THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 11JESS WALTER HASfashioned his eighth nov-
el, “The Cold Millions,” out of the free
speech riots that erupted in Spokane,
Wash., in the early years of the 20th cen-
tury. The Industrial Workers of the World
had attempted to break a system of kick-
backs between corrupt employment agen-
cies, which fleeced laborers with bad job
leads, and the crew bosses who took a por-
tion of the proceeds to hire and fire work-
ers in an unconscionable churn. Eventu-
ally, rowdy Wobblies packed the streets,
and 400 people were beaten and jailed in
the ensuing conflict.
Walter dramatizes the melee and its af-
termath with a lively cast of characters
both invented and real. His novel’s main fo-
cus, a fictional pair of first-generation Irish
brothers named Rye and Gig Dolan, inter-
mingle with historical figures like the“rebel girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a com-
munist firebrand and founding member of
the A.C.L.U.
Having escaped a bad start in Montana,
the Dolans arrive in Spokane looking for
steady work and a better life. Those are
Rye Dolan’s hopes, anyway, while Gig, the
older and more charismatic of the two, in-
clines toward showgirls and the vices on
offer in the city’s tenderloin district. En-
lightened by the likes of Nietzsche and
Rousseau, Gig is in possession of just
enough learning to be dangerous. He is ea-
ger to fight back against the bosses who
cheat him, the corrupt cops who enable
them and the capitalists and company men
who regulate every aspect of his vagrancy.
The differences between the brothers is es-
tablished early on, when they wake on a
ball field among fellow tramps and ex-
change ideas for how to spend the day:
“Hey, Gig, let’s see if that doorman at the
Empire will pay us two bits to carry his
trash to the river.”
“You go on, Rye-boy,” Gig replies, pat-
ting himself for a smoke that fails to mate-
rialize. “I’m going to the hall today.”
That is, to the riots. Rye is reluctant to
join him. Having witnessed too much pov-
erty and death in his young life, he’s driven
less by idealism than by the need to eat. He
is a pacifist and a skeptic. Yet he isn’t de-
void of the romantic impulse. “Rye had an
insight that felt like a reverie,” Walter
writes, “that, man or woman, Catholic or
Prod, Chinese, Irish or African, Finn or In-
dian, rich or poor or poor or poor, the world
is built to eat you alive, but before you godown the gullet, the bastards can’t stop you
from looking around.”
Loose, lyrical passages like this one cele-
brate the democratic ideal, at present so
degraded and very evidently on Walter’s
mind. Both brothers attend the free speech
event: Gig as a devoted socialist, Rye as a
devoted brother. Both are arrested. But
one is still a boy, and when Rye’s age is dis-
covered, Gurley Flynn secures his release
and turns Rye into a prop in the socialist
struggle. He just as quickly becomes the
pawn of anarchists and hired goons, too.
The plot follows: Will Gig get out of jail?
Will Rye sell his soul to guarantee it? Who
will die?
Walter has made a major career out of
the minor character, and his portrait of Rye
is not unlike that of his B-list lovers in
“Beautiful Ruins,” or the poet-father drug
dealer in “The Financial Lives of the Po-
ets,” who is generously brought to life with
humanity and wit. Walter’s latest novel is
more hybrid beast than those earlier
books: not quite fiction and not history but
a splicing of the two, so that the invented
rises to the occasion of the real and the real
guides and determines the fate of the in-
vented. He makes this explicit on his ac-
knowledgments page: “What happens to
the historical figures in the novel is gener-
ally what happened to them in life.”
I found this a fascinating stipulation: If a
bit of burlesque creeps in around the edges
of Walter’s showgirls, tramps and ardent
idealists, as perhaps it should, very real vi-
olence and the tidal pull of history keep the
book tethered. So do injustice, poverty, big-
otry, ecological disaster. Turns out this
tramp’s tale is a timely book, and its timeli-
ness suggests an ethos: There is no placehere for lofty speculation or counterfactu-
als, time machines or talking dogs.
There is instead a fealty to fact and to
strict cause-and-effect, with an abiding
preference for the historically plausible
over the fictionally possible in both plot
and characterization. Which isn’t to say
the book lacks brio or invention; it is full of
both. But there’s also a strong invitation, as
Rye navigates his way through conspira-
cies and bloodshed, to link the historical
events of his time to the present day, and to
ask what Walter means to say about capi-
tal-H history by inventing one of its walk-
on characters.
Defying his own romantic prediction,
Rye is not eaten alive by the world. When
the book’s coda arrives, the year is 1964,
and he’s the last man standing from that
revolutionary time. Only he’s not standing:
He’s sitting at home watching the Freedom
Riders on television. As in 1909, skeptical,
self-preserving Rye has politics on his
mind but not on his agenda. Activism and
idealism, Walter suggests, consume you or
get you killed, and history is no arrow or
arc pointing upward, but a cycle of repeat-
ing patterns. Rather than taking part, Rye
found solace, and salvation, in a day job.
“Rye loved being a workaday guy,” Wal-
ter writes affectionately, and we sense that
this determined son of immigrants will
survive history’s conflagrations for old-
fashioned reasons: rectitude, fidelity, sac-rifice. Altogether it’s a tender portrait of a
fine man. But it’s impossible not to notice
that neutrality is a key feature of his sur-
vival. Rye stays alive by keeping his head
down, leaving others to war over the world.
At the end of his life, he has grandkids and
a pension after working 50 years as a union
machinist. He has lived out his humble por-
tion of the American dream.
These late developments in the novel
put me in mind of words attributed to Chief
Seattle in an address he gave to the newly
elected governor of the Washington Terri-
tory, which would have included Spokane.
“Regret is useless,” a subdued chief con-
cluded, speaking of the fate of the Native
American in 1854. Then he added a premo-
nition, or perhaps a curse. “Your time of
decay may be distant, but it will surely
come, for even the White Man whose God
walked and talked with him as friend with
friend, cannot be exempt from the common
destiny.”
These days, the machinist is a relic and
the pension is dead. The world is on fire
and so are the streets. By formally tying
1909 to 1964, Walter asks us to connect the
dots in his schema to the present day, dur-
ing another eruption in history’s cycle.
Only this time, the common destiny Chief
Seattle warned about appears to have ar-
rived. At first blush a loving tribute to Wob-
blies and tramps, “The Cold Millions” ends
as a eulogy for a certain kind of man:
white, fair-minded, nonideological, in-
clined toward the sidelines. Had Walter in-
serted a time machine into his book after
all, and flown Rye to the current year, it’s
hard to imagine even someone so innately
neutral looking on passively as history
comes for him, too. 0Blood Brothers
Jess Walter mixes fact and fiction in a story of two very different siblings.
By JOSHUA FERRISElizabeth Gurley Flynn addresses workers at an outdoor meeting during the Paterson Silk Strike in 1913.PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE NEW YORK TIMESThere’s a strong invitation to link
this novel’s historical events to the
present day.JOSHUA FERRISis the author, most recently, of
“The Dinner Party and Other Stories.”THE COLD MILLIONS
By Jess Walter
352 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.
$28.99.