I highly recommend Brendan Short’s debut novel, Dream City. Not because I know him personally – I do. Not because I went to both high school and college with him – I did. Not even because the cover art is cool – it is (kudos to Dorothy Carico Smith). But while all of these constitute a sufficient rationale, at least as far as I am concerned, such bias sinks the ship of credibility. More directly and to the point, Short is a good writer who tells a good story – and that story sticks with you and makes you think, reflect, and assess, even long after you have put the book on your shelf.
This is not the space to summarize Dream City. I would much rather pinpoint what I found interesting and compelling in order to substantiate my claim in the last sentence of the first paragraph.
Short develops characters – the primary ones as well as the more tangential ones – of complexity and depth. At times, relationships and experiences are intertwined in expected, quite ordinary ways, ways that make the reader comfortable in familiarity. But the more satisfying lines and trajectories are ones that are unexpected and disquieting; and these, of course, are the ones that matter most. Confronted by a variety of moral dilemmas, and following a life-path characterized more by inertia bordering on anomie than by stability and good luck, the novel’s central character, Michael Halligan, struggles not-so-valiantly to forge ordinariness into greatness, as his heroes often do in the Big Little Books he obsessively covets and collects. Michael’s boundless childhood optimism, imagination, creativity, and idealism hurtle with full force into the harsh realities of adulthood.
Ah, but those Big Littles…they offer continuity, solace, an anchor of sorts. For Michael, a mass-culture product provides what all the various human beings that populate his life cannot – a fulfilling, focused sense of purpose. Then again, most of those human beings lead exhausted, even ruined lives. So his obsessive pursuit of every Big Little Book in existence, that very project of collecting, gives Michael some resilience, some traction, some hope as he treads the waters of his chaotic, often cruel life. Michael certainly is not the first, nor will he be the last, to find an escape in the products of American popular commercial culture. Incidentally, Michael collects other things as well, including prostitutes and sexual experiences, and the consequences are just as varied and colorful.
Many readers can relate on some level to obsessive collecting. When I was a kid, while others went off to collect baseball cards, I went off in search of business cards. Yes, business cards. I certainly found them interesting at the time (and still do), but now, as we gallop into the digital age, they are not merely quaint relics, but, I would argue, historically significant artifacts. Perhaps more about that another time…
And speaking of history, as a lifespan story, the historical sweep that Short manages – the 70-plus years from 1932 to 2004 – is noteworthy. He attempts to faithfully capture both the historical and socio-cultural milieu as the story winds its way through these seven decades. This is no easy task, and while the overall effort produced mixed results, Short is probably best when immersed in Depression-era Chicago. Indeed, the crucial context for the first third of the book, and setting the stage for the rest, is the 1933-34 World’s Fair in Chicago. The “Century of Progress” fair becomes the cauldron in which the very meaning of American progress and the American Dream are contested, complicated, challenged, and questioned. They are, perhaps, entirely myths, with social mobility, justice, and equality always just out of reach. The fair may have provided Americans, even in the midst of the Great Depression, with a platform for their vision of prosperity and power, but that vision was far from monolithic or cohesive, its foundations grounded in long-established inequalities. This couldn’t be more evident than in the lives of the Halligans and other characters throughout the novel.
[NOTE: The best books about international expositions and world fairs are by historian Robert W. Rydell. See especially, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Good websites include: The University of Chicago Library's Century of Progress 1933-34 World's Fair Collection and The Chicago Historical Society Collection.]
There are other historical themes and issues of consequence that Short grasps and incorporates into the novel. The charismatic proselytizer, Eddie Kowal, through his fiery attacks on creeping materialism and his in-your-face cries for social justice, prompt us to think about the role of religious movements – fringe, populist, or otherwise – in American society, then and now. Additionally, one can extract insights about fluctuating gender roles, demographic changes and urban-suburban postwar migration, and the search for order in the wake of economic depression, hot war, cold war, and political upheaval.
Ultimately, Short has done well with this first novel, and I very much look forward to his next offering.
This is not the space to summarize Dream City. I would much rather pinpoint what I found interesting and compelling in order to substantiate my claim in the last sentence of the first paragraph.
Short develops characters – the primary ones as well as the more tangential ones – of complexity and depth. At times, relationships and experiences are intertwined in expected, quite ordinary ways, ways that make the reader comfortable in familiarity. But the more satisfying lines and trajectories are ones that are unexpected and disquieting; and these, of course, are the ones that matter most. Confronted by a variety of moral dilemmas, and following a life-path characterized more by inertia bordering on anomie than by stability and good luck, the novel’s central character, Michael Halligan, struggles not-so-valiantly to forge ordinariness into greatness, as his heroes often do in the Big Little Books he obsessively covets and collects. Michael’s boundless childhood optimism, imagination, creativity, and idealism hurtle with full force into the harsh realities of adulthood.
Ah, but those Big Littles…they offer continuity, solace, an anchor of sorts. For Michael, a mass-culture product provides what all the various human beings that populate his life cannot – a fulfilling, focused sense of purpose. Then again, most of those human beings lead exhausted, even ruined lives. So his obsessive pursuit of every Big Little Book in existence, that very project of collecting, gives Michael some resilience, some traction, some hope as he treads the waters of his chaotic, often cruel life. Michael certainly is not the first, nor will he be the last, to find an escape in the products of American popular commercial culture. Incidentally, Michael collects other things as well, including prostitutes and sexual experiences, and the consequences are just as varied and colorful.
Many readers can relate on some level to obsessive collecting. When I was a kid, while others went off to collect baseball cards, I went off in search of business cards. Yes, business cards. I certainly found them interesting at the time (and still do), but now, as we gallop into the digital age, they are not merely quaint relics, but, I would argue, historically significant artifacts. Perhaps more about that another time…
And speaking of history, as a lifespan story, the historical sweep that Short manages – the 70-plus years from 1932 to 2004 – is noteworthy. He attempts to faithfully capture both the historical and socio-cultural milieu as the story winds its way through these seven decades. This is no easy task, and while the overall effort produced mixed results, Short is probably best when immersed in Depression-era Chicago. Indeed, the crucial context for the first third of the book, and setting the stage for the rest, is the 1933-34 World’s Fair in Chicago. The “Century of Progress” fair becomes the cauldron in which the very meaning of American progress and the American Dream are contested, complicated, challenged, and questioned. They are, perhaps, entirely myths, with social mobility, justice, and equality always just out of reach. The fair may have provided Americans, even in the midst of the Great Depression, with a platform for their vision of prosperity and power, but that vision was far from monolithic or cohesive, its foundations grounded in long-established inequalities. This couldn’t be more evident than in the lives of the Halligans and other characters throughout the novel.
[NOTE: The best books about international expositions and world fairs are by historian Robert W. Rydell. See especially, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Good websites include: The University of Chicago Library's Century of Progress 1933-34 World's Fair Collection and The Chicago Historical Society Collection.]
There are other historical themes and issues of consequence that Short grasps and incorporates into the novel. The charismatic proselytizer, Eddie Kowal, through his fiery attacks on creeping materialism and his in-your-face cries for social justice, prompt us to think about the role of religious movements – fringe, populist, or otherwise – in American society, then and now. Additionally, one can extract insights about fluctuating gender roles, demographic changes and urban-suburban postwar migration, and the search for order in the wake of economic depression, hot war, cold war, and political upheaval.
Ultimately, Short has done well with this first novel, and I very much look forward to his next offering.
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