On the Line Red Baker

By J.D. Reed

In his fourth book Robert Ward has attempted to update a half-forgotten relic of the '30s: the proletarian novel, with its idealized workers and smokestack suburbs. Ward's contemporary laborers are not moved by Woody Guthrie's lyrics; they rock to Mick Jagger and Aretha Franklin. They are not Dead End slum dwellers; they are Viet Nam vets and night-school dropouts. Their collars may be blue, but their lives run in the black: sheepskin jackets and vacations at the beach.

When hundreds of Baltimore steelworkers are laid off from their assembly line in the winter of 1983, however, the comfort abruptly collapses, leaving a wake of rage. Some blame the Japanese or the Government; all confront the terrifying reality that they have what are euphemistically called "nontransferrable skills." At first, hard-drinking Red Baker, former high school basketball star now turning 40, buries his fear. Each day he sees Wanda, his wife of 19 years, off to her waitressing job, and plays one-on-one basketball with their teenage son Ace. "Act like a family man," he tells himself, "keep your eye on the bright days ahead."

But in the row houses, the bait shops and car lots of Baltimore's back streets, jobs are identities; unemployment strips souls down to their working parts. Among the city's new office buildings, Red views another America that "had been pushing me and my friends all along, and we had been so caught up in just staying alive, that we had never once pushed back."

Ward has no manifesto and wisely refuses to use Red as a convenient symbol of the wronged working class. With patience and faith, his hero emerges cold- forged by tragedy, observing that what sets one man apart from another is not brains or money but "what he will risk for love." Ward has taken a similar chance in an age of upwardly mobile fiction. Passion informs every page of this tale without cheapening or glorifying its difficult subjects. They may not build 'em like they used to, but Red Baker is a product that any working fella can damn well be proud of.