The Corner

Regular book clubbers will be aware of my intense love affair with anything written by David Foster Wallace (If you're not aware of this, come back next week...). A little over a year ago, when I finished Infinite Jest, I was at a bit of a loss for how to follow it up. I ended up reading Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, the creator of the Wire. Homicide, a non-fiction title which saw Simon follow detectives in the Baltimore police department for a year, was completely different in approach to Infinite Jest, but far more readable, and intensely gripping.

Let’s skip forward to last month when I bought the follow up, The Corner. The premise is similar, although this time co-authored by Ed Burns, a former BPD detective. Together they spent over a year following around life on the street, choosing the corner of West Fayette and Monroe Streets to centre their investigation. The resulting novel follows a broken family, the McCulloughs, who consist of Gary and Fran - separated but both dependant on drugs, and their son DeAndre, who has recently taken to slinging drugs from the corner.

If I’m being really honest, the book is consistently harrowing, At frequent points I had to stop, put it down, and recover from what I was reading. Overdoses are common amongst background players in the book, characters regularly steal, even from close family, and many of the addicts spend a lot of time lying to themselves in order to escape from the reality of their lives. One scene in particular, recounting how the daughter of Ella Thompson, who runs the local rec center, went missing only for her beaten, violated corpse to be found a few days later is particularly moving. Ella channels her grief into a personal mission to try and keep as many of the kids off the corner as possible. She knows she is fighting a losing battle, but her self determination is nothing short of inspirational.

The arguments made in the book will be familiar to anyone who has watched the Wire. That so many kids go on to lead the corner life is explained in very simple terms. The failure of the government, in both their strategies with law enforcement and the school system is disected. In a recently added afterward, the authors describe how a few years after the book, a guy who was running for city mayor held a copy of the Corner up at a press conference to show he understood how to deal with drugs. When a local reporter pointed out the book argues that the criminalisation of drugs has failed, the politician admitted to having not read the book. He was elected for two terms.

The Corner is an incredibly powerful and well written argument. It humanises a set of people that can seem alien to the majority of its readers. At the same time, the effects a lifetime of drug addiction can have are made very clear. While I think the book addresses very clearly what has gone wrong with areas such as West Baltimore, it also attempts to show a path for a better system. That they don’t claim to show an easy path is a credit to the authors. Ultimately only hard work can help get kids off the corners and their parents off drugs.