'Love' gets into your head
By Maria Russo |
December 9, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
"LOVE and Shame and Love:" It looks more like a line of free-form, possibly adolescent poetry than the title of a novel, with the repeated "love" trying to buffer the fragile "shame"-filled center. Then again, that verbal image applies well to Alexander Popper, known to all simply as Popper, the melancholy, searching main character of Peter Orner's third work of fiction. With its short and evocative chapters, its charged and playful language, its movement to and fro in time, the novel is indeed poetic. It's epic too, encompassing Popper's life from childhood into his early 30s as well as chunks of the life spans of his parents and two of his grandparents, with check-ins on various other relatives.
The city of Chicago also figures prominently, one of several webs ensnaring Popper. Others are his family's long-ignored but still insistent Jewishness and the fractured, bewildering culture of the 1970s and 80s. Then there is his near-overwhelming desire for women, for love, a need so devouring it hobbles him romantically. Teeming yet not hyperactive, full of emotion without being mushy, elegant yet intimate, this is a book that gets into your head and makes itself at home there.
We've met Popper before, in Orner's first book, a collection called "Esther Stories," which contained a section devoted to a Jewish family in Chicago named Burman. In these linked stories, three generations grapple with the surprising demise of Esther, as a child anointed the star of the family, who ends up divorced and apparently mentally unstable, living back home with her parents and still feuding with her older brother. The narrator is that brother's adult son, and in each very short, powerfully condensed story he excavates some small aspect of his relatives' lives, trying to understand why the family is so emotionally stunted.
In "Love and Shame and Love," Orner's fifth book (in between were a haunting novel, "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo," about a Midwestern Jew working on a desolate mission in Africa, and two oral histories, "Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives" and "Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives"), he has returned to that earlier story. The central character's surname has been changed, and he has an older brother instead of a younger one, but the other details of his family are unmistakable. Esther's plight becomes just a thread in the life of Alexander Popper as Orner gradually lays bare the family's secrets and lies, its unfulfilled yearnings.
What place can Popper possibly claim in the new Chicago, the new world? The family moves to upscale Highland Park soon after his birth, and Orner locates an ambient menace in the 1970s childhood that for Popper, "robbed of his birthright" as a city kid, plays out as a kind of suburban gothic. The spine of the novel is the always crackling bond between Popper and his sharp-minded, sharp-tongued girlfriend Kat.
Still, "Love and Shame and Love" doesn't end so much as fade into a Lake-Michigan-in-winter mood of quiet devastation. It doesn't grab for glory, but it wins a big share anyway.
The city of Chicago also figures prominently, one of several webs ensnaring Popper. Others are his family's long-ignored but still insistent Jewishness and the fractured, bewildering culture of the 1970s and 80s. Then there is his near-overwhelming desire for women, for love, a need so devouring it hobbles him romantically. Teeming yet not hyperactive, full of emotion without being mushy, elegant yet intimate, this is a book that gets into your head and makes itself at home there.
We've met Popper before, in Orner's first book, a collection called "Esther Stories," which contained a section devoted to a Jewish family in Chicago named Burman. In these linked stories, three generations grapple with the surprising demise of Esther, as a child anointed the star of the family, who ends up divorced and apparently mentally unstable, living back home with her parents and still feuding with her older brother. The narrator is that brother's adult son, and in each very short, powerfully condensed story he excavates some small aspect of his relatives' lives, trying to understand why the family is so emotionally stunted.
In "Love and Shame and Love," Orner's fifth book (in between were a haunting novel, "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo," about a Midwestern Jew working on a desolate mission in Africa, and two oral histories, "Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives" and "Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives"), he has returned to that earlier story. The central character's surname has been changed, and he has an older brother instead of a younger one, but the other details of his family are unmistakable. Esther's plight becomes just a thread in the life of Alexander Popper as Orner gradually lays bare the family's secrets and lies, its unfulfilled yearnings.
What place can Popper possibly claim in the new Chicago, the new world? The family moves to upscale Highland Park soon after his birth, and Orner locates an ambient menace in the 1970s childhood that for Popper, "robbed of his birthright" as a city kid, plays out as a kind of suburban gothic. The spine of the novel is the always crackling bond between Popper and his sharp-minded, sharp-tongued girlfriend Kat.
Still, "Love and Shame and Love" doesn't end so much as fade into a Lake-Michigan-in-winter mood of quiet devastation. It doesn't grab for glory, but it wins a big share anyway.
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