One rainy day in December several years ago, Susan and I were two of the four people attending a reading at the Concord, MA Public Library by Peter Orner.  We had a chance to chat with him and discovered he was a neighbor of ours in Vermont.  He came to our house for dinner along with our local librarian, a poet who shared office space with Orner in White River Junction.  I learned that Orner could have been my twin separated at birth—short, Jewish, growing up in a Chicago suburb, attending U. of Michigan, and endlessly interested in reading and writing.

“The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter” is his sixth work of fiction, and while I like his essays a bit more than his fiction, this is a compelling book.  Not sure whether it’s a mystery story, a family saga, or a work of meta-fiction, and it’s hard to know where fact ends and fiction takes over, but however one classifies it, it’s a good read.

The book is narrated by Jedidiah Rosenthal, the grandson of Lou and Babs Rosenthal who were the best friends of Irv and Essie Kupcinet in mid-20th C Chicago.  Kup wrote a gossip column for the Chicago Sun Times for more than 40 years, did color commentary with Jack Brickhouse on the Cubs and White Sox baseball games, and hosted a late late night TV show that presaged Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, and the rest.  He was a major Chicago personality, so when his 22 year old daughter, Cookie was found dead in her Hollywood apartment the week after JFK was assassinated, it was front page news in Chicago.

Jedidiah, an English professor at Loyola and sometime novelist, becomes obsessed with Cookie’s death  sixty years later.  Was it murder or suicide?  His obsession deepens since immediately after her funeral, Kup and Essie drop Jed’s grandparents, Lou and Babs like a hot potato, a 40 year friendship ended abruptly without explanation.  Jedidiah digs into newspapers, police files, coroner reports, and even flies out to LA to visit Cookie’s apartment where she died, another weird coincidence since her address, 1227 Sewalls, is eerily the same as the address of the house I grew up in at 1227 Franklin Avenue in River Forest, a tiny suburb west of Chicago.  River Forest is also mentioned in the book as the home of the Chicago crime boss, Tony Accardo who lived on our street several blocks south of us and the location of the cemetery where Cookie was buried, though Orner got this wrong since Waldheim is in Forest Park, not River Forest.  References to the Chicago of my childhood abound in lists of sports figures, streets, famous celebrities, restaurants, and the Standard Club where Chicago Jewish royalty hung out.  I have clear memories of going to seders there with my family.   Orner also writes that Jed’s father had gone to Camp Ojibwa in Wisconsin, a place familiar to me as well.

These connections between Orner and me and between this novel and real life abound.  My aunt and uncle were in reality best friends of the Kupcinets, and I originally thought that they were the models for the Rosenthals, but in all likelihood not.  In addition, Orner had already based a short story on their son my cousin, who had been kidnapped in the 1960’s in Chicago.  There is also a reference to the ‘purple Hyatt in Lincolnwood’, a hotel a few blocks from where my wife grew up.  Weirder and weirder….

At any rate, this is a fine book.  Adam Langer reviewed the book recently in the New York Times Book Review and wrote, “…what Orner has constructed is a moody and engrossing meditation on the ephemerality of memory, the persistence of family myths and a haunting ode to a by-gone Chicago. A memorable novel of the stories and people everybody has already forgotten.”  Well, not quite everybody!