I think a lot about place, about how to capture a place on the page without going too far, without attempting to be encyclopedic. You want to give just the right amount of detail to put someone somewhere without getting in the way of whatever story you are trying to tell. I say this as if I have any real idea of what I try to do on the page—aside from not drown. But fiction, and I’m talking about fiction here, is all about this impossible silence that lurks between what I want to say and what I’m able to say.
In this regard, I’ve been thinking about Bette Howland. Howland was a great Chicago writer who, like most writers, let’s face it, was eventually forgotten in spite of her three stellar books. She was brought back from obscurity not long ago by an editor named Brigid Hughes who found a book of hers called W-3 in the bargain bin outside a bookstore in Manhattan. I think she bought it for a buck. W-3 is a harrowing and often funny account of Howland’s experience on the wing of a Chicago Psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. Howland is able to find comedy pretty much anywhere, and Hughes was so taken with W-3 that she looked further and discovered Howland’s short stories.
As a Chicagoan in exile, I’m always looking for routes back to the city I love. And so reading Howland’s stories for the first time (after Hughes published Howland’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: Selected Stories) was a revelation to me. Where had this Chicago writer been all my life? Howland writes about race and class and religion—like me, Howland was a baffled Jew—with candor and beauty and a kind of self-effacement that doesn't call attention to just how good her prose is. Her “rediscovery” caused a bit of an uproar in the literary world for a few minutes or so before it was on to the next rediscovery, but now, thanks to Hughes, Howland’s back in print, let’s hope for the foreseeable future.
Of her most memorable stories is the achingly titled “Blue in Chicago”—it makes me think of the lake I call home. The story is an account of a road trip to a wedding in the 1980’s. It’s a road trip across Chicago. The Howland character is traveling in a car packed with her mother, her grandmother, her cop uncle, Rudy, and Rudy’s wife, Roxy. The narrator is a divorced mother of two but in this car it’s as if she’s been reduced to the adolescent of this bunch of misfits. The last place she wants to be is where she is and yet she’s got to go to her cousin’s wedding, right? What would it look like if she didn’t turn up at first cousin’s wedding in the suburbs?
What’s so wonderful about the story in terms of place is that it moves from Hyde Park to the farthest reaches of the North Shore. At one point, and this is real local stuff, Rudy, the cop, and his sister, the narrator’s mother, get into an argument about what to take north, Sheridan Road or the Edens Expressway. Chicagoans, particularly north siders, will recognize this dilemma right away. Sheridan or the Edens? But let’s say you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about. That you’ve never been to Chicago, that you think is part of flyover country. (I’ll spare readers my speech on what bullshit this position is. There is no flyover country.) My point here is you don’t need to have ever been on Sheridan Road or the Edens Expressway (or the Kennedy or the Dan Ryan or the Stevenson) to get that the argument is one you might have about a place you know. We all know what it is like when locals fight over directions. It’s basic, the more specific we are about a place, the more present a reader becomes, whether the ground is familiar or not. May seem easy; watch how a master does it:
“Hey? Which way you going?”
My mother sat up, suddenly erect, her striking white head looking all about. She was in black and white from head to toe, stark contrasts: dark mink stole, long evening skirt, pointed shoes. “I thought you were going to take Sheridan.”
“Hah. We’d be there tomorrow, I took Sheridan,” Rudy said, looking over his shoulder and showing the dark spaces in his teeth. He has a loud offended voice, the result of his partial deafness.
“You don’t mean to tell me you’re taking the Edens Expressway?”
“Natcherly. What do you think? I’m taking Edens.”
“Edens. Who ever heard of anything so stupid? Taking Edens.”
My mother was rummaging in her purse. She took out a mimeographed sheet—a map of directions…
To appease his sister, Rudy takes Sheridan on the way home and that’s a great scene, too, but more than I’ve got time for here.
Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He’s just published Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin*, a highly personal collection of essays about literature that Kirkus Reviews calls a “wise, welcoming, heartfelt book.” He is a volunteer with the Norwich Fire Department.*