Steve Corbett: New novel takes aim at local racism

After years of covering the Wyoming Valley in newspaper columns and on the radio, Steve Corbett is now depicting the area through his newest novel, “Paddy’s Day in Trump Town” — and if you ask him, it’s not a pretty picture.

The novel tells the story of a loose group that Corbett calls “the Irish Guys,” including a character called Pug Mahoney who is described on the blurb on the novel as a “psycho first-time voter,” who, along with the rest of the Irish Guys, “will do anything to guarantee President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election.”

“It’s about Wilkes-Barre,” Corbett said in a phone interview on Thursday, voice booming just as it had for years on local radio. “It’s set in the city; it’s loaded with local landmarks.”

It’s a city Corbett says he knows well, having lived and worked in it for 17 years, formerly as a columnist for the Times Leader. And it’s a city that Corbett describes as having a dark, bigoted underbelly.

“At one point, I called Wilkes-Barre, pound for pound, the most racist city in America,” he said.

Corbett says he sees extreme racial and ethnic tribalism as a major issue in our area, and it’s something that he said informed the story of the novel.

And according to Corbett, it’s something he’s seen first hand.

“I grew up with these guys,” he said of some of the people in our area who inspired the novel’s “Irish Guys.”

“These Irish clubs, that’s what they’re all about,” he went on. “That kind of bigotry is what drives those kind of clubs. They believe that they are the chosen ones.”

This, he thinks, is part of what drove Trump’s popularity in Luzerne County.

“Donald Trump came to town and he validated their bigotry,” Corbett said.

Corbett said during the course of the interview that extreme tribalism has become an inherent part of Irish American culture, but he said that it doesn’t need to be that way.

Corbett points to one of the characters in the novel, Francis Finnerty, who he described as one of the novel’s heroes. A core facet of Finnerty’s identity can be summed up in a simple sentence he says: “All I ever wanted was to be Irish.”

“I grew up like that,” Corbett said. “I’m a real proud, belligerent, radical Irish-American.”

But pride in one’s ethnicity is a very different thing from full-throated bigotry, and Corbett says the novel argues a key part of Irish American culture strays too far into the latter category.

“Too many Irish Americans became the very oppressors that their families fled in the old country,” he said.

Corbett describes his novel as a “bleak, disturbing read,” despite being punctuated throughout by a dark, rye humor.

“It takes you inside the head of white, working class bigots,” he said. “They hate everybody, including themselves.”

While Corbett acknowledges that plenty of people in this area will likely hate the points he’s trying to make in the novel — and, he said, in this very article — he said it is important to look unflinchingly at the problems in the culture.

“If you wanna slay the dragon, you have to face the dragon,” he said.

Corbett says his novel takes place in an alternate version of early 2020, culminating in a Wilkes-Barre St. Patrick’s Day Parade that ultimately did not actually happen, focusing on some of Trump’s most hardline loyalists in the area.

“This book is a warning across the bow,” he said. “This novel is a warning that what happened in 2016 can happen again in 2020.”

If you are interested in Corbett’s novel, it is available on Amazon (and is available for free if you are a subscriber to Kindle Unlimited) and from Barnes & Nobel, but he encourages you to order it through an independent bookstore.

“I want people to know that we as a nation as a state as a community as a city whether you live in Scranton or Wilkes-Barre or any of the patch towns in between, we stand wobbly at the crossroads of the future, and unless we take direct challenge against the powerful, the bigots, we will fail,” he said. “Frankly, I’m rubbing people’s noses in their own hatred.”