This is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held it Together by  Jon Mooallem Random House 336 pp.

By Ann Fabian

Life in our cloud of viral worries has been making it hard for me to sit still and read books.  Escape reading just wasn’t working for me.   Victorian novels made me grumpy.   Then a couple of weeks ago, I found my library’s cache of audio books, downloaded a stack of plague listening and took long walks with bleak books.  Oddly distracted from our current terror, I covered miles listening to John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (2005) and miles more with Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (2002).

Antibodies, I thought, books to get us set for the next pandemic.  So I was ready for Jon Mooallem’s new book, This is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held it Together.   Mooallem tells the story of the earthquake that rattled Alaska on Good Friday, March 27, 1964.  Mooallem likes elaborate titles, but he’s an elegant writer, a fine chronicler of disaster and a smart student of the ironies and contradictions of contemporary culture.

Mooallem also walks.  Or so I gather from “the WALKING podcast,” which has nothing to do with earthquakes.  It simply plays the sounds of Mooallem’s walks near his Bainbridge Island home.  Occasionally, a garbage truck or a neighbor interrupts but most of the time we listen as Mooallem crunches along through the woods.  The podcast is peculiar but it is kind of soothing.  Maybe it runs against Mooallem’s wordless meditation, but I bought the audio version of This is Chance! and took the book out walking.              

I’ve admired Mooallem’s writing for a long time.  I used to ask my students who were thinking about extinction to read portions of his Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.  It’s a smart book with good characters and startling observations about the workings of American culture.  Last summer, the New York Times Magazine published Mooallem’s remarkable account of the “Camp Fire” that destroyed Paradise, California, in November 2018.  He described the ways that climate-fueled fire brought us to “a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live.”

This is Chance! describes a more innocent time, when for many Anchorage residents the earthquake was only a disaster.  In the hours that followed the quake, tsunamis brought catastrophes to Native villages.   

The March earthquake struck Anchorage, a city of about 100,000 people poised to be Alaska’s urban future. The city had a theater, a newly built J.C. Penney, and local TV and radio stations.  Radio reporter Genie Chance sits at the book’s heart, but Mooallem conjures its soul from Thornton Wilder’s 1938 drama, Our Town.  Locals were rehearsing a production when the earthquake struck.  And that coincidence opens things up for Mooallem, lending his Anchorage community depth and a sort of cosmic reach. 

In a nod to Wilder, Mooallem starts with a cast of characters, divides the story into three acts and borrows the play’s opening lines to begin the book.  Like Wilder, Mooallem wants us to feel the weight behind the mundane details of ordinary lives.  And like the play’s Stage Manager, Mooallem adopts an easy “omniscience about the past and future, able to see the full sweep of time around each present moment that unfolds onstage.”  While the book’s earthquake drama played out over three days, Mooallem gives his characters their life histories.  What brought these men and women to Alaska?  What demons destroyed their lives?  What cancers, addictions, plane crashes and brain lesions blotted them out?   

But alive or dead, Genie Chance is the book’s great character, more Mooallem’s discovery than his invention.  Chance is Mooallem’s source, the voice of the story—his witness, reporter and chronicler.  She left her daughter with 30 boxes filled with her tapes, diaries and letters.  Mooallem, with his reporter’s gift for listening, must have been amazed by the chance discovery of Chance’s trove of boxes.  Whatever time-bending license Mooallem took from Wilder’s play, Chance’s collection (along with notes from visiting sociologists) lets him stick close to his characters and, remarkably, to write dialogue in their own words.      

Chance, her car salesman husband and their three children moved from Texas to Anchorage in 1960, joining the rush prompted by statehood.  She went to work at KENI, the local radio station.  On the afternoon of the quake, she’d gone downtown on an errand with her son.  Streets buckled, buildings fell.  Chance witnessed the destruction, went to the radio station and went to work.  For the next several hours, Chance’s was one voice on the air. 

Talking to Anchorage on the radio, Chance settled the shattered city.  Her voice brought a community together.  Ordinary people took charge.  “A kind of human infrastructure was snapping into place where the built environment gave way,” Mooallem writes.  Her voice carried the community’s news over the air to a world outside Alaska.  Within few days, reporters, politicians and a group of sociologists from Ohio State’s Disaster Research Center arrived, thinking they would take charge and sort things out.  They found Chance and her neighbors in Anchorage already managing pretty well. 

This is Chance! is humane book with a soulful story. But listening to it in the days of this plague, a couple of things jumped out. Mooallem recounts the many ways the people of Anchorage found strength by coming together.  People showed up at the Anchorage Public Safety Building, volunteering to take in neighbors, make sandwiches and search for survivors.  We’d take in neighbors too, but the corona virus keeps us from coming together, from doing the very things that helped resurrect a community in Anchorage.  

And unlike Anchorage, we don’t have a world outside to come to our rescue. The earthquake (9.2 on the Richter scale, the second strongest on record) sent its shocks around the world, but the disaster did not.

One last thing.  As a walking-reader sometimes I shout out loud, like the mad man on the corner.  Listening to John Barry’s book, I yelled a lot, particularly at the blind foolishness of politicians.  But I let out a last yell late in the book when Barry described the influenza virus waging its last vicious attack on the Native villages of the Arctic.  Mooallem’s earthquake took a catastrophic toll there too.  Near the end of the book, he tells us that the earthquake killed about 115 people around the state, only nine of them in Anchorage.

Those dead aren’t part of Mooallem’s story; they aren’t really part of Our Town.  I wish I could send Mooallem back to Alaska with time and money enough to find the story of those missing dead.  He could find it, I know.  And generations of walking readers would be grateful for his telling.   

Ann Fabian is immediate past President of the Society of American Historians.