Cold Type

July 14, 2014
Against the backdrop of a fictional newspaper strike in 1994, Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter Araton's (Driving Mr. Yogi) novel explores the decline of unions as the the business of news changed, and even the relationships between fathers and sons separated generationally and by class. When New York City's blue collar paper, the Tribune, is bought by a conservative Englishman, he institutes policies designed to force a drivers' strike, which in turn leads to strikes among other unionized workers at the paper. Jamie Kramer comes from a pro-union family and his father, Morris, shop steward for the paper's printers, expects that Jamie will not cross the picket line. But the decision for the journeyman reporter supporting an ex-wife and toddler isn't so easy, particularly when his former wife may move to Seattle with their son to help start an online bookstore. The author uses Jamie's and his father's estrangement to explore scarred family dynamics and the historically ugly blue collar and union mentality on race. Jamie and his little boy, on the other hand, are pure love; the toddler's baby-talk is sweet rather than cloying. The narrative itself is less interesting than its parts, though the denouemont is clever and hopeful.

June 1, 2014
A story about a newspaper, a family, a strike, and social and economic change-sketched against the backdrop of New York in the 1990s. New York Times writer and columnist Araton knows newspapers and knows New York, and in his seventh book (and first novel), he explores clashes more personal, more searing, more universal than any of the sports stories he's told before. Cold Type is a tale about collisions: between generations, between classes, between different crafts in a rapidly changing economy, between the past and the future, between father and son. These are collisions that no one wanted and that no one could avoid. They break the rules, they break apart families, they create heartbreak. They are as ancient as the hills and as current as today's news-and the existential crisis that surrounds today's newspapers. By crossing a picket line that includes his father, a hard-boiled shop steward, the reporter Jamie Kramer crosses a moral line, as well-and the book's action and its interest revolve around what happens on both sides of those two lines. Tensions rise with the unions out on strike, but management and union defectors ensure that copies of the paper are out on the street. Before long, union workers drift back to their jobs-setting up one of the freshest surprise endings of the stale genre of the newspaper novel.A novel with a strong whiff of the New York Daily News strike of 1990-1991-and with ominous foreshadowings of what the protagonist describes as "this internet thing everybody's talking about.''

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