Waterloo
by Karen Olsson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Flush with wit, insight, nostalgia and wry humor, Karen Olsson's first novel can be construed as a political story. And so being it is sympathetic to the aging liberals and old-guard Democrats — her book's heroes — struggling to make sense of the shifting winds in Waterloo, "the last little blue dot in Texas." Based on Austin, where Olsson lives and works as a writer at large for Texas Monthly, Waterloo, we are told, was a longtime harbor for "state legislators and musicians, two populations who, despite their very different styles of dress, were united in their desires not to have to work too hard, to be locally renowned, and to drink beer paid for by somebody else."

Beset by an economic boom at the beginning of the 20th Century, Waterloo's less industrious population has in the present day found itself stumbling "through the malls and the office parks, bewildered, uneasy, cursing under their breath ... forever wishing that it had all turned out differently." Although Olsson renders a clear, critical vision of the political forces behind the changing city, providing readers a fair number of intellectual rewards, her story, like the party with which she obviously sympathizes, offers little solace for Waterloo residents — indeed, blue dotters everywhere — being displaced by money- and power-hungry politicians after more than local renown and free beer.

Will Sabert, a stroke-afflicted "old liberal warhorse" congressman, represents what Waterloo once was. He surfaces briefly in the present, bumbles around his kitchen, then dies. Through flashbacks, Sabert's brand of liberalism — "He was an idealist, but not a starry-eyed one" — hangs about the book like a good-hearted specter, and we recognize him as the paterfamilias of Waterloo Democrats. We are charmed when we learn that he was asleep with a hangover during a state Democratic convention walkout in 1952 and nearly missed his chance to make the speech that propelled him into congress, but we also understand why he is the last of his breed when juxtaposed with Olsson's Republican characters — sincere but unthinking candidates fed by career politicians, back-office strategists and schemers.

The story's hero, Nick Lasseter, a college dropout and "debunking" specialist writing for the Waterloo Weekly alternative newspaper, was working on a profile of Sabert when he died. Nick drinks too much, can't produce a worthwhile story for his straight-ahead editor McNally, and he pines after his last serious girlfriend. When McNally orders Nick to write a puff profile on first-term Republican state assemblywoman Beverly Flintic, it is clearly his last chance to salvage his job. In an act of political revenge, "Bones," Nick's boozing lobbyist uncle, feeds Nick some information about a bill Flintic is sponsoring. Nick manages to produce a story of worth, exposing the legislation as an attempt by a development corporation to introduce a deregulated wonderland into a small, impoverished sliver of Waterloo. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Liberal Avenger is back!" Nick says to himself. The article is a small success, but we learn from a young, Rove-like Republican puppet-master named Yates that Flintic has turned herself into a minor character through non-compliance with the "R" party line. Still, things look up for Nick. He finds a new love interest and manages to free himself from the grips of his ex and his editor. But still there is Waterloo, where gentrification and urban renewal are closing live-music institutions and pushing immigrants and young artists out of the neighborhoods they once shared.

The only disappointment in an otherwise well-crafted first novel is that for both literal and figurative residents of Waterloo, Olsson can offer little more than a clear definition and understanding of the difficulties that afflict it and the forces that create them. In Olsson's rendering of the symbolic death of the gentleman politician and the ascendancy of corporate-fueled, hard-line partisan politics we can clearly discern why Waterloo has lost its compass. In Nick Lasseter and his friends we recognize a generation of young liberal people searching for a place to fit in and finding none. Early in the story, during a candidate's speech at a Republican event, we learn that Nick had "At one time ... seen all this sort of talk as a facade and imagined himself capable of puncturing it ... But gradually he'd concluded that the people doing the posturing believed in their own postures. There was no simple underlying truth behind or beyond." In Waterloo, there is only the changing landscape.

— Conor Risch (crisch@coolehmag.com)