Crucible
In Crucible, John Sayles tells the multi-layered story of Detroit and “America’s favorite tycoon” as the city and its most famous man wrestle with class conflict and racial tensions.
This expansive story (almost 500 pages) unfolds through a panoply of characters representing the salient issues of the day: Henry Ford, Black and white Ford employees, their families, newspaper reporters, Communist radicals, Brazilian rubber tappers, to name just a few. And literally the biggest character is the River Rouge Ford assembly plant itself, “not a factory, it’s a city,” says our nameless narrator. But with the stock market crash and beginning of the Great Depression, Henry and his son, Edsel, must find ways to keep the factory afloat… including strike-breaking scabs that inflame Ford workers to unionize (anathema to Henry). Sayles captures in granular and dialogue-heavy sequences the strikes, protests, and eventual riots that plague Detroit during this defining era.
Sayles also turns a playful eye to Henry’s quixotic rubber-tree growing operation, otherwise known to history as “Fordlandia,” where the effort to set up a homegrown botanical manufacturing center goes tragicomically awry in the Brazilian jungle. With arch prose and snappy, cinematic dialogue, Sayles assails his readers with an assortment of viewpoints and characters. The large number of characters can be hard to follow at times, but they are so well drawn—and with an ear to authentic dialect—that it is more of an embarrassment of riches. Sayles is a superb writer, and he ducks and weaves adeptly, much like the boxer Joe Louis (who also appears), through the revolving door of events, people, and place scenes.
Crucible is a long book, but the variety of subplots and character evolutions keep the pages turning in Sayles’s inimitable style, bringing the story of 20th-century Detroit to wonderful and vivid life.
