South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Sam Anderson explores the vortex that is Oklahoma City
About three-fourths of the way through “Boom Town,” his nuanced, immersive portrait of Oklahoma City, Sam Anderson takes a walk. It isn’t just any sort of walk — but then, Oklahoma City isn’t just any sort of town. It’s a walk back and forth through the city’s history. Anderson has just attended a Century Chest celebration at the First Lutheran Church, at which a time capsule, sealed 100 years before, has been unveiled.
Anderson is skeptical; “Time capsules are notoriously disappointing,” he writes. “They are supposed to be magical existential wormholes to a lost reality, but instead they are almost always empty, damaged, full of junk — further depressing evidence (as if we needed any) of the absolute tyranny of time.”
The passage evokes its author deftly: the inside outsider, captivated but unconvinced, part of the collective while also essentially apart. The same might be said of Oklahoma City, which was created in a single day, April 22, 1889, when across the span of a few hours the Oklahoma Land Run brought 10,000 residents to a place that had been occupied, previously, by no one.
Surprisingly, however, Oklahoma City’s time capsule contains real treasures: “A wooden Choctaw bow. A 1913 phone book, plus a clunky old-timey phone to make calls with. A judge’s gavel. A glass container of wheat.” Anderson is moved — or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he is overwhelmed. He drives out to the edge of the city, “as near as I could to ... what the settlers of 1889 called the ‘Pott Line,’ because the territory on the other side belonged to the Potawatomi Indians.” This is one of the places the Land Run began.
For the rest of the day, he walks back into downtown, through empty streets and failed shopping centers, past prefab houses and piles of dirt. The landscape is forsaken. “OKC was more than just a city,” Anderson reflects, in the midst of the desolation; “it was an existential crusade, an attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness, of human life, in this endless sea of nothing. It had to keep booming, because whenever it stopped to rest, the prairie rose up and tried to swallow it.” This is the strength, the unlikely triumph, of “Boom Town,” which takes a city almost universally overlooked and turns it into a metaphor for, well, everything.
Anderson is not a native; he had never been to Oklahoma City until he was sent there, in 2012, to write a magazine piece about the Thunder, the city’s improbable — and improbably successful — NBA team. What he finds, though, is not just a basketball story but a kind of vortex.
“Is it possible to control an explosion?” Anderson wonders at the outset, and the question lingers throughout the book. In part, this is because Oklahoma City is itself explosive, a great nothing that out of sheer will spun itself into something, only to flirt with nothingness again. In part, it has to do with what has happened there.
Underneath it all, the longing and disruption, echoes the ghost of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, blown up by Timothy McVeigh on April 19, 1995. “I got to know people in Oklahoma City,” Anderson informs us,
“who would tell me everything about their lives, every inch of the deep history of the city, but they could not talk to me about anything they saw on April 19.”
The Oklahoma City bombing was the most destructive terrorist attack in the U.S. before 9/11; 168 people died in the explosion. And yet, for much of “Boom Town” the tragedy is as absent as the negative space where the Murrah building used to stand.
At first, it seems like an oversight, a loose end, something tugging at us from just beyond the page. Anderson, however, knows what he is doing, which is less to create a history of Oklahoma City than to map it out as psychic space. If no one can tell him what they experienced in the tragedy, how can he tell us? The story has to exist in the interstices, to be intuited as much as told.
What Anderson is tracing is the creation of a narrative, the story the city tells about itself.
David Ulin, the author of “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms With Los Angeles,” is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.