Love and Shame and Love

Read from Sunday, November 20th to Tuesday, December 6th.

Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner, is another book from the Rumpus Book Club.  I haven't been getting around to reviewing the books as soon after I read them as I would like, so it will be brief.

This is the story of three generations of the Popper family from Chicago.  It mostly follows Alex Popper, and starts off with his relationship with Kat in college in the late 1980's.  Popper is a quiet, reserved kid that has a problem remembering too much.  Kat is the first girl he ever really connected with, and for half a decade they spend in bliss in their apartment, until Kat becomes pregnant and it forces her to evaluate her relationship and who she wants to end up with.  They break up, and Popper gets visitation rights to his daughter and ends up a lawyer.  Most of this story is resolved at the end of the novel.

In the middle, we learn about the modern origins of the family.  Seymour is the paternal grandfather, with his wife Bernice.  Seymour went off to WWII to fight in the Pacific, and he ended up the commander of a large battleship.  His experience in the war is told through one-sided letters to Bernice that are spread throughout the novel.  After the war, Seymour and Bernice set up shop in Chicago and host many celebrities at their house, like the Rat Pack.  The Poppers are deeply involved in Chicago politics, and they are allies with Mayor Daley.  Seymour's son and Alex's dad Philip is a rich lawyer and he makes an unsuccessful bid for political office.  Philip and Alex's mom Miriam end up getting divorced after she has an affair with one of the family friends, and the story follows Alex and his brother Leo as they navigate school living with their mom and becoming estranged from their father.

It's a beautiful, although sad story, and the technique is the most interesting part.  There are dozens of chapters, each one only a few pages long, and each one telling a short story or anecdote about the family.  These are mostly sequential, although it reads more of an oral history of the most compelling parts of Popper's life.  The ending with Kat I found especially tragic as I had hoped for more of a happy ending, although the reader is able to feel the cyclical nature of lives.

Supposedly mostly autobiographical, according to Peter Orner in his author chat, it reads like excellent fiction.  Orner does an especially good job of showing things to the reader, and letting them figure it out themselves, rather than telling them what is going on.  It can be difficult to follow along, since each chapter is a new setting and time and characters, but you eventually get the hang of it.  Really recommend it, and look forward to more by Orner.  Four out of five stars.