Bich Minh Nguyen | Cheeni Rao | Ha Jin | Local Lit

Local Lit

New books by Chicago-area authors

April 30, 2009

DARK PLACES
Gillian Flynn
Shaye Areheart, $24

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ,” declares Libby Day, the heroine of Gillian Flynn’s compelling new thriller. And it’s no wonder: At age seven, she was the sole survivor of “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas”—a night of gruesome murders that took the lives of her two sisters (strangled, axed) and mother (knifed and shot in the head). Young Libby’s testimony was central to the conviction of her teenage brother, Ben, who’s been in prison for the crime for the past 24 years.

Like Sharp Objects, Flynn’s 2006 debut, Dark Places is deliciously creepy. Now 31 and pretty much a loner, Libby is scraping the bottom of her “Baby Day” charity trust. Loath to get a real job, she thinks she can finagle some cash out of the so-called Kill Club—a group of serial killer/unsolved murder aficionados—when she’s approached to attend a memorabilia show. Some very dedicated club members have pored over the evidence of the case, and they’re convinced Ben is innocent. Libby isn’t so sure. But spurred on by the club, she develops some doubts and sets out to find the truth.

And you will not guess what it is. Flynn follows 250-some pages of masterful plotting and character development with a speedway pileup of pulse-pounding revelations—one WTF! after the next. —Jerome Ludwig

Gillian Flynn
Wed 5/13, 7:30 PM, Barnes & Noble, 1441 W. Webster, 773-871-3610.
Tue 5/19, 7:30 PM, Hopleaf Bar, 5148 N. Clark, bookslut.com.
Wed 5/20, 7 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665.

FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY: A MEMOIR
Jeffrey Brown
Touchstone, $16

With his relentless grid layouts, solipsistic subject matter, and charmlessly crude drawings, Jeffrey Brown has long embodied the most predictable tropes of sensitive alternative comics. His latest volume is, in every sense, more of the same: a series of short stories dedicated to rigorously chronicling every possible hipster autobio cliche. We get the story about how Brown felt awkward around girls as an adolescent, the one about how he came to draw comics, the ones about his experiences with alcohol, drugs, and teachers who didn’t understand his art, and on and on and on.

Four Foot Eleven and Rising Bich Minh Nguyen’s first novel is about two Vietnamese-American sisters trying to stand tall.
By Ed M. Koziarski

How’s Your Relationship With the Monkey God?When Cheeni Rao hit bottom, he turned to Hanuman.
By Anne Ford

Stranger in a Strange Language Ha Jin on what it means for an immigrant to write in the tongue of his adopted country.
By Julia Thiel

Plus: New books by Gillian Flynn, Chesa Boudin, and other local authors

The Author's Sister Chicagoan Catherine Cox reflects on The Sisters Antipodes, Jane Alison's memoir about their parents' mate swapping
Hot Type by Michael Miner

Race and Real Estate Redux A history of bloodsucking practices in Chicago's ghettos reads like today's news.
The Business by Deanna Isaacs

As is de rigueur for this sort of thing, nobody else in the book is graced with either a personality or sustained interests. It’s all about Jeff’s ambivalence, Jeff’s bittersweet life lessons, Jeff’s struggles with his art. Throughout, Brown can be counted on to add that extra detail—the smug smile when he renounces pot, the 15th Chris Ware reference—that pushes his work past tedious and right on into insufferable. —Noah Berlatsky

Jeffrey Brown
Sat 5/2, noon-3 PM, Dark Tower Comics and Collectibles, 4835 N. Western, 773-733-4026.

GRINGO: A COMING OF AGE IN LATIN AMERICA
Chesa Boudin
Scribner, $25

Classic bait and switch: Chesa Boudin opens this collection of travel writings with a promise to chronicle his personal journey from late adolescence—he takes his first trip while still a senior at the University of Chicago Lab School—through early manhood. And that journey stands to be remarkable, given who he is: the son of 60s radicals Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, raised by Weather Underground veterans-cum-public intellectuals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn while his parents served time for murder.

But what Boudin delivers instead is an often shallow series of observations on life in the new century among Latin America’s poor and powerless. He never loses sight of the fact that he is a privileged, young, white American male visiting worlds the inhabitants have no hope of escaping. But his reflections never go deeper than noting how often he plays the “gringo card” to extract himself from tight situations, or to initiate relationships with attractive local women.

If Boudin experienced any personal epiphanies slumming his way through Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, and Guatemala, he doesn’t share them. Instead he gives us pages of sub-Lonely Planet prose interwoven with boilerplate left-wing critiques of the World Bank, the Chicago Boys (a group of Chilean free-market economists trained at the University of Chicago), and the class warfare and hardship their neoliberal agenda has wrought. —Jack Helbig

HOW TO HOLD A WOMAN
Billy Lombardo
OV Books, $16.95

Billy Lombardo’s “novel in stories” offers scenes from the life of a family that’s suffered a terrible tragedy. Unfortunately, the first (misleading) hint of what’s happened doesn’t come until a third of the way through, and the calamity isn’t revealed in full until the final chapter. So while you’re actually reading, the behavior of the characters—particularly the mother, Audrey—makes no sense. Why is she sitting on the toilet in her underwear with “criss-crossed scratches of new blood across her breasts”? Who knows? And since we’ve been kept so completely out of the loop, who cares?

The relationship between the family’s two sensitive, precocious, baseball-mad young sons is well drawn, but the adults remain ciphers. Workshoppy gimmicks like writing a whole chapter in the form of a list don’t help, and neither does Lombardo’s labored prose, including this bit about a coffee maker: “Alan would not wake to its sweet, throaty hissings, nor to the kitchened rills of coffee steam.” Lombardo’s use of Chicago celebrities and settings—Tony Fitzpatrick, the Khyber Pass restaurant, Francis Parker School—is similarly contrived, more name checking than stage setting. And then there’s the concluding sucker punch.. —Kate Schmidt

LOVE AND OBSTACLES
Aleksandar Hemon
Riverhead, $25.95

In “Death of the American Commando,” one of the best stories in Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection, the narrator recalls when, as a kid, he got the chance to wander the school hallways while everyone else was stuck in class. “I relished the squeaking of my shoes, the echoes in the void,” he says. “I felt free. . . . There, but not there.” Straightforward but layered with meaning, it’s a typically insightful Hemon moment—one of the many instances in his work where epiphanies about identity and place emerge from the ordinary.

Hemon’s 2000 book of short works, The Question of Bruno, featured elliptical stories constructed from narrative vignettes, fragments of observation, and a quirky use of his nonnative English. The eight stories that make up Love and Obstacles are more conventional in form and delivery, but they’re populated with his most developed and interesting characters yet—like the shady American expat who introduces Hemon’s alter ego to pot during a stay in Africa, or the arrogant Bosnian poet who both epitomizes and transcends the tragedy of his homeland. Through all the stories runs a resilient belief that there’s meaning in the confusion of everyday life. —Mick Dumke

Aleksandar Hemon
Wed 5/6, 5 PM, University of Chicago, Classics Hall, room 110, 1010 E. 59th, 773-834-8524.
Sun 5/17, 3 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665.
Mon 5/18, 12:30 PM, Borders, 150 N. State, 312-606-0750.

RUNNING FROM THE DEVIL
Jamie Freveletti
William Morrow, $24.99

Jamie Freveletti’s debut novel reads like an extended treatment for the kind of international action thrillers George Clooney has been starring in for the past few years. Her set pieces are frequently gripping, and she has a clear grasp of geopolitical minutiae, particularly regarding U.S. drug policies in Latin America. But the polish isn’t there.

Instead of a Clooney-ready protagonist, Freveletti—herself an ultramarathoner, black-belt aikido master, and trial lawyer—gives us an ass-kicking heroine in Emma Caldridge. The novel opens with Emma’s British Airways flight going down in the Colombian jungle after an apparent hijacking. Surviving the crash, Emma uses her martial arts savvy to avoid being taken hostage by a gang of sadistic drug-cartel guerrillas. These scenes are skillfully intercut with the rescue operation unfurling back in Washington, and things get really harrowing as a series of secret agendas are revealed.

But Freveletti’s prose fails to match the speed of the story she sets out to tell, and the writing often stumbles when it needs to soar. Emma remains frustratingly out of reach—a gleaming action-movie heroine without a compelling interior life. —Leon Hilton

Jamie Freveletti
Wed 5/13, 7 PM, Borders, 1500 16th, Oak Brook, 630-574-0800.
Tue 5/19, 7 PM, Book Stall at Chestnut Court, 811 Elm, Winnetka, 847-446-8880.
Wed 5/20, 7 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665.

WELL READ AND DEAD
Catherine O’Connell
Harper, $13.99

Poor Pauline Cook. After an amorous yacht cruise from Portofino to Greece, followed by a sojourn in Paris, the widowed Chicago socialite (51 but still fetching) learns that her portfolio is down 90 percent due to the Enron implosion. She returns to her Gold Coast penthouse posthaste to sort out her affairs—the ones involving money, anyway. When she tries to retrieve her beloved cat, Fleur, from gal pal Whitney, she finds that Fleur has gone missing. And so has Whitney.

Whitney’s distraught husband, megawealthy lingerie mogul Jack Armstrong, offers Pauline $5 million to find his wife. See, he doesn’t want the cops involved. Because Whitney used to be a man. With a drug problem. Pauline’s leery, but with her fortune at a mere $2 mil (“Hardly enough to live on!”), she agrees.

That’s the setup for Catherine O’Connell’s guilty-pleasure mystery. Her characters are well-read (snippets of Shakespeare, Marvell, and Pope are shamelessly dropped), and several end up dead as Pauline discovers that some of the glitterati got glittery doing dirty deeds.

Though all does not end well, the ride’s fun, as O’Connell skewers the pomposities of the ultrarich for laughs. And while Pauline ultimately learns that money doesn’t buy happiness, well . . . continuing the pursuit isn’t so wrong, is it? Take this one to the beach. —Jerome Ludwig

Catherine O’Connell
Thu 4/30, 7 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665.

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