Looped - Softcover

Winston, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0972456295 ISBN 13: 9780972456296

Publisher: Agate Bolden, 2005

Synopsis

A remarkably assured and accomplished debut novel that encompasses the bursting life of contemporary Chicago, Looped tells the separate stories of a diverse group of Chicagoans—black, brown, and white, gay, straight, and bi—as their lives unfold in diverging and (occasionally) converging ways over the course of the year 2000. Among the characters are the family of a middle-class black postman whose runaway daughter has just learned she’s pregnant; a gifted half-Vietnamese high-schooler whose troubled father spies on the son he abandoned years earlier; a tradition-bound Greek diner owner whose upwardly mobile daughter, embarrassed by her ethnic roots, is snarled in a loveless marriage; a gay chef whose shaky relationship is strained by the visit of his closeted lover’s uncle, a Catholic priest; and the motley members of an up-and-coming band shaken by the breakup of its ambitious lead guitarist and his sexually confused songwriter girlfriend. Ambitious, sprawling, engrossing, multifaceted, insightful, and addictively readable, Looped explodes with a life and vitality that mirrors the multicultural reality of twenty-first century Chicago, where the families that sustain us are more likely to be those we’ve created than those we’re born to.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Winston is a former editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review literary magazine.

Reviews

College dropout Ellen Kovacs wanders through the Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park, using an 8mm camera to follow a single face. It's a fine metaphor for this clear-sighted debut novel, which evokes all the variety of the massive city of Chicago by focusing on the workings of one neighborhood. The face Ellen follows belongs to Alice O'Leary, a struggling musician with a job in a flower shop. At the shop, Alice meets Nathan and his lover, Robin, who are trying to keep up a relationship despite heavy baggage on both sides. Across the street from the flower shop is a diner frequented by Ng Pran-Markowitz, a teenage artist and loner. The diner, in turn, is owned by Elias Kanakes, who is losing his connection to his family and worries that his restaurant's day has passed. His mail is delivered by Alphonse Duchossois, an African-American who befriends Florence Finkel, an elderly Jewish widow who sees visions of her late husband. Winston spins his wheel of characters round and round over the course of a single year, capturing the way relationships bloom and break apart and raising unspoken questions: What constitutes community? What do people really have in common? Winston gives Chicago the complex treatment it deserves, both as a dynamic city and a collection of individuals. He demonstrates that people who share space also share responsibility for one another. As Ellen says to Alice, "Some day... you have to promise something to someone."
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Winston's debut is slow to start but pulls you in, the interlocking stories connecting to each other with a light hand. Centering on a handful of very different Chicago residents and their lives in the year 2000, the novel explores the many different worlds of young urban slackers, an older wealthy widow, an immigrant woman and her American-born son, a restaurant owner, gay couples from more than one walk of life, and a family of at-risk urban teens. The places in Winston's Chicago subtly become characters in themselves, as much a part of the story as the people. The flower shop-cafe, the diner, the lakefront, and the living spaces of each character are as real as the people who visit them. It is in the way that the people pass in and out of these spaces that the reader gets a feel for the many personalities of the city. This is a solid first novel, picking up momentum as it goes along, and will engage readers from many angles. Debi Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Agate Bolden
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0972456295
• ISBN 13: 9780972456296
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 409