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The setting is Milwaukee, Wisconsin—if not America’s heart, then at least its liver—home to an array of breweries and abandoned factories and down-on-their-luck Eastern European immigrants. The year is 1989.
Revolutions are sweeping through the nations of the Eastern Bloc. Communism is unraveling. And nobody feels this unraveling more piquantly than Yuri Balodis—a fifteen-year-old first-generation American living with his Latvian-immigrant parents in Milwaukee’s Third Ward.
It’s a turbulent time. And when Yuri falls in love with Hannah Graham—the daring daughter of a prominent local socialist—chaos ensues. Within weeks, Yuri is ensnared by both Hannah and socialism. He joins the staff of the Socialist Worker. He starts quoting Lenin and Marx indiscriminately.
His parents, of course, are horrified and deeply saddened. They try to educate him, to show him why, in their opinion, communism has ruined so many lives. But Yuri is stubborn. And his ideological betrayal will have more serious consequences than breaking his parents’ hearts.
Red Weather is by turns funny and bittersweet, tinged with a rueful comic sense that will instantly remind you of the absurd complications of love. Pauls Toutonghi’s stunning debut novel is at once reminiscent of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.
The stunningly quiet ending reverberates back through the whole book, throwing fresh light on both its weaknesses and its real ambition. The final dated section takes place on Friday, May 4, 1990; although Toutonghi never mentions it, that was the day the Supreme Soviet Council announced the restoration of Latvian independence. This correlation goes unremarked by the characters. But in ending his novel on this day, Toutonghi silently allows Yuri to disown his ideological posturing, and reconciles the politics of the father with those of the son. It's a touching act of homage from a novelist who is foolish and brave enough to sacrifice his own prospects of writing an original novel for the greater good of a love letter to his father.
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