Customer Reviews

Chicago Noir

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I enjoyed Chicago Noir quite a bit. Its broad array of authors offer a refreshing take on the well-worn noir genre. While there's still plenty of moral ambiguities, cliffhanger plot twists and sudden acts of senseless violence to please the most devoted fans of traditional noir, the writers come up with some interesting new angles. A very enjoyable effort overall.

This much is clear: Akashic Books is on a roll. With the publishing of their fourth anthology of Noir tales, the publishing house is quickly securing their reputation as having a good eye for both desired topics and authors to supply that demand. How else does one explain the amazing stories collected in Chicago Noir, a book that is less about Chicago as it is about writers who are in tune with the art of true storytelling.

Chicago Noir follows the tradition of Akashic Books' Brooklyn Noir and San Francisco Noir in offering tales of shady characters, double dealings, gun molls and violent deaths in and around one select city or location; this time Chicago. But while not all of the tales have a Chicago flavor even in the least bit, the stories themselves do manage to live up to the
flavor of noir.

[...]Bayo Ojikutu's The Gospel of Moral Ends, while well intentioned, belongs in another book altogether, which is to say that overall Chicago Noir burns as hot and brilliant as the Chicago Fire-even if editor Neal Pollack, who does a fantastic job here as editor, no longer lives in the Windy City.

I think CHICAGO NOIR tries to redefine what noir might mean in 2005, and does a fine job avoiding the hard-boiled cliches of the 1930's. The short fiction is well written and takes the reader into many places that might not be considered tradionally noir. I think the above reviewer, Jerry Saperstein, needs to lighten up and let modernity flow. His president is certainly having a hard time with that himself.

It was okay, but not the best tales from Chicago there could be. On the upside, if you are thinking of becoming a writer, this will certainly give you some encouragement. Whatever you are writing can't be any worse than the stories in here.

An immediate note is required. While this collection of short stories as a whole is dull, there is one standout: "Zero Zero Day" by Kevin Guilfoile. This particular story could be set in any large city, so the "Chicago Noir" aspect is meaningless. What counts is Guilfoile's skill: he knows how to write a short story, a demanding form that all the other authors in this collection, including the editor/author seem to be unfamiliar with.

Aside from "Zero Zero Day," the other 17 stories range from merely boring to truly awful. One of the worst is "All Happy Families" by Andrew Ervin. This is a sophmoric attempt to mix Joycean stream of conciousness, bank robbery, failed romance and baseball into something or other. A young bank robber is riding the train (as in AMTRAK) back from a college town where he has just robbed a bank to Chicago's Union Station. The attempt to mix these themes results in a display of pretentiously "intellectual" nonsense. One of those things that no one understands, but people will claim to find meaning in so they don't appear embarassed to their equally clueless friends who also extract deep, hidden meaning from utter nonsense. Thus are "artists" born in our culure.

Anyone familiar with the short story from its golden age in America, the 1930s - 1950s will recognize that the authors here are, for the most part, pretenders. Contrary to the back cover blurb that "It's the Chicago that the Department of Tourism doesn't want you to see . . . ", none of the stories are uniquely Chicagoan. They could take place in any large city and in most smaller cities as well. Most of the stories are self-concious in their styles: the writers are preening, showing off.

Much of this may have to do with the editor, Neal Pollock, who claims to have been a "reporter" with the Chicago Weekly Reader for several years. The Reader is a so-called alternative newsweekly. This means its editorial content of anti-American, anti-capitalist, ant-establishment, anti-everything is sandwiched inside a wrapper of advertising. The Reader, by my estimation, carries about 12 pages of advertising for each page of editorial, a ratio most legitimate, traditional newspapers wouldn't dare. But the Reader caters to an audience that pretends to be something other than what they are: urban up and comers going through their "independent adult" period before they marry and head off to the suburbs.

In any event, with the exception of the Guilfoile story, this collection is both a bust and an insult to the short story form.

Jerry