Truth Like the Sun

Lynch (Border Songs) offers a new entry into the prominent "city portrait" novels with his newest, which aims to do for Seattle what Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City did for St. Louis or Erik Larson's nonfiction The Devil in the White City for Chicago. The split narrative opens with the unveiling of the Space Needle in 1962 and the rise of its charismatic young architect, Roger Morgan, then ahead jumps to 2001, when the 70-year-old Morgan is running for mayor of the city he helped put on the map. Unfortunately, he's hounded by Helen Gulanos, an ambitious reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who stumbles upon sordid aspects of Roger's past. As Lynch shuttles back and forth between early 60's idealism and contemporary political cynicism, a host of subplots are explored from the standpoint of Morgan's glory days%E2%80%94hobnobbing with Elvis Presley and pursuing capitalist expansion by any means necessary, even if it means fraternization with Seattle's criminal underworld%E2%80%94which are then contrasted with Helen's hunger for truth and the Morgan campaign's attempts to bury the scandal in the days leading up to the primary. Executed at a heady clip, the book gets some special traction from posing capitalism under the menacing shadow of Khrushchev against pre-9/11 apathy. But characters like Morgan and Gulanos are ultimately no more than values, their functions and destiny foregone, in service of awfully small stakes. (May)