EMERALD CITY

Gangsters, college kids, sports grifters, and a deaf businessman collide in Birnbaum’s sprawling debut saga of corruption in Seattle.

At Seattle’s fictional Myriadal College, student Benison Behrenreich struggles on the basketball team, which recruited him only because his wealthy father, Marc, bribed the athletic director. Marc, meanwhile, is under investigation for defrauding the government with bogus telephone-translation services for deaf people like himself—a scam masterminded by Mafioso Johnny Raciti. As part of another enterprise, Johnny has his granddaughter Julia recruit Peter Fosch, an off-road motorcycling phenom, to transport a mysterious drug for the mysterious “Mr. K,” a Russian émigré crime lord. Things get further complicated when Julia and Peter fall in love, and the latter gets caught between Johnny’s and Mr. K’s mutual betrayals. Percolating beneath these lurid plot points are emotionally fraught details involving child molestation and family strife. Birnbaum’s meandering yarn unfolds in scenes of woozy drug binges, financial intrigue, tough-guy posturing, grisly killings, and gruesome cleanups; at times, it reads like a mashup of David Foster Wallace and Mickey Spillane, rewritten by James Joyce. Birnbaum is a gifted writer who crafts evocative imagery—“Sunlight bloomed ambient dust like gaseous urine”—and excels at conjuring atmosphere in every context, from retail checkout lines to basketball drills (“God damn it, Jonesy. This time set a screen, don’t just sidle up to Gabe like you wanna tell him about daffodils”). His skills sometimes lack discipline, however, and he has a tendency to wrap empty clichés in dense, cryptic language: “Adolescent angst, far from liminal, was the hazy dawn of his becoming.” He also overwrites banal events, as when Julia washes her face: “A hard scrub using imported soap, a coarse brown lump coagulated by whole grains, whittled the whiteheads gorging on oils in her nasal nooks and crannies.” Four novels’ worth of plot jockey for space in these pages, but they’re elbowed out by superbly observed scenes that nonetheless lack dramatic tension or narrative import. When Birnbaum figures out which of his characters’ actions and emotions are important, he’ll be a writer to reckon with.

An ambitious but self-indulgent portrait of a city’s underbelly.