Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty

My brother's stories are more apple cider. They are good to drink but you will not forget yourself entirely. Wholesome tales, without too many fricasseed widows. True mostly--I will not lie any more than is wanted for decency. Simple and moral, easy to grab, the better to encourage someone over the the head with. Not too quiet--you must not fall asleep. Let us have commerce and racing horses. Progress and the mastery of nature. Swap swords for axes and plows. Let us have tenderness but also a dash of cussedness and tragedy. All in the manner native to Ohio.

"Tall tales" emerged out of the country's first frontier: the woodlands of the interior and Midwest. Think Paul Bunyan, clearing the trees for civilization. Pete Beatty's debut novel Cuyahoga focuses on a tall tale character named Big Son, whose story is narrated by his brother Medium Son, also known as Meed. Big Son's deeds are legendary: he rastles Lake Erie, fells hundreds of trees at a stroke, and climbs a two-mile ladder to see what a cloud is made of. But Big Son lives, unfortunately, in a world that is becoming less myth, less frontier, and more civilization, and that's an uneasy place for a tall tale to live. Big Son wants nothing more to marry the love of his life, Cloe Inches, but how do you marry a tale? And who will give a myth a real job, and money to live on?

Big is the tutelary spirit of Ohio City on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. The book's larger plot focuses on the controversy between Ohio City and Cleveland over who will build a bridge over the Cuyahoga; Cleveland manages it first and sets the tolls. "Two Bridges or None" becomes the rallying cry of the Ohio Citians, and they enlist Big Son in building a bridge, which he does in a matter of days. But of course, Big's bridge is built more of myth than wood or steel, and it collapses in a grand tall-tale fashion. Big's problem is that once the frontier is gone, the figure from the tall tale is no longer needed. What Ohio City needs is industry, expertise, civilization--it needs, in a sense, realism. Beatty emphasizes this point with a funny aside about Johnny Appleseed, depicting him as a cider-swilling drunk unable to handle the transition from his an economy of small homestead orchards to the mass production of food. Big Son is not alone; the country is leaving its tall tales behind.

I was really impressed by Cuyahoga. It's a little scattershot and rambunctious, but it's shaggy quality well matches that of the tall tales that are its inspiration. Books that puncture the myths of the American frontier, even cheekily or ironically so, are not so unfamiliar, but I don't think I've ever seen someone do such a deep exploration of this particular aspect of American myth, perhaps because the time frame--that doldrum period between the Revolution and the Civil War--looms so little in the popular imagination. More than anything, I was impressed that Beatty is able to keep the bit going, and able to keep it from being just an interesting premise. The layers layer well: the jealousy of ordinary Meed toward his supernatural brother; a subplot about a devious grocer intent on blowing up the Cleveland Bridge; the various tall-tale figures and creatures, like the treacherous "night pigs." Facsimiles of newspapers and bulletins add to the story rather than seeming like empty exercises in period style, and the 19th century voice is just anachronistic enough to feel as if it speaks to modern ears.

What Cuyahoga revealed to me is that American myth didn't disappear; it just went underground. The devious grocer, nicknamed Dog, describes seeing General Washington as a young man: an emaciated, toothless figure. We made him into a god with our stories, Dog suggests, but perhaps we did worse: we sapped the vitality of the man by taking what we wanted from him. Big Son belongs to a passing era, and his tragedy is that he's unable, like the other myths of America, to transform or be disguised, or hide away in a story more appropriate to the cynicism of the day.