies. And go out to meet it.
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