Alexander Popper can't stop remembering. Four years old when his father tossed him into Lake Michigan, he was told, Sink or swim, kid. In his mind, he's still bobbing in that frigid water. The rest of this novel's vivid cast of characters also struggle to remain afloat: Popper's mother, stymied by an unhappy marriage, seeks solace in the relentless energy of Chicago; his brother, Leo, shadow boss of the family, retreats into books; paternal grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, once high fliers, now mourn for long lost days; his father, a lawyer and would-be politician obsessed with his own success, fails to see that the family is falling apart; and his college girlfriend, the fiercely independent Kat, wrestles with impossible choices. Covering four generations of the Popper family, Peter Orner illuminates the countless ways that love both makes us whole and completely unravels us. A comic and sorrowful tapestry of memory of connection and disconnection, Love and Shame and Love explores the universals with stunning originality and wisdom.
Release date:
November 13, 2012
Publisher:
Back Bay Books
Print pages:
448
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“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…. Like the James Salter of Light Years and A Sport and a Pastime, with their acutely observed domestic and sexual tension. There’s something noble and moving about Popper’s resolute sorrow, about all the Poppers’ largely unsuccessful struggles to connect to their times, to their city, to others. 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.”
—Maria Russo, New York Times Book Review
“Beautiful…. Think Saul Bellow (Chicago setting, rollicking Jewish-style comedy) mated with Chekhov (unassuming, devastating detail), set to the twangy thump of early Tom Petty. Now that promises quite a love child…. Orner is the rare sort of writer who not only exactingly paints life’s bewilderments and suffering, but induces the experience itself in the reading…. Again, apt that Chekhov is invoked here, because Orner’s prose showcases a twenty-first-century version of the Russian’s unvarnished mastery…. What drives this slideshow is inventiveness and craft—or art—condensed into seemingly simple images and stories. It’s the kind of nostalgiafest that finds you settling deeper into your cushion, leaving you slightly bereft when the last image gives way to a bright white screen.”
—Ted Weesner Jr., Boston Sunday Globe
“Peter Orner’s inventive coming-of-age story finds the drama pulsing through the most seemingly conventional lives…. ‘I start things and I stop,’ Alexander Popper admits. ‘It doesn’t connect. Nothing ever connects.’ Not so with this fine novel, which resonates thanks to Orner’s understanding that the more disparate the elements, the more complete the portrait of family life.”
—David L. Ulin, O, The Oprah Magazine
“Both challenging and worthwhile. Instead of a sustained narrative, hundreds of snapshots from Alexander’s past are pieced together—though ‘snapshots’ suggests something static, and each of these eye-blink vignettes is animated by yearning…. They soon coalesce into an emotionally inflected mosaic of Alexander’s past. ‘Isn’t history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up?’ Alexander asks. Mr. Orner has found a way of making loss and reclamation exist side by side.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“Though Peter Orner is quite purposeful and precise in his nonlinear approach to storytelling, reading his latest novel, Love and Shame and Love, can evoke the sensation of unpacking a box full of memories in brief, frequently lovely chapters, vignettes, and letters, which ultimately coalesce to create a powerful and heartfelt family history…. But this is less a semiautobiographical bildungsroman or a sad chronicle of one family’s ascent and decline than it is an ambitious, kaleidoscopic novel of the Jewish experience in Chicago…. Love and Shame and Love serves as an ode not only to the history of Chicago, but to Chicago literature itself. In Orner’s erudite, quotation-filled prose… there is, of course, more than a hint of Saul Bellow. The novel is… remarkable for the specificity of its characters and the settings they frequent… But the more universal story of the Poppers’ thwarted dreams and loves will likely resonate with those who have never set foot in Chicago or its northern suburbs.”
—Adam Langer, Chicago Tribune
“This book evades quick reading, and rewards the kind of close attention paid to poetry…. The pleasure is in the language and the characterization, both of which are sharp and particular. It is clear that Orner knows these people deeply.”
—Malena Watrous, San Francisco Chronicle
“Like Jeffrey Eugenides’s Detroit, Orner’s Chicago is the microcosm of the twentieth-century European immigrant experience. The ‘white-but-not-white-enough’ immigrants: exiled, persecuted, overworked, caricatured, yet still suffered just enough power by the dominant culture to occasionally rise above the huddled masses…. Peter Orner has written a magnificent book—magnificent in its unassuming details that nevertheless burst with meaning.”
—Lauren Eggert-Crowe, Los Angeles Review of Books
“From his first story collection, Esther Stories, on to his most recent novel, Love and Shame and Love, Peter Orner has established himself as one of the most distinctive American voices of his generation.”
—Ted Hodgkinson, Granta
“Part epic, part bildungsroman, Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love is a refreshing departure from the shtetl nostalgia shtick that has come to typify contemporary American Jewish fiction. Orner’s characters are complex, but their quirks, like their Jewishness, are the stuff of real life. And like life, this novel is at times terrifically funny; at others, hopelessly sad. Always, the writing is meticulously crafted and evocative…. Often, Love and Shame and Love brings to mind Saul Bellow and his depictions of Chicago, that land of opportunity and loneliness, and characters—like Moses Herzog—who are helpless in the face of destiny. In the world of this novel, as in much of Bellow’s oeuvre, Jewishness is not something external to the characters; it’s embedded in their psyches like childhood traumas, like Chicago, but more so, inextricably a part of who they are.”
—Shoshana Olidort, Jewish Daily Forward
“Love and Shame and Love is an epic book—epic like Gilgamesh and epic like a guitar solo. When I finished it, my head was buzzing, my heart was pounding, and I was pumping my fist high in the air for Peter! Goddamn! Orner!”
—Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs
“Reading Peter Orner’s work is like breathing different air, or moving through a different kind of time—I feel like I’m stepping off some mental treadmill and looking around at a world which isn’t trying to sell me anything. It’s exhilarating and finally necessary.”
—Paul La Farge, Bomb
“The Chicago men and women who inhabit these pages exist in a world we recognize, where government is as common a topic of thought and conversation as relationships, work, and kids. Drawing on his own history, Orner sifts freely through three generations of the Popper family, which moves from Chicago to Highland Park in the great suburban expansion after World War II. They’re ‘a modern ironical family’ who say proudly, ‘We’re Democrats before we’re Jews.’ Alexander Popper, the youngest son of the last generation, serves as the modest but haunting central character…. Melancholy anecdotes are held aloft by wry humor…. Orner has a fine ear… but the most striking aspect of the novel… is its airy structure…. What emerges is the history of a man trying to feel loved, watching his parents and grandparents falling apart, and seeing politics as some larger expression of belonging that never quite satisfies…. Orner is unusually gifted at creating freighted moments of despair that generate far more impact than their size would suggest. There’s a short piece in Love and Shame and Love about a fishing vacation—‘Chain O’Lakes’—that’s line-by-line perfect, from its hilarious opening image of Alexander’s mother sitting in the boat in her mink coat to its mournful climax. An anecdote about gym class—‘The Hill’—plays with the clichés of middle school, but then sneaks up and devastates you…. As Alexander says, ‘I’m trying to write a sad story, a good, sad story.’ Orner has done that.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Orner, who comes from Chicago in the way that James Joyce came from Dublin, uses the Second City to explore what amounts to serial romantic and political monogamy. The book is about politics and passion… like a sonata, it does a hundred things at once. It makes you laugh against your will…. This is the laughter of Kafka and Welty, a laughter that asks you to take seriously the vagaries and violences of human life, but also to distance yourself from them…. A tour-de-force novel.”
—Katie Kane, The Missoulian (Montana)
“In his magnificent second novel, Love and Shame and Love, Peter Orner proves he is one of the finest American poets of family weather…. The novel unfolds like an epic in miniature. Since his 2000 debut, Esther Stories, Orner has refined working in short chapters to a prose poet’s art…. Entire worlds are created within them…. Where does a family mythology go when there is just one person to tell it? Love and Shame and Love forms the only answer possible. You remember, and even when there is hardly a happy arc, you tell its story anyway. With a ferocity that can only be called love.”
—John Freeman, Toronto Star
“Vibrant and captivating, this novel about three generations of the Popper family of Chicago resonates with the truths about human nature. Sure-footed control of his narrative gradually discloses information that conveys emotion and physical atmosphere. A richly layered, intimate picture of a distinctive but also typical family enduring life’s vicissitudes and stoically carrying on.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Love and Shame and Love will break your heart, but in the best possible way.”
—Anna Pulley, San Francisco Weekly
“It’s easy to luxuriate in Orner’s language, which blends poetic rhythms and a foreboding tone…. The novel is remarkably earthbound and emotionally complex.”
—Mark Athitakis, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Love and Shame and Love is a finely crafted family album, told in comic and heartbreaking snapshots, of America in the twentieth century. Orner has captured his characters in motion, bringing the past exquisitely and precisely to life even as he illuminates the present, timeless struggle to make family, and life, meaningful. This is a big, smart, generous, important novel.”
—Antonya Nelson, author of Bound
“In this emotionally saturated yet briskly episodic novel about a brash city on a Great Lake, and a family navigating the rough waters of ambition and disappointment, pain and sorrow, Orner achieves a remarkable mix of psychological nuance, imaginative storytelling, and historical verisimilitude.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A masterful, multifaceted novel. Readers will find both love and shame in abundance in Orner’s teeming fictional world.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A keen-eyed observer of American life and history, Peter Orner strips every layer of pretense from his characters, not to diminish but rather to reveal them. This is a real and memorable America.”
—Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
“Peter Orner’s new novel is a deft character study of a family hiding the usual secrets and lies of contemporary life, but it’s also a well-observed portrait of a city as rich in history, dirty tricks, and deception as any of the people he puts in it. Orner excels at stripping away artifice and revealing the complicated, often contradictory workings of the human heart…. Love, anger, shame, sorrow, regret, betrayal, and, finally, acceptance: these, then, are the factors that propel the Poppers.”
—Connie Ogle, Miami Herald
“Love and Shame and Love is a marvel. It left me with that feeling we all crave when we read—the sense of wonder you wake with after a dream, realizing just how mysterious is this world.”
—Marisa Silver, author of The God of War
“I consider Peter Orner an essential American writer, one whose stories unfold with a flawless blend of ease and unpredictability. Every sentence he writes is wide awake to his characters’ hearts, and it is for the clarity with which he makes me feel time working its changes in their lives, and by extension in my own, that I keep returning to his books. Esther Stories was among the best story collections of the last decade. Love and Shame and Love is among the best novels of this fresh new one.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination
“A beautifully written book about the ghosts of family hovering over us all, and the often tenuous perch the tribe has in a gentile world.”
—Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times
“Each chapter is a solitary memory, dusted off and glowing with latent emotional residue…. It stands as a feat of laudable literary skill that Orner manages to use one-off vignettes to get at the really big happenings in life.”
—Jessica Gelt, Los Angeles Times
“A captivating family epic that stretches across four generations and fifty years, Orner’s second novel is a vibrant masterpiece about what it is to live in America—and what it is to live. Orner’s characters, the children, parents, and grandparents of a Jewish middle-class family, are exquisitely rendered, and though he is not always kind to them, they are easy to fall in love with, no matter their faults.”
—Emily Temple, Flavorpill.com
Chicago, 1984
This is how it was for certain boys in Chicago, the sons of lawyers. In some families, Alexander Popper’s included, forget the bar mitzvah. To leave boyhood behind, you went to see Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz for a chat.
He was a great man, a learned man, bosom buddy of the mayor himself, the machine’s favorite judge. In the words of one West Side precinct captain, “The yid really classed up the joint.”
A federal judge! Think, son, of the heights to which you yourself might one day rise!
A bachelor, father to no one and so father to everybody. Popper’s brother, Leo, once presented the judge with a drawing of him and his namesake. In the picture, Marovitz and Lincoln are sitting on a bench talking politics. The caption beneath their feet reads: Just a Couple of Abes. Marovitz got a big kick out of that. “Just!” he roared. “Just!”
In the index of Mike Royko’s Boss, the judge is listed like this: Marovitz, Abraham Lincoln, 41–46; and Mafia, 42; amateur boxing career, 41; association with underworld figures, 42–43; influenced by “friendships,” 43–44; friendship with Richard Daley, 44–45; preoccupation with Abe Lincoln, 41–42.
Now to this day, Popper has no truck with Royko’s insinuations. He remains a loyal, if wayward, stalwart. And hey, if Judge Marovitz was crooked, he wasn’t that crooked, which in Chicago, as everywhere, if everywhere was as honest about being dishonest, means something.
It wasn’t a chat. Popper remembers how he sat there, swallowed up in that tremendous leather chair, afraid to even move because of how loud the crinkle would sound in his ears, and how he listened. But take a step back—before he listened, Popper waited, and in that waiting was a silence so absolute it was like drowning in the lake, out past that point where the sandbar gives way to blue emptiness. Him in there alone, his father in the judge’s anteroom, pacing. And the judge staring at him. His face and ears and bald pate were ruddy, as befitted a man who kept his chambers heartily cold. His single thick eyebrow was like a centipede crawling across the top of his face. And his eyes beneath that thicket of brow were full of motion, and to meet them straight on (as Popper had been told by his father to do) caused a churn in Popper’s stomach. Above him, as if to enforce the power of the judge’s gaze a hundredfold, an armada of images of Lincoln. Paintings, photographs, etchings, silhouettes, drawings by other boys like Leo who’d been encouraged by their father to give the judge a present. (Popper himself presented him with a piece of cardboard, the judge’s great name spelled out in pennies.) And on the tables, busts of Lincoln, statuettes of Lincoln. And they were all watching him, too—this was a test—and the silence was broken only by the judge’s sporadic wheezing. The fourteenth floor of the Federal Building. Afterhours, February.
The judge slowly raised one hand and waved it around a little, as if to summon the force of all the Presidents who were all the same President. Then, with the index finger of his other hand, he pointed to a framed picture on his desk, a man and a woman dressed in black. Lined faces, hollow-eyed peasants from Lithuania. His parents. The judge played traffic cop, exhorting him to look around the room and at the same time at the little picture. But he got it. Popper had been prepared by his father to get it. Moreover, he was given to understand the miracle that was this country itself, this city. From a Kentucky log cabin to the White House. From the shtetl to the U.S. Courthouse. Look at him. Look at them. Now look at me. My father was a peddler. My mother sewed buttons for the landowner’s wife. My mother first got wind of the Great Emancipator at a meeting of socialists in Podberzeya. She heard that after he freed the slaves, Lincoln got shot in the temple. In the head, Mother, it means in the head! Nothing could convince my mother that Lincoln wasn’t a Jew!
And the two of them, Popper and the judge, laughed, but the judge stopped laughing earlier, so Popper’s laugh hung there alone, between them, like an insult. And the judge’s ruddy face drooped then, became sad. Sad because there were some boys, there were always some boys, who failed to embrace the opportunity that was being handed to them on the silverest of all platters. Maybe you yourself are one of those boys who will squander God’s gift of Chicago. One of those boys who will take this vast gift for granted.
The judge talking less to him now than to an audience of ghosts who seemed to have gathered at the darkening windows, just behind the half-closed blinds.
Not that any gift worth salt comes without a price. You think a gift is free? Remember this for all time. But, by God, here we are free to live. No Ivan the Terribles, no Cossacks, no Stalins. In this city they wouldn’t know a pogrom from the St. Patrick’s Day parade. And here we answer only to the United States Constitution and Robert’s Rules of Order. With, note, one unwritten stipulation. Some call it patronage, I call it friendship. Everybody needs somebody else. Just as in the old country, everybody serves Caesar. The difference is, here you get a shot at playing Caesar in the movie. And so does your neighbor. And your neighbor’s cousin Bobchinsky. We scratch each other’s back in this city. I scratch you. You scratch me. Nice to have your back scratched. Especially those places you can’t reach. T. . .
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