[Author’s note: In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve known Tyler for just under a year since meeting him at a book fair over in Johnston, Iowa. We’ve run into each other at book fairs in the area since then, and I did attend one he organized in Windsor Heights, Iowa this fall. However, ever since I’ve met him, I’ve been intrigued by this book, and I looked forward to finally getting a chance to read it this October.
Also in the interests of disclosure, Tyler does talk about working with several Democratic political campaigns and during several election cycles in this memoir, including the 2018 election year. My wife was a Democratic candidate for the Iowa House of Representatives that year, although her campaign was not mentioned in this book. All right, possible conflicts of interest disclosed, on to the book.]
Iowa Trouble starts in a whirlwind of action, adventure, trauma, drama, ups and downs, as Granger recalls his life from a millennial growing up in small-town northern Iowa to his later years in the (literally) full-contact world of Iowa politics. By the time the reader gets to The End on page 383 of the book (with several pages of thoroughly cited footnotes following), said reader might be, as I was (metaphorically) a bit winded and overwhelmed with all they have read and learned. It was a wild ride for me. Was it a perfect book, one without flaws? Definitely not, but it gives its readers (including me) some insights into life in Iowa I’ve not seen in other typical Iowa memoirs.
If there was a reader who might be someone this memoir might be geared for, I might be at least one of the readers in question. It is an autobiography of a young millennial man growing up in turn of the 20th century. I am solidly (although I’m not a fan of generational labels) Generation X, but I, like Granger, did grow up in suburban Iowa throughout my youth and beyond.
The tagline for the book on Goodreads is, “A memoir of political violence across Iowa including horror stories from punk-subculture to Iowa gangsters to the politics of the Iowa Caucus.” So, we have punk rock (one of many musical interests of mine), the punk subculture, Iowa gangsters (meaning the underculture of Iowa life) and the politics of the Iowa Caucus (a slight hobby of mine, as I’ll explain later). After I read that tagline, I was convinced I’d want to give it a read.
The reader begins the first chapter seeing Granger grow up in a loving home in northern Iowa and yet contending with bullies and dubious classmates at a now-defunct high school, and it never quite slows down from there. It might have been useful to have at least a quick author’s note laying out his purpose in sharing his story with us. The closest Granger comes to a thesis statement or main idea is this brief commentary in the second part of the first paragraph of the book:
My memoir is a remembrance of victims of Iowa ungodly geopolitics and deadly drug war. These are the weight of memories I have been carrying and wanted to get off my chest. This memoir reflects my past recollections through Iowa, and a few details have been compressed, some of the names and places have been edited to protect people’s identities, and the rest is Ope1!
I believe one of the flaws in the book concerns Granger’s punk rock fandom. For example, he presents an entire chapter of his experiences at the Warped Tour, a rock festival between 1995-2019. The chapter is packed with his experiences at these tours with friends and acquaintances, with a laundry list of mosh pit fracas, boozy sessions at and around the festival, and other similar wild times.
However, what I thought was missing was an exploration of what made these bands so important to Granger. He never really gets into any discussion of what attracted him to the musical genre in the first place, and why he followed more bands than others. One of the few stories coming closest to exploring this, for example, is when he and some party companions go to an out-of-town bar, and out of loyalty to the hometown band, Slipknot requests a couple of hours’ worth of their songs on the bar’s jukebox. We hear about his substance-enhanced nights on the town and at the concert arena, but he doesn’t necessarily articulate what he got out of the scene but a good time. (To be fair, later in the book, he does acknowledge eventually developing a dependency on alcohol and describes his efforts to eventually become sober).
I have to refer back to my own experiences as a writer and an Iowan for this next part of the review. I am a writer, and I am an Iowan, but I do not think I could strictly define myself as an “Iowa writer.” By this, I mean I am a writer who tells authentic stories, fictional or otherwise, about my state in a way that allows readers to have a deeper understanding of the place and its people. In my fiction, at least, I have not done this, as I’ve had other storytelling interests. However, I think many of the writers in recent years have concentrated on an image of Iowa as simply a rural farming hamlet, which I think is overly reductive. You get a clear look at the lives of traditionally rural Iowans in such books as A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley and The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. However, there are many experiences that kind of books never touch on. For example, I’ve lived in Iowa for more than 40 years and I’ve never lived closer than five miles or so to a cornfield.
For its part, Iowa Trouble acts as an important corrective. Again, Granger has lived a far more exciting and dangerous life than I ever did at his age, and as he describes his encounters with gang members, bikers and otherwise, and their activities involving the drug trade, it becomes apparent why Granger has often used aliases in this narrative. One wonders how he managed to escape his twenties without a significant criminal record, although Granger makes it clear he only hung out around the edges of this lifestyle and did not fully partake in it.
I believe Granger’s narrative on this subject does a far better job of showing what draws Iowans into the criminal and drug lifestyle than I expected. His tales help humanize these people and the struggles they face. Considering a good number of them are either dead or missing with whereabouts unknown by the end of Granger’s memoir, I could sense his obligation to represent them accurately and with their humanity intact. He also makes a compelling argument that Republican efforts to deregulate the distribution of prescription and non-prescription drugs, led by local political leaders such as US Senator Chuck Grassley, directly contributed to the explosive growth of the methamphetamine trade in Iowa.
All the above is an intriguing read, but when Granger leaves behind his college days and begins his work as an activist and staff member for various Democratic political campaigns is when the narrative kicks into high gear. Iowa Trouble then becomes an invaluable first-hand look into the political scene of early 21st-century Iowa, as well as the decline and fall of both the Iowa Democratic Party and the famed Iowa Caucuses.
I came at this part of the book with my own unique point of view. I’m a now-retired Iowa journalist who during my time on the job covered some portions of about four Iowa Caucuses, and numerous statewide and local political campaigns. I had first seen how the caucuses worked as a reporter, and I was an interested observer in the Iowa political scene afterward.
Granger explores in great detail the highs and lows of working for political campaign, from the triumphs of working for Barack Obama’s successful reelection campaign in 2012, as well as some congressional races, to the absolute lows of Republican domination in Iowa politics by the start of the 2020’s.
In describing his experiences on the campaign trail, he takes time to lay out who is to blame for the decline of the Democratic Party and liberalism in general within the state. Part of the issue was hostile Republican operatives who were willing to resort to harassment or violence to get their way. Some of Granger’s accounts of his working for campaigns appear to be one long stream of verbal or physical attacks from Republican supporters or voters.
Even during the height of the Obama race, there were supervisors who were more interested in their own advancement than the effectiveness of the race in Iowa. Later, the mistakes of particular candidates (Bruce Braley, cough cough) and their out of touch staff added to the problems. He’s also not a fan of Senator Bernie Sanders and what he terms the “toxic left:” although Granger is far from a conservative, he accuses Sanders of overpromising popular policies to his followers, and he accuses many of those followers of deliberately sabotaging state Democratic campaigns, and he provides considerable journalistic references to support his claims.
By the time I’d read through several chapters on the Iowa political scene, I was seriously concerned with how Granger had managed to get through everything without getting hospitalized or having a mental breakdown. If the Iowa Democratic Party was a person, I’d be accusing it of being in an abusive relationship with Granger and urge him to find someone else. (Thankfully, his wife appears to be a lovely person from his description of her here.)
Again, Iowa Trouble is not without its flaws. The book doesn’t so much end; rather, Granger seems to stop in the middle of the narrative, with a few positivity statements thrown in at the last minute. I missed not knowing what he is up to now and how his family is coming along, just one of many things he could have added to the text to properly frame his experiences and put them into proper context.
However, Iowa Trouble does give its readers a unique view and insight into life in Iowa that they will not see in conventional media or other works of fiction and nonfiction involving the state. For this alone, I am glad I had the chance to finally read Granger’s story. It’s a worthy read for anyone wanting to understand Iowa, its people, and its current culture.
Iowa Trouble is available on Amazon and at Beaverdale Books in Des Moines. It will also be featured at the upcoming Windsor Heights Book Fair next year.
Lovely Midwestern slang essentially meaning “oops” or “I’m sorry.” Just learned about it today and I lived in this area more than 40 years. As I will mention later, I am not a proper Iowa writer.