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Summary
Summary
National Book Award finalist Thompson "offers precisely the kind of beautifully crafted, intelligent, imaginative writing that serious readers crave" ("USA Today"). "City Boy" is her novel of romance, Chicago style.
Author Notes
Jean Thompson is the author, most recently of Who Do You Love: Stories, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundations, she lives in Urbana, Illinois.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Thompson (Wide Blue Yonder, etc.) dissects the breakup of a marriage in cool, convincing detail, capturing the fraught day-to-day dynamics of conjugal life in this neatly crafted novel. Jack Orlovich and Chloe Chase, both in their mid-20s, have just moved to an apartment on the gritty near-north side of Chicago, Chloe's new corporate job at a downtown bank. Jack has given up teaching high school English in order to write a novel, which gives him plenty of free time to joust with the couple's noisy new neighbor, Rich Brezak, a surly, womanizing young man with a penchant for full-volume reggae music. During frequent trips upstairs to ask for a lowering of the volume, Jack becomes involved in the lives of Brezak and the other wild kids upstairs, whom he finds repellant but also admirable, the way they "didn't try to pretend that one thing was its opposite, or that they didn't feel what they felt." Chloe, busy at work, grows increasingly disenchanted with their home life, and Jack begins to suspect that she is cheating on him. Addicted to his beautiful, high-maintenance wife, he loves her more than she will ever love him, but he doesn't usually like her, especially as she begins to drink too much. In tracing the widening fissures in the couple's relationship, Thompson paints a compelling picture of Chloe's fundamental dishonesty and the insecurities of a woman often hated or loved unreasonably for her beauty. Thompson's quiet observations sometimes verge on the simplistic, and Jack and Chloe can seem rather blandly archetypal, but the gradual unfolding of motive and shifting of sentiments reveals much about the mechanics of love, betrayal, lies and jealousy. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A would-be writer's painful journey toward self-understanding, as seen in this thickly plotted fourth novel from veteran Thompson (Wide Blue Yonder, 2002, etc.). The primary viewpoint character is Jack Orlovich, a Californian-born Northwestern University student who's smitten with forthright beauty Chloe Chase (whom he encounters in a poetry-writing class), marries her on the rebound from their tense subsequent meetings, and settles down with in Chicago, as a sometimes-employed househusband, while Chloe supports them as a junior bank executive. Fissures in their marriage's surface emerge, then gradually widen. Chloe's binge drinking leads her to blame Jack's failure to be breadwinner. Complaining about loud music played by their scruffy upstairs neighbor Rich Brezak ("Hippie Pothead Rasta Boy") brings Jack into unplanned intimacy with Brezak's female mÉnage--notably, a sexually inviting crippled girl called Ivory. The moribund loneliness of their apartment building's other tenants clutches at them like a communicable disease. Meanwhile, the issue of starting a family pushes Chloe and Jack nearer the edge; a visit from her ebullient parents climaxes at a Cubs' game where Jack tangles with a drunken fan; and exploding fireworks during a rooftop July 4th celebration maim and disfigure another of Rich's girls. Thompson subtly communicates Jack's unvoiced fear that the perpetually stoned, reckless Brezak is what he himself may become--an insight borne out by the long, packed climax, in which infidelity, unwanted pregnancy, violent death, recriminations, and partings fold in on one another with the accelerating force of a sentence of doom. It's all rather too much--though there's a whiff of real tragic power in Jack's tardy realization that "Chloe was what he'd had inside him . . . . Now he would be like anyone else, shrunk down to normal." An overfamiliar tale, redeemed considerably by solid writing and sobering empathy. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Apartment buildings are lively microcosms and, in the right literary hands, can generate dramatic situations rife with irony and revelation. Thompson, author most recently of Wide Blue Yonder (2002), makes the most of a seen-it-all four-flat in blustery Chicago in this compulsively readable tale about a phenomenally toxic marriage. New to the city, handsome but oh-so-juvenileack, a wanna-be but hopelessly inept writer, and Chloe, his beautiful and untrustworthy bank-executive wife, find themselves contending with unsavory neighbors: pissed-off and racist Mr. Dandy, deaf and widowed Mrs. Lacagnina, and a loud, rude, and studly young pothead living above.ack can't resist the partying upstairs, especially a regular on the scene, a wry young woman with a withered leg, and ambitious Chloe increasingly resents having to support her floundering spouse. The wild mischief and mayhem these two smart, complicated, and self-loathing spoiled brats enact are wickedly intriguing, and suspense runs high as Chloe sneaks around andack runs violently amok. Like Maxine Chernoff andoyce Carol Oates, Thompson, a stellar stylist, offers unexpected twists, piercingly insightful descriptions, venomous dialogue, and unfailing empathy in a galvanizing novel of hazardous love. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Those familiar with Thompson's earlier novel, Wide Blue Yonder, or her story collection, Who Do You Love (a National Book Award finalist in 1999), will find similar themes in this tale of the sad events that ensue when West Coast fantasy meets Midwestern reality. Jack, a twentysomething product of California's suburbs, is a part-time teacher and would-be writer striving to become authentically urban and urbane in Chicago. His dreams are thwarted by his failure to grow up and inability to cope with life in his gritty neighborhood lurching toward gentrification. His beautiful young wife, Chloe, is equally immature and equally unable to make adult-level choices while juggling a drinking problem with the stresses and temptations of a fast-track management internship. Add to this mix some creepy neighbors who indulge in awesome amounts of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, and bad times are virtually assured. Although the relentlessly shallow characters can induce reader impatience, the author's assured and stylish prose brings them and their mostly self-created predicaments to convincing life. For most fiction collections.-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
