A Book and a Bear: Two Impressions of Chicago

Predictably, I got around to watching Hulu’s The Bear right before it piled up a stack of Emmys. I’m still a season behind, but I want to begin this post by saying that Season 1 Episode 7 is brilliant and unique. You should see it if you haven’t already. No spoilers here, except perhaps visual ones. 

The episode, called Review, is shorter than most. It begins with a quiet early morning montage of Chicago, then erupts into nonstop restaurant industry chaos and emotional upheaval. It’s that first 2:33 though that speaks to me so deeply. We see a panoply of dawn blue grays, a faceless statue with a laurel wreath on a sloping metal roof, then the three offset building blocks of a heroic whitish skyscraper all alone under a thin layer of scudding clouds. More grays, then the dirty ripped blue jeans of a booted man walking, we hope to paid work, followed by a black trenchcoat and the white labradoodle of a richer person. Historical images start to intrude. Sparks flying from a giant bygone factory, a mugshot of Al Capone, a young Barack Obama, a black and white still photo of a hoopster practicing his dribbling in an athletic near splits position, beetling police in riot gear bashing protesters with batons, a paper flyer with the capitalized words BLACK MEN STAND UP.

The scene then cuts to the handsome face and slicked back hair of Richard Esteras, who plays the big, unflappable dishwasher at The Original Beef of Chicagoland, home to most of the first season’s action. We see Esteras riding a city bus with a blue interior, looking out on Chicago just as we the viewers look in. Soon we see two hot dog statues on a roof, one dressed as a woman in a mini skirt and the other as a man. The hot dog man has arms, and he is flexing them. Finally we cut to Jeremy Allen White in the lead role as Carmen (“Carmy”) Berzatto, hurrying under tan elevated railroad tracks to another long day at The Beef, the restaurant he has inherited from his deceased, drug addicted, larger than life older brother.

I do not know Chicago well at all, but the mood of this montage reminded me very much of my favorite time and season to be in New York, a city I once called home—winter early morning, on those cold bright days when the buildings glitter in the sun, a place of edges so hard they melt into dreamlike insubstantiality.

I do not know Chicago well at all, but somehow, I think I like it. My parents’ relationship had its origins there, in the early ‘60s, when my mom was a biology major and sorority sister at Northwestern and my dad was poised to walk out of law school at the University of Chicago to join the Marine Corps as an officer. I guess one might say this was before the time of the “gap year.” She married him, followed him gamely to Camp Lejeune, and while he eventually finished his legal training, they never returned. But maybe a place in me knows I owe an almost natal debt to the loud, cold, fierce city by Lake Michigan.

Certainly Chicago was already on my mind before I started watching The Bear, as I backed off from this blog into my school teacher role and into a push to finish my novel (tentatively called Love Economy, if you want to know). This is because during this time, on the way to work most days, I was listening to someone else’s novel, Nathan Hill’s sprawling new book Wellness, which is set in Chicago, at least primarily. Over time, as I worked to more fully make one of my own main characters feel real and relatable, I found myself thinking that a review of Hill’s book might be an appropriate way to re-enter essay writing.

But like many projects I seem to set myself, a review of Wellness is a tricky proposition. The book is more than 600 pages, or in my case almost 19 hours long. It is bitingly funny and bittersweet. I downloaded  it looking for a “romance-adjacent” comp, since this is the space into which I hope to get an agent to market my own book. But even though Hill’s novel is about a couple, named Elizabeth and Jack, it is substantially further adjacent to romance than I anticipated at first. The emphasis after a short initial meetup sequence is about the accommodations couples make within the “happily ever after,” not about the events leading up to that wished-for status. 

But Hill’s book is not just the saga of a marriage and a family. Wellness is also cultural critique. The novel is relentless in its examination of the repeating loop tendency in American culture to search for bodily perfection and miracle cures. See this genius book of essays by Marilynne Robinson if you are interested (among other things) in how this cultural strain consistently stands in the way of the achievement of our national promise. Another less frontal argument in Wellness relates, I would say, to the dialectics within a culture profoundly committed to marriage but at the same time persistently open to utopian experiments in communal life. See this podcast on The Ezra Klein Show if you are interested in what jogged my thinking on this latter topic as I read (or really listened) to Hill’s book. You might also want to look at Everyday Utopia, a book I still need to buy and read, by podcast guest and author Kristen R. Ghodsee. Also see the provocative and often-cited Atlantic article The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake by columnist David Brooks, which I have read. You should too.

To get a flavor for both Wellness and in particular for the way it depicts the city which forms the focus of this post, I want to briefly relate three telling vignettes. The first comes in the second paragraph, here copied in full from public material on Amazon, as a young Jack and Elizabeth secretly peep at and pine for each other at night across an industrial alleyway in just-beginning-to-gentrify early 1990’s Wicker Park.

“Barely any light enters the narrow alley between them, and barely any rain either, or snow or sleet or fog or that crackling wet January stuff the locals call ‘wintry mix.’ The alley is dark and still and without weather. It seems to have no atmosphere at all, a hollow stitched into the city for the singular purpose of separating things from things, like outer space.”

Jack observes Elizabeth’s “cheerful jaunty bounce” and the kinds of non-seasonal dresses she prefers, noting her “manifold and intimidating” tastes in poster art. Elizabeth observes how loneliness seems to hold skinny Jack “like a buttonhole,” how the tattoos begin to spread “ivy-like across his back.” It’s a great setup for a sex scene, if you’re an aficionado of erotica or open door romance. But the sex scene never comes. This is a different kind of book. Still, Jack and Elizabeth do finally talk to each other, and they fall in love. 

The second Chicago vignette I want to relate centers on a passage with a wryly funny minor character, one of many Hill has the chance to draw over the course of his long saga. The character is arts promoter turned real estate developer, self-styled yogi, and miracle elixir purveyor Benjamin Quince, a longtime friend of Jack and Elizabeth. The passage has Quince, who audio reader Ari Fliakos imbues with a wonderfully smarmy bass voice, shirtless and in a lotus pose, leading a class in breath-based “psychedelic self micro dosing” to a group of nattily attired men gathered in a blue-green Chicago skyscraper. Sadly, the building had been designed to mimic the local environment with such fidelity that birds crash into it at regular intervals. Jack, waiting at the back of the room for his old friend amidst a pile of business shoes (Hill describes the smell as “the vague scent of moist leather and collective feet”) notices the thunk of the “sudden impact” of one of these birds. “He was just in time,” Hill writes, “to see a small, dark creature hang still in the air for a split second, before beginning its flaccid fall.”

Something about this passage with the birds, the building, and Quince showing off an upper body with “the rigid but also swollen look of buff older men” shows much of what I like about Wellness. There is a sharp sense of humor here, a chilly but not unsympathetic awareness of the inner blindnesses of all of the characters, and a sense of connection to the landscape. I particularly enjoy how Hill makes the link in this passage between the indoor landscape and the wider city. “Before him sat all these men on their yoga mats, beyond them the front windows, the view of the river, the Merchandise Mart across the river, the morning’s frenzied rush hour sidewalk bustle.”

The third vignette I want to share involves another minor character. This is “Kate,” the much younger but clearly dominant female half of non-monogamous parenting couple Kate and Kyle, recently arrived in Chicagoland from, as you might have guessed, the Bay Area. Elizabeth finds herself seduced by meritocratic uber-winner Kate’s vitality and dyed gray hair, willfully ignoring her inner coldness (at one point Kate describes her collection of lovers, each satisfying different flavors of sexual experience, as a “properly diversified portfolio”). While maintaining a critical eye, Hill gives a lot of ink to both Kate and Kyle’s extended descriptions of their relationship. Aspects of it seem more lively and prosocial than selfish and utility maximizing, appealing in a way that Elizabeth, cut off through the sheer exhaustion of parenting from the friend networks that once seemed to support her marriage, finds hard to dismiss.

In fact, Elizabeth finds Kate so appealing that she convinces Jack to meet up with Kate and Kyle at a sex club, hilariously dubbed “The Club – A Private Club.” I will not describe what happens, mostly to avoid any plot reveals at an important turning point midstream through Wellness. But I do want to point out Hill’s brilliant handling of another Chicago landscape, in this case an interior landscape of a waiting room “lit by a crystal chandelier with all these flickering LED candle things.” He evokes a space with a “Moulin Rouge quality,” with red walls and drapes. A sixty- or seventy-something woman named Donna is the only other person there, stationed behind an antique writing desk with a guest list and waiver forms. The desk, which Jack admires as “an outstanding piece of furniture art,” includes “ornate inlaid carvings of flower stems and blossoms,” perhaps suggestive of further ornate proceedings within.

To find out what happens behind Donna and her fancy desk, and to learn more about Jack and Elizabeth’s lives, you’ll need to pick up Wellness. Here are another couple of links, this time not to Amazon, but to remind Sacramento readers of both the East Village Bookshop and Capital City Books. But wherever you pick it up, or whether you get the audio book like I did, I recommend Wellness. I also strongly recommend you check out The Bear, one of the most compelling TV shows I have seen in a long time.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more of my promised “baker’s dozen” list of social policy thoughts related to family and child rearing. I haven’t forgotten.