City Boy: A Novel [Paperback]

Jean Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2005

Newlyweds Jack and Chloe are building a life together in a modest Chicago apartment. The city is theirs to enjoy as Jack struggles to pursue a writing career and Chloe works downtown, applying herself to the world of high finance. While Jack aspires to be the perfect husband, his own self-doubts and Chloe's office flirtations cast shadows. Jealousy and mis-behavior undermine their notions of themselves and of each other, and their lives take on uncomfortable parallels with the volatile, chaotic existence of their raffish, menacing neighbors. In the intense heat of one Chicago summer, Jack and Chloe's marriage roils into a queasy chemistry of vanity, lust, and greed. Thompson writes with piercing insight and emotional truth, setting off literary fireworks.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Thompson (Wide Blue Yonder, etc.) dissects the breakup of a marriage in cool, convincing detail, capturing the fraught day-to-day dynamics of conjugal life in this neatly crafted novel. Jack Orlovich and Chloe Chase, both in their mid-20s, have just moved to an apartment on the gritty near-north 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 full-volume 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, high-maintenance 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 seen-it-all four-flat in blustery Chicago in this compulsively readable tale about a phenomenally toxic marriage. New to the city, handsome but oh-so-juvenile Jack, a wanna-be but hopelessly inept writer, and Chloe, his beautiful and untrustworthy bank-executive wife, find themselves contending with unsavory neighbors: pissed-off 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 self-loathing 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 Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743242831
• ISBN-13: 978-0743242837
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #556,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "She'd been the most extraordinary thing about him.", June 12, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City Boy: A Novel (Hardcover)

Marital infidelity along with love and deception are at the heart of this wry, acerbic and darkly humorous domestic drama set in the windy city of Chicago. Thompson recounts with intuition and detail, the inevitable downfall of a young marriage when unfaithfulness, disloyalty and betrayal inevitably set in. A rising young couple Jack and Chloe - he is a writer, she is a beautiful but troubled banker - move into a Chicago apartment to discover that Rich Brezak, their neighbor upstairs is a dope smoker with an almighty loud reggae blaster. Before long Rich's hippy ways and dirty, disorganized life begin to corrupt Jack. When he goes upstairs to tell Rich to turn the music down, he ends up staying for a joint and partying with Rich and his girlfriends, Raggedy Ann and Ivory. Jack has some quick, furtive sex with Ivory, and then decides to keep the status quo in his life with Chloe. Meanwhile Jack begins to suspect that Chloe, who has drinking problems, is having an affair with someone she works with.

Thompson inserts into this drama an assortment of batty and eccentric of characters. Mrs. Lacagnina, and elderly lady who lives upstairs, never going out of her apartment and Mr. Dandy and old Irish Catholic and confirmed bachelor, who is incensed at the changes taking place in the neighborhood. Much of the story is told from Jack's point of view in the form of a twisted reverie. Sometimes we watch as Jack crafts a new story, lingering softly over his feelings for Chloe, but more often, we catch him in an act of remembrance, recalling, with a kind of baffled amazement, when things start to go wrong with Chloe. Jack begins to realize that "there is nothing in life that is not conflicted and imperfect and wounded, love most of all." He is no lonelier than anyone else who has walked on the earth, but he is tired of words, the effort of wrangling, coaxing and explaining. Jack hates having his "insulated bubble of smugness punctured ? he is the only one in the face of it all capable of insight, observation and judgment."

A highlight of the novel is the series of arguments between Jack and Chloe "with words getting of the track, then the tracks going haywire, looping and doubling back, ending up somewhere that is shocking in its ugliness." Jack's life "seems to be taking place in slow motion, like the arc of a ball thrown high for an easy catch." The scene when Jack finally confronts Chloe on her infidelities is typical of the way the novel works - each chapter showing us a Jack who has been brushed by the wings of the past.

Thompson largely defines her characters by their actions and dialogue rather than their thoughts and she gives us in Jack and Chloe an infinitely impatient intelligence. This along with the book's sharp dialogue and astute urban, inner city observations sometimes makes City Boy more closely resemble a movie treatment than a novel. But Thompson does a great job of teasing the reader with her cynical social observations, giving us an entertaining and amusing story that pays off magnificently. Mike Leonard June 04.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The decay of a starter marraige, October 20, 2004

By 

J. Fercho (Calgary, AB. Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City Boy: A Novel (Hardcover)

It doesn't take long to realize that Chloe and Jack are a mismatch from the get-go. A needy, high maintenance girl who blames most of her problems on the fact she is beautiful, pairs up with an eager, devoted man who feels he never quite measures up to his stunner of a wife. The fireworks are inevitable, and the sparks do fly.

While Chloe pursues a high powered career in finance, Jack plays the role of struggling writer. His time at home allows him to become inappropriatly entangled with the odd residents of their apartment building, while Chloe pursues her own brand of misbehavior at the office.

Wonderful writing, remarkably well developed characters, a witty and believable plot, this novel would as others have mentioned, make a fine movie

It's impossible not to enjoy riding along with this train-wreck of a marraige as it hurtles toward it's satisfying crash ending.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific Novel, April 18, 2004

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City Boy: A Novel (Hardcover)

Jean Thompson does a wonderful job of recounting the decay of the starter marriage of Jack and Chloe, two young yuppie-ish Chicagoans who were probably mis-matched from the start. Jack first sees Chloe in a poetry class at Northwestern and is immediately taken with her. He then casually pursues her, orchestrating several accidental meetings and ultimately the relationship takes off. The action of the novel takes place after they move into their first apartment--a building with four flats. Because Chloe works in a high-powered bank training program, it is Jack, who is "working" on a novel, who becomes entangled witht he lives of the other inhabitants of the building--each of whom are disturbing in their own way. The novel starts off a little slowly, but once Thompson gets into the rhythm of their daily life in this apartment building, dealing with the obnoxious reggae cranking Rich upstairs, Rich's entourage of women,the racist across the hall--the pace picks up. The writing here is excellent--certain passages Thompson writes are so witty, so observant, so dead on. This is a terrific book. Very well done.