Bibliofiles

by Robert D. Johnston

(Princeton University Press, 416 pages, $35)

University of Illinois history professor Robert Johnston advocates for what he sees as the progressive potential of the American middle class and uses early-20th-century Portland as his model. Leftists, he suggests, have unfairly demonized the middle class as "politically retrograde, morally inert, and economically marginal." The lower middle class, Johnston admits, can be selfish and racist, but he points to "the thousands of middling folks who made Portland during the early 20th century the most complete democracy in the world."

Johnston trains his sights on four Portlanders: Harry Lane, Will Daly, William U'Ren and Lora Little. He calls U'Ren "the most robust symbol of popular democracy during the first decades of the 20th century." U'Ren's greatest fame came as architect of the "Oregon System" with its revolutionary initiative and referendum. Johnston imparts long-forgotten details on the radicalism of Lane and illuminates the careers of the lesser-known Daly and Little.

There are some mild shocks: The Ku Klux Klan was not alone in opposing parochial schools in the 1920s. The Scottish Rite Masons also made it a priority.

Concerning the past champions of this lower middle class (which he calls the petite bourgeoisie) Johnston declares, "We honor their memory by learning from their lives to temper our intellect--and, then, by dreaming the most daring of democratic dreams ourselves." Whether one agrees with Johnston's thesis about a radical lower middle class or not, the reader is treated to fascinating and heavily documented accounts of some dynamic and little publicized currents in Portland's history.
Art Chenoweth

we ain't got no car! #7
by Jack Saturn
(Recursive Delete Imprint, 251 pages, $8)

Being a disenchanted young hipster is tough: small unemployment checks, housemates who don't do their dishes, buying a Megadeth CD case that holds a Cranberries disc inside.

These are the trials of "jack," the primary character in Saturn's We Ain't Got No Car #7. Like everything else in Car--names, beginnings of sentences, days of the week--jack appears in lower-case, which may be an effort to appear zinester-colloquial, or a comment on the fundamentally lower-case life jack leads. It's probably not laziness, as Car is handsomely produced for a self-published book on a vanity imprint.

Saturn could be a good storyteller, with his eye for detail and relentless need to imbue everyday occurrences with immense symbolism. Unfortunately, the former leads to a focus on trivialities, and the latter to a neurosis bordering on paranoia.

Moments of emotional engagement shine through when jack deals with the illness of a family member or the departure of a pet--brief flashes interrupting his nearly autistic inability to interact with the real world outside his bedroom, select hipster enclaves, and the limits of his navel. New to Portland, he attempts to make an entire life and philosophy out of shopping decisions (co-op good, Fred Meyer bad) and indie-culture self-identifications (old Ozone Records good, new Ozone Records bad). Then there's the really hardcore part, ditching CDs altogether and going strictly vinyl.

Life is rife with such decisions. But only skilled writers--Nick Hornby, say, or Marcel Proust--can transform endless litanies of cultural prosaica and personal detail into absorbing reading material. Saturn may not be there yet, but he clearly has more promise than his anemic character, who seems barely capable of tying his own hempen shoelaces. Saturn would do well to leave lower-case jack behind. Tiffany Lee Brown

WWeek 2015