Broward County

The Big Wind-Up

Scott Simon spins the Second City

By John Hood

Aside from the title (duh), the first words to be found on the front of Scott Simon’s Windy City ($24.95) are “A Novel of Politics.” Now, that might sound kinda inconsequential to some, but to these attune-seeking ears, it’s like a pitchfork — one stabbing ring of a haymaker.

Why? Well, the last big book to use the term was Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, and that title rang off the charts. Of course, Klein’s anonymously cloaked tome concerned itself with fictionalizing the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, while Simon keeps to the streets of Chicago, though both seem inordinately adept at making hay.

I’m talking timing, dig? And as the hero of Simon’s story so succinctly states, “You get points for timing.”

You also get points for reaching for the stars and pounding the pavement, wrapping your arms around the whole wild world while keeping it local and, yes, telling a tale like it is, like it was and like it always will be, regardless of what malfeasance may come along.

And since this is Chicago, the malfeasance comes good and ugly: One alderman gets nabbed having hanky-panky with two of the cops in his security detail; another may or may not be pocketing pay-offs; and, as a center motif, the mayor himself ends up face-first and very dead in one of that town’s famous deep-dish pizzas.

Good thing for Second City citizens they’ve got Vice Mayor Sunny Roopini on hand to step in and fill the mayor’s oversized shoes; otherwise all hell would break loose.

Actually, it does. In addition to the above-mentioned untowardness, the mayor’s last meal was discovered to have been peppered with poison, his once-trusty sidekick takes a leap from his balcony and ends up in pieces, and a self-righteous U.S. attorney is determined to root out and prosecute every city official within reach — even if he’s gotta make up the case himself.

Naturally, even he’s no match for Roopini, who knows more than a few things about human nature, even as he glides above its basest base. See, Sunny runs the 48th Ward, a district that’s “like a piece of jagged glass. Sikhs, Koreans, bearded Jews, Bible-thumpers, hillbillies, Pashtuns, Oaxacans, Menominee, Jamaicans, Nigerians … [e]verybody brags on being the most aggrieved.”

And since Sunny’s a good-natured Indian who happens to run a very welcoming restaurant, he gets a pass among the polyglot.

Sort of. 

Remember, this is politics, and in politics nobody really gets a pass — for long.

Peabody Award-winning Scott Simon, who hosts NPR’s Weekend Edition, told his colleague Steve Inskeep that he believes “politics is a local specialty in Chicago, just as blues and improvisational comedy are a local specialty. As a matter of fact,” he continued, “I think politics often resembles the blues and improvisational comedy in Chicago.”

It is just that type of bluesy improvisation that Simon best captures. It isn’t always pretty and it’s seldom ever nice, but it’s the kinda high-wire act that only people who think on their feet can handle — and those who’d rather die by the sword can defy.

As Simon says simply: “Of course the system isn’t fair — it favors the rich and the beautiful and the shameless, but it gives everybody a chance to try.” And that, my friends, is the great American wind-up.

Now, go get ’em.

Scott Simon reads from Windy City at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 26, at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. For more information, call 305-442-4408.