City Boy: A Novel,Used

From Booklist 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 seenitall fourflat in blustery Chicago in this compulsively readable tale about a phenomenally toxic marriage. New to the city, handsome but ohsojuvenile Jack, a wannabe but hopelessly inept writer, and Chloe, his beautiful and untrustworthy bankexecutive wife, find themselves contending with unsavory neighbors: pissedoff and racist Mr. Dandy, deaf and widowed Mrs. Lacagnina, and a loud, rude, and studly young pothead living above. Jack 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 selfloathing spoiled brats enact are wickedly intriguing, and suspense runs high as Chloe sneaks around and Jack runs violently amok. Like Maxine Chernoff and Joyce 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 SeamanCopyright American Library Association. All rights reserved Product Description His idealistic, rosehued perceptions about life and love shattered by an inconsiderate neighbor's perpetual partying, newlywed Jack struggles to tame outofcontrol emotions and save his marriage over the course of an intensely hot, vicecompromised Chicago summer. 25,000 first printing. From Publishers Weekly Thompson (Wide Blue Yonder, etc.) dissects the breakup of a marriage in cool, convincing detail, capturing the fraught daytoday dynamics of conjugal life in this neatly crafted novel. Jack Orlovich and Chloe Chase, both in their mid20s, have just moved to an apartment on the gritty nearnorth 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 fullvolume 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, highmaintenance 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.Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Jean Thompson is the author of Who Do You Love, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction, and Wide Blue Yonder, a New York Times Notable Book for 2002. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she lives in Urbana, Illinois. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One They had a bad neighbor. Bad in all the usual ways, and difficult to ignore. Music, noise on the stairs, c