« Happy Birthday, O.E. | Main | So Much More Attractive Inside the Moral Kiosk »
Hail to the Bright One
Tom McNamee wrote a wonderful profile on the state of Chicago fiction in yesterday's Sun-Times.
American fiction has moved on in its purposes, ratcheting down from the grand social critiques of an earlier day (such as Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Wright's Native Son) to themes of personal identity and relationships (almost anything on the Oprah's Book Club reading list). And Chicago itself has moved on -- either up or down, depending on your depths of nostalgia for the colorfully bleak. A hard town that forged hard writers has grown a bit soft, which is nice, and a bit generic, which is not.
McNamee's piece is accompanied by nice profiles of leading lights Aleksandar Hemon, Stuart Dybek, Elizabeth Crane, David Mamet and, of course, Saul Bellow. But what really struck me is McNamee taking the time to discuss the lower-profile but no less essential The Dollar Store, THE2NDHAND and Other Voices.
Meanwhile, across town, while I have to applaud the Tribune for reviewing Gary Stochl's street photography monograph On City Streets: Chicago, 1964-2004, once again the Trib's timing is no less than baffling. Stochl is a major, recently-discovered talent, who has been doing exemplary street photography for forty years but didn't have his first major exhibition until this year, when the Chicago Cultural Center staged an excellent retrospective which I had the pleasure of viewing last week.
The trouble is that the exhibition closed yesterday, the same day that the Trib's review of Stochl's book appeared. You'd think that the Trib could publish their review a few weeks before the exhibition closed, to give people who first discovered Stochl through the book review a decent chance of seeing his work in the gallery setting it deserves. Looking back at the Trib's archives, I do see that art critic Alan Artner did give the exhibition a brief review earlier this month, but the two reviews really should have been run concurrently to give Stochl an appropriate level of exposure.
Another wrist-slap to you, Trib.
April 25, 2005 in Books | Permalink
Comments
I found it odd that the Sun-Times article focused so much on writers who moved to Chicago at a late age rather than those who grew up there, like Don DeGrazia and Joe Meno, neither of whom were mentioned.
Posted by: John McNally at Apr 26, 2005 8:58:52 AM
Good point, John. The transplanted-to-Chicago writer theme seems to get a lot of focus from the critics, probably since it includes the biggest Chicago names--Bellow, Dreiser, Algren etc.
Posted by: Pete at Apr 26, 2005 9:51:55 AM
