Detroit In Books, Part I—Roberto Bolaño's 2666

The first in a, most likely, annoyingly sporadic series about the portrayal of Detroit in literature and other published works.   

    Detroit, despite being founded 310 years ago, and in this time offering up plenty of accessible metaphors and ironies for its millions of inhabitants who came from all parts of the world, each one a character and each with a tale to tell; has oddly enough never produced one great novelist, resulting, of course, in untold untold stories.  Yes, there are the crime novelists Elmore Leonard and Donald Goines, but when it comes to literary fiction Detroit's preeminent voice is nowhere to be found.   Speculatively, Joyce Carol Oates could have taken this mantle had she continued to live in the city and write 7,000 books about it, instead of leaving some 40-odd years ago and writing 7,000 books about other things.  There are also those who would give the title, by default it seems, to Jeffery Eugenides based solely on his second (and most recent) novel Middlesex which won the Pulitzer prize in 2003.  I'm going to go out on a limb though and predict there will never be a statue of Jeffery Eugenides in Detroit.
    So, given the dearth of Detroit literary novels, you'd think it would be a welcome development when Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean writer seemingly destine for a Nobel Prize had he not passed away so unjustly at the age of 50, chose to use Detroit as a setting in his near-universally acclaimed final novel 2666.  Unfortunately it is not a welcome development, but a peculiar, cringe-inducing episode.
    The Detroit part of this 900-page book is only 22 pages long, and comes as a surprise after Bolaño has deftly taken the reader through several parts of Europe.  I don't know for certain that Bolaño never came to Detroit, but based on his brief description of the city it seems quite evident he did not.  And yes, this is quibbling, and no, it doesn't really affect anything in the large scheme of things, but it just would have been nice if there were a greater amount of verisimilitude. 
    In the novel, a reporter for a New York-based magazine called Black Dawn, Oscar Fate, is sent to Detroit to interview one of the founders of the Black Panthers, a man named Barry Seaman.  Seaman's neighborhood is described as follows:  "The neighborhood looked like a neighborhood of Ford and General Motors retirees.  As he walked he looked at the buildings, five and six stories high, and all he saw were old people sitting on the stoops or leaning out the windows smoking."  Later, when Seaman is giving a speech in a church, he describes California for the benefit of his Detroit audience like this: "People live in houses not apartment buildings, he said, and then he embarked on a comparison of houses (one-story, at most two-story), and four- or five-story buildings where the elevator is broken one day and out of order the next." 
    The problem here, of course, is that Detroit is primarily a city of houses and not apartment buildings; and one of the fundamental aspects of the city is that autoworkers, not just those from Ford and GM but also those who worked for Chrysler, were able to buy their own homes.  Neighborhoods full of apartment buildings, the way Bolaño describes them, don't really exist in Detroit.
    Bolaño's writing often fluctuates between the real and the imagined, between the conscious and unconscious, he plays a lot with our sense of reality, and it is often his intent to keep the reader guessing it seems.  But the Detroit part of 2666 is confusing for its odd attempts at exactness, like when he calls it the "Detroit-Wayne County airport" which isn't what anyone calls it, or when the Oscar Fate character "...headed down Woodward Avenue and checked out the downtown.  He had a cup of coffee and toast for breakfast at a Greektown diner."  And that's it, that's as descriptive as Bolaño gets when it comes to downtown, as though his information was gleaned from an in-flight magazine.
    The book moves from Detroit to Mexico, to the most memorable section of the novel, "The Part About The Crimes."  After reading this part, with it's gruesome descriptions of hundreds of murdered women and girls, you'll wish it had stayed in Detroit; but the truth is the Detroit part is quickly and easily forgotten.