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Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Last Fine Time (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991) Reissued by Vintage in paperback in 1993 In The Last Fine Time, prolific author and New York Times book reviewer Verlyn Klinkenborg traces the history of 722 Sycamore Street, a bar that thrived on the East Side of Buffalo from the 1920s to 1970. Situated against the backdrop of a declining neighborhood and a city in the midst of rapid industrialization and transformation, he tells the story of two generations of the Wenzek family, the Polish Americans who ran and lived above the bar (specifically focusing on his father in-law Eddie). Through their lives and memories, Klinkenborg zooms out to encircle a larger urban reality with vivid scenes of blackened smokestacks and gritty railway stations, taking the reader on an expedition through postwar America. With the bar as its pivotal point, the book constructs a rich and complex tale of assimilation, tracing the Wenzek family's journey from the peasant farms in Galicia to the factories of industrial America, finally arriving in the suburbs near the end of 21st century. At times Klinkenborg's dense and meandering prose is a bit distracting, drowning out the voices of some of the main characters. Still, the book is an excellent birds-eye view of the rise and decline of a working-class city and is well worth the read for its historical information and elegant descriptions. "This book is about the passing of industrial America, of its solidity, its stolidity, its hard work and its narrowness," writes Richard Eder for the Los Angeles Times. "The author is not sentimental about it — the gritty world he writes of had a full measure of hardship — but he finds nothing to replace its energy except a gentling, an ease that, by the 1960s, had largely moved out to the suburbs." MORE: Flak Magazine's interview with Klinkenborg |
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