This American Life addressed the issue with a two-part episode about the daily lives of students and staff at a Chicago high school where twenty-nine students were recently shot, eight of whom died—not in one large event but in isolated shootings over a series of months.

The episode hasn’t become as ubiquitous as, say, discussions on the Newtown shooting, but it is equally important to hear. If a killer indiscriminately opening fire on children is the stuff of nightmares, so is a neighborhood in which gang affiliation is not optional and kids walk in the middle of the street to stay safe.

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That was, until one victim decided to fight back.

***

I already knew a few things about detective work when I decided to take on this case, having hung out with cops when I covered the police beat as a young newspaper reporter in South Florida 15 years earlier. I knew that tracking down criminals took patience. That it required careful observation and critical thinking. And it required evidence. Good hard evidence. I also picked up a few pointers from old school TV detectives who sat in unmarked cars on overnight stakeouts, drinking black coffee and eating deli sandwiches while patiently waiting for the perps to emerge.

The crime I planned to investigate on my own was personal. It hit close to home. Someone was stealing one of the most treasured parts of my life, a piece of my morning ritual, my sense of the world.

My newspapers.

And the more it happened, the more incensed I became. My wife watched me swear and pound my fist each time I trudged upstairs empty handed to our second floor condo in the Edgewater neighborhood on Chicago’s Far North Side. I needed those papers.

I’m a newspaper junkie, still grasping onto a dying tradition of having printed papers delivered to my home that I can open and savor with my morning coffee. I find it comforting and life affirming, the big headlines and photos telling me what’s important that day, the crinkle of newsprint, the black ink on my fingertips that irks my wife when I smudge it on the white refrigerator door and light switches. I depend on having a newspaper—not a laptop—to take with me into the bathroom.

The morning paper is a ritual I picked up from my father, a longtime journalist and former newspaper reporter like me. I remember as a kid watching my dad spread out the broadsheet Chicago Tribune at the kitchen table, his coffee and Winstons at his side, streams of smoke shooting from his nostrils. He told me how important it was to read, to be informed, to be aware. I began subscribing to my own newspapers in college and never stopped. And now, every day, I receive the Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, and on Sundays I get the New York Times, as well. The papers are usually waiting for me at the front entrance to my condo building. I count on them to start my day, to inform and startle me, amuse and engage me.

***

My investigation began with some basic surveillance. I decided to get up early to watch out my second floor window in hopes of observing the thief in the act. The window was just above the front entrance to the three-story building, so I had a clear view of anyone who approached the door where the deliveryman left the papers. (The same carrier delivered both.) If I moved quickly, I could run down and confront the thief. What then, I did not know.

I began by getting up around 5:30 AM to determine what time the deliveryman arrived. I learned he usually came around 6:15, give or take ten minutes.  So the next morning, I made sure I was up around 6 and took my place by the window. I pulled up a chair, sat with my coffee and watched the tops of people’s heads bob by as the morning went from dark to early light. I got bored after about 20 minutes, having seen no unusual activity. I was eager to get down to get my paper so I could start the morning ritual. The papers were waiting for me during the next few days, but then, alas, the Sun-Times was missing one morning. During the next few weeks, some days I’d get the papers, others they would be gone. Perhaps the thief was toying with me. I wasn’t keen to play, nor did I have the discipline to get up early every morning to do window surveillance. I’d have to come up with another plan.

***

Newspapers hold a deep place in my heart. They helped sustain three generations of my family, beginning with my grandfather Sol, “Dixie” Davis, a photographer during the much romanticized, Front Page era of the 1920s and 30s, a time when major cities like Chicago and New York had half a dozen or more dailies, when reporters wore trench coats and fedoras, smoked in the newsroom and stowed bottles of bourbon in their desks. Sol worked for the Chicago Daily Times and Chicago Herald and Examiner, among other papers. When I was a teenager, my dad showed me yellowing newspapers and brittle old prints of my grandpa Sol’s famous pictures. Sol photographed some of Chicago’s biggest newsmakers, including John Dillinger and Al Capone; celebrities Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, Rudolph Valentino and Shirley Temple; and sports figures Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth. My dad followed his dad into the business, starting at the sports desk of the Chicago Tribune, then on to the City News Bureau, the renowned training ground for journalists, (“If your mother says she loves you, check it out”), and later as a reporter for the El Paso (Texas) Herald Post where he covered everything from church news to labor unrest. He once had a bullfighting column.

By the time I was ready for college, I wanted to be like my dad and my grandpa. I had been seduced by the news business, drawn to the idea of making a living witnessing life as it unfolded, by having permission to go places, talk to people and ask questions that no one else could do and then writing about it. Like my dad and grandpa, I craved the adrenaline rush of being summoned at a moment’s notice to the scene of a big story, of facing impending deadlines and seeing my stories in print the next morning, knowing that my work and my byline would arrive on people’s doorsteps. I wound up studying journalism at the University of Illinois and writing for The Daily Illini, spending more time in the newsroom than in class.

After college I took my first newspaper job in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the Sun-Sentinel, working in a crowded, bustling newsroom that gave me that rush I had craved. I spent most of my time on the crime beat during the wild shoot-‘em-up, cocaine-driven 1980s. I covered riots in Miami, Cuban and Haitian refugees floating ashore on makeshift rafts, a deadly hurricane, plane crashes and scores of murders, fires and disasters. Later, as a freelance journalist, I wrote for the Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and covered the Midwest for USA Today.

News was my life. Newspapers put bread on my family’s tables. I knew what it took to produce the news that people depended on each morning. Damned if some low life thief was gonna mess with my newspapers.

***

The thievery at my building began a few years earlier. The first couple of times, I thought the carrier was simply late or forgot to come. I called an 800 number, spoke to a customer service rep, and usually in less than an hour, someone would come to the door with replacements. But after five or six times, it became clear that someone was stealing them. At first I suspected neighbors, and posted a sign in the foyer asking that my papers be left alone. I lived in a six-unit section of a 24-unit building, and didn’t know my fellow unit owners that well, so they were all in the initial pool of suspects. After a few more calls to the newspapers, the carriers placed warning flyers inside the plastic coverings stating that stealing newspapers was a crime punishable by fines and jail time. It worked for a few weeks, but the thievery eventually resumed.

I knew that calling the police wouldn’t do any good, and I’d be embarrassed to report it, given the much more serious crimes that occur daily in my city, and in my neighborhood, considered Chicago’s most ethnically diverse with its mix of middle class and poor, vintage 1920s apartment buildings, new condos, subsidized housing, single family homes, blacks and whites, Asians and Africans, Mexicans and Middle Easterners and the occasional roving gang bangers who spray graffiti and sell drugs in the alleys. About four blocks south, there have been occasional shootings and murders. One afternoon I came home while someone had been trying to climb though a bedroom window I stupidly had left unlocked. He ran off down the back stairs just as I got to the bedroom. A guy was stabbed in the stomach a half block from my front door one night.

Those were serious crimes that deserved police attention. Not mine. That’s why I decided to take the law into my own hands on this newspaper caper. Besides, I always thought detective work was cool, and often had fantasized being on the homicide squad, collaring elusive murderers thanks to my street smarts and keen instincts, and bringing justice to grieving families.

Seeing that the surveillance from my upstairs window wasn’t working, I decided that some kind of undercover operation might be in order. I figured I could pull it off. After all, I had first hand knowledge of how it worked. During my days on the crime beat I went on operations with undercover cops who posed as drug dealers, hookers and johns. I sat with cops in unmarked squad cars and surveillance vans, including one disguised as an ice cream truck in which I hid in the back with a bunch of sweaty officers on a 90-degree day. The trick was to pounce at the right moment. The element of surprise was key. When those cops got the signal, they burst out of the ice cream van just as the perp made a drug buy, and I tagged along right behind them. The guys they busted had this Holy Shit expression. One time I saw a guy piss in his pants because he was so scared at the rush of cops. The rule of thumb in these operations was to get ‘em fast, take ‘em down and no one gets hurt. I thought I could do that. Well, maybe not take ‘em down. I didn’t want any one pissing his pants, either.

***

The Chicago Police Department strongly encourages community participation in its mission to keep the city’s neighborhoods safe. On the other hand, the department discourages getting too involved. That’s what a sergeant recently told me when I called the department to ask about the do’s and don’ts of citizen involvement. What should regular folks do when witnessing crimes in progress? Should they try to solve their own crimes? Where do safety and common sense come in?

“Neighborhood residents can very effectively be our eyes and ears, providing valuable information regarding crime and quality of life issues,” Sergeant Antoinette Ursitti told me in a rather bland, carefully crafted email response after we chatted briefly by phone. “An allegiance between the community and police is the best tool at the disposal of law enforcement.”

But then she got to the heart of things. “However, we never encourage anyone to take any enforcement action, risking their own personal safety. Anyone who sees a crime being committed is asked to call 911 immediately and provide detailed information abourt the offender and incident so that police action can be taken.”

Call 911 for a newspaper thief? I had to take care of this.

***

After my paper was stolen once again, I moved into the next, more serious phase of my investigation. Instead of watching from upstairs, I decided to go on a real undercover stakeout in my car. That night, I waited for the perfect parking spot to open across the street from my building to give me a clear view of the entrance, but far enough away that the thief would not see me. My car, a black 4-door 2000 Toyota Camry that I bought used with 90,000 miles and two hubcaps missing, even looked sort of like an undercover cop car, like those Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors favored by cops and cabbies.

The next morning, I got up around 5:45. I didn’t even need the alarm because I was so excited. I brewed some coffee, put it in a thermal cup and went down to my car in my cool undercover cop-looking get-up, a mid-length black leather car coat and black knit cap. It was fall, the air cold. The deliveryman had not yet arrived. I tried to position myself in the car so that I was sitting low, and not easily visible. I sipped coffee and thought about those cop shows where they did stakeouts like this. The only thing missing were deli sandwiches.

About 6:15 the deliveryman pulled up in a compact car, got out and placed the papers on the doorstep. OK. Now I could watch.

Around 6:30 more people were emerging from their homes and apartments, going to their cars or walking east one block to the bus stop on Broadway Avenue or “L” train station another three blocks away. I sized people up as they walked toward my building. Everyone was suspect: The man in the business suit with his computer case slung over his shoulder. The joggers. The woman with the baby stroller.  The two snotty supersized guys who lived together in the condo unit west of mine and never talked to any one unless to complain.

I peered over the dashboard. A gray haired man paused in front of my building. “Aha!” I thought. I felt a rush of adrenaline, fear and excitement. But he continued on, heading east past the alley and on to Broadway. I hadn’t thought too much about what I’d do if I caught someone in the act. What if he was big and mean? What if he got violent? Just in case, I brought a small digital camera thinking I might photograph the suspect from afar. I decided to play it by ear, and react based on the size, age and manner of the thief.

After about 45 minutes of surveillance, I decided to call it quits. I needed to start my day. Such is detective work. Some stakeouts take weeks or months before paying off, though I wasn’t sure whether I’d have the patience to be in it for the long haul. I tried a couple more times with no results. Disappointed, I called off the undercover surveillance for a couple of weeks, and sure enough, the papers began to disappear again.

***

I recently located a video on YouTube titled “Man Stealing Newspaper.” The filmmaker set up a video camera to point at the front stoop of his condo in San Diego. About two minutes and 30 seconds into the video a man with a baseball cap and jacket walks up, bends down, takes the paper and quickly walks away. I learned that the video was made by Devin Braun, a transportation planner in San Diego. I had found a kindred spirit.

“Basically we live on a condo that fronts the street and our newspapers are dropped on the front porch…easily taken by anybody walking down the sidewalk,” he told me by email. “After many a stolen paper we asked the carrier to put it behind the bushes.  The man in the video apparently figured that out.  He’s one of many ‘resident’ homeless people in the neighborhood.  We set up the camera to catch the person and to see who it was and what time he did it.”

Braun said the man was the second newspaper thief he caught on camera. But like me, he didn’t go to the police. He did something even more radical. “Because of this man on the video we canceled the paper and just buy it when we feel like reading it.”

***

Cancel the paper? I would never do that.

Yet thousands of people have been canceling their newspapers during the last two decades. Most major metropolitan dailies are available online for free, as are hundreds of other news and information sites, aggregation services and media outlets that deliver the news you want when you want it and doing so with fewer employed in the industry. This is part of the reason newspapers have declined, and why I never sought to return to newspapers after seeing so many friends and colleagues get laid off. In 1985, the year I began my newspaper career, there were 1,676 daily newspapers. Not long after I started working in South Florida for the Sun-Sentinel, the Miami News and The Hollywood Sun- Tattler, both substantial daily papers in the region, went out of business, along with the evening paper, The Fort Lauderdale News. Economics were largely to blame. A lousy economy meant less advertising, the lifeblood of newspaper revenue. Today, there are about 1,400 daily papers left, though by one estimate that number could be reduced by half by the end of the decade. There’s a web site called Newspaper Death Watch, which chronicles their demise. A government report shows that in the last ten years, newsroom staffs have been reduced by 25 percent, with more than 17,000 employees being laid off or forced into buyouts. In 2011 alone more than 3,600 lost their jobs. If someone wasn’t stealing my newspaper it was just a matter of time before there’d be no newspaper left to steal.

This thief was stealing the very symbol of what remained of a dying industry and a part of my life I was still clinging to. Even though I bailed out of my job before I could get laid off, I opted to continue working as a freelance writer. At first I contributed mostly to newspapers, though for considerably lower pay than my once-salaried position. The flood of laid off journalists trying to make a buck drove down the value of the written word even more as papers tried to squeeze cheap content out of professionals like us to keep profits up. Pay for Internet sites was worse, sometimes pennies a word. Later, I began teaching college journalism classes part time, mostly for the money, but also with the faint hope of inspiring a younger generation to keep the fire going. I could never let go of my newspapers, clutching with all my strength a part of who I was and how I had defined myself for more than 20 years. I wasn’t going to cancel my papers and read them online. I wanted my printed newspapers in my wretched, ink stained hands. So it was back to surveillance work.

***

Once again, I secured a prime parking spot across the street, got up before 6 and took my place in the car.  It was another cold morning, just above freezing, cold enough to elicit streams of vapor when I exhaled into the car. I slouched down in the front seat, watched and waited. People emerged once again to make their morning commutes. My neighbors left for work. I eyed everyone with suspicion once more.

Then, from behind my car, a dark figure emerged from the alley. He crossed the street diagonally toward my building. I slouched down a little further. The man walked to the entranceway. He looked left, then right and crouched down and snatched one paper. He straightened up and walked briskly eastbound, across the alley.

I felt my heart pumping and a surge of nervous energy. It happened so fast and I did not think, but my body moved forward. I opened the car door, felt myself breathing hard as I slammed the door shut. I walked fast toward the man while yelling, “Hey, Hey, hey, you.” I was moving fast and entering his personal space. “What are you doing? That’s my paper. You’re stealing it.” My voice was loud in the still morning.

He was an African American man, about 60, who I assumed was homeless based on his ragged coat, stained slacks and peppery stubble. He had graying hair beneath an old baseball cap. I don’t remember seeing his shoes. I do remember his face, and his eyes told me he was startled.

“You just stole my paper,” I said.

He mumbled, and said something about it being his paper. That he gets the paper. I didn’t really understand what he was saying. I was breathing fast.

I swiped the paper from his hand like a child grabbing a toy from another. “That’s my paper. I saw you take it.”

I told him that I would be watching him. “I’m going to call the cops next time.” I said it twice and then he walked away.

My nerves were still electric when I went back upstairs, my wife now awake and wondering what was going on. She lectured me about putting myself in danger.

When I calmed down I began to feel stupid for yelling at this poor guy as if he did something horrible or homicidal. Had I reacted a little too dramatically? Here was a homeless guy, taking newspapers and likely selling them on a street corner somewhere. I’d seen guys doing that around town. Homeless guys stealing the product of a dying industry to stay alive.

There was something sad about this newspaper thief, this guy who had to steal papers and hustle them on the street. I didn’t think it excused what he did, but it helped explain why. I was reminded of the many people I’d seen busted for crimes, petty and felonious, when I was a reporter. It rarely felt satisfying to see them being carted away in cuffs, (except for rapists and murderers) and certainly not romantic. It wasn’t like TV at all. Most were poor, desperate souls, addicted to drugs or booze, locked in poverty, stuck with hopelessness, trying to make a buck or steal one.

So I got my newspapers back and scared the shit out of some poor old guy who very well might have been a victim of the same social and economic forces that have driven newspapers to their deaths, a man who might have lost his job, his livelihood and found himself unemployable, cast aside, and old relic. Perhaps as he walks the streets and contemplates stealing another paper he’ll think of the crazy dude who jumped out from his car and snatched away that newspaper as if his life depended on it. If only he knew.

***

Photographs by the author and Martie Sanders.

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Plus, it seriously hinders his ability to “eavesdrop on what you’re reading.”

Check out the article and the cool reader map of the Chicago L here.

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Chicago.

Sometimes it gets overlooked as a great city as we tend to focus our energies on considering the coasts and leave the interior as a great blur in our minds. But a great city it is, indeed, and its location in the Midwest enhances its riches. It’s real. Unpretentious. Sitting as it does right in the center of the country, it is in some respects, the most American of cities.

It ties east to west and carries our industrial tradition in its very architecture.  After the great fire of 1871, Chicago didn’t just rebuild, it gave us the first skyscraper. You get the sense that everyone in Chicago is working. Hard. Sprawling under its L tracks are a kaleidoscope of images and recollections:  terrific parks, Lollapalooza, Al Capone, baseball, politics, President Obama, a rich fabric of diverse and disparate neighborhoods, ethnic foods, the Art Institute with “American Gothic” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” inside, Second City, theater, Lake Michigan, jazz clubs, speakeasies, so many great restaurants, hot dog vendors, Michigan Avenue, Navy Pier, Ira Glass doing This American Life over at WBEZ’s studios, the University of Chicago and its storied press, and on and on.  After being raised from the age of three on the South Side, the great scribbler Nelson Algren would go on to write about the city, “Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.”

These tracks tell some of Chicago’s many tales, evoke some of its many stories, each song as real as the city itself.

-1-
“Sweet Home Chicago”
Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings

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• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #6: Drinking Red Wine
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If it seems like this is a lofty goal, no worries, there are some guaranteed great performers in the lineup like Bill Callahan and a free “Renegade Craft Fair.” Details here.

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Comics editor, Paul Madonna is in town talking about and signing his new book, Everything is its own Reward. The book is chock-full of beautiful illustrations, if you haven’t seen it already.

Where and When: 826 Chicago, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL, tonight at 7:30 pm.

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The Rumpus caught up with Skloot at a Borders Books in Chicago, where Skloot has recently moved. Writer Tasha Cotter spoke with her about nonfiction writing, what it’s like to guest edit the Best American Science Writing series, and how to turn a bestseller into a book for a middle grade audience.

***

Rumpus: How are you liking Chicago?

Skloot: I’m liking it. Honestly, I’m not home all that much. I do so much traveling that when I’m home I’m like a hermit, so I haven’t done much in the way of sightseeing or anything like that. I was actually born in Springfield, Illinois. This is the first place I’ve lived where people are actually like, “Oh, yeah Springfield! I know where that is.”

Rumpus: Besides doing readings and publicity events for the book, what else are you up to these days?

Skloot: I’m adapting the Henrietta Lacks story for a middle-grade audience. Kids are interested in the mystery, the sci-fi element, but then they get interested in the family story and they connect with the family losing its mother. So there’s that, and I’m working as a consultant for the movie version. People often ask if I’m writing the screenplay, and the answer is no.  I’m a journalist, screeenwriting is a very different type of writing than what I do.

Rumpus: Does the middle-grade version of your book have something to do with science literacy in the schools? Do you see a deficiency in science literacy rates?

Skloot: I think low science literacy rates are a huge problem in our country. It’s a big reason I’m so interested in getting this book ready for a younger audience. People read about the Lacks family and how they struggled to understand the science behind the HeLa cells.  Her family didn’t have a basic science education, and they say, “That level of science illiteracy doesn’t exist in our country anymore.”   But it does. It’s a big, big problem.

Rumpus: Your website is getting updated constantly. I read that you were just named one of Five Surprising Leaders in 2010 by The Washington Post and then I saw that the movie rights to the book were sold.

Skloot: Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball are co-producing the movie for HBO.  I’m a consultant for the film. So are some members of the Lacks family. The screenwriter is coming to Chicago next week to do some related work with me. People often ask who is going to play me in the movie. Readers often throw out names like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman but I have no idea.

Rumpus: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks took more than a decade to research and write. It’s clear in the book that other writers had tried to research this story, but there were so many obstacles along the way they eventually gave up. Did you ever feel like this story was too big for one person?

Skloot: Well, I didn’t think about giving up. I thought I might be, like, ninety years old by the time it was done. I knew [Henrietta Lacks’s daughter] Deborah wanted to tell the story, and that it may take a while, but eventually she opened up to me. In total, the book probably took more like 12 to 13 years. In a lot of ways I feel like I’ve been working on it my whole life. I still am with the tour and the appearances.

Rumpus: One of the things I couldn’t get over about this story is how the Lacks family can’t afford health care, despite Henrietta’s cells—or HeLa cells—essentially being the cellular workhorse for decades. I can’t even begin to imagine how we’ve all benefited from experiments done on HeLa cells. It seems like what she was able to give to science—and help scientists uncover—is helping lots of people, but not her family. How does the Lacks family feel about the book?

Skloot: The Lacks family has been attending some events with me. They talk to people and answer questions, so that’s good, I think. Lots of scientists talk to them now about how her cells impacted their research and why they were important. I feel like they’ve gotten some closure. I did set up the Henirietta Lacks Foundation to help with education and medical care for the descendants of Henrietta Lacks. People can donate online.

Rumpus: I see they have the audiobook version of your book here. Will the paperback version will be out soon?

Skloot: They wanted me to read the story for the audiobook version and I was like, “Noooo…” But they ended up getting two actors—one for my voice, the other for Deborah. And the paperback version will be out on March 8.

Rumpus: So do you get any breaks?

Skloot: This is actually my break. Next year I’m going to be in Canada in early 2011—Toronto. I’m basically booked through 2011.  All of my events are on my website at http://rebeccaskloot.com/events/.

Rumpus: I saw that you are guest editing the 2011 edition of the Best American Science Writing. What has that process been like so far?

Skloot: Basically, I’ve been reading through everything that was published in 2010. I’ve just been reading all kinds of online journals and print journals, looking for what catches my eye. I’m serving as the guest editor and there’s also the series editor. I think it goes to print in February 2011. So I’m basically doing a ton of reading for that and selecting the best stuff I can find.

Rumpus: Do you write in other genres? Did you always know you wanted to write nonfiction?

Skloot: I never write in other genres. For me, so much about what’s amazing about the stories are the facts.

Rumpus: You have a B.S. in Biology from Colorado State University, and an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh. Were you always interested in science writing? One thing I loved about this book is how it’s so easy to follow the science—the writing is really clear and the scientific angle never ever felt like it was over my head. The degree in biology coupled with the MFA seems to be the perfect training for telling this story.

Skloot: For a long time I wanted to be a veterinarian. I never set out to be a writer. I had no desire to be a writer. But I’m always happy to hear that so many people—people from so many backgrounds—were able to connect with this story. Yeah, I learned about the HeLa cells in a high-school biology class and that idea stuck with me and… well, I followed it.

Rumpus: What are you reading these days? Do you mostly stick to nonfiction or do you change it up?

Skloot: I’m reading lots and lots of material for the Best American Science Writing series. When I can, I like to read novels because I want my nonfiction to read like fiction.

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It is undeniable that Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel is completely successful in its goals. It’s got the quirks, the puns, the joking asides, and the quickest pace of almost any book I’ve read. Zambreno’s characters are vivid—from Maggie the spoiled child turned bipolar wreck, to Mommy the quintessential Midwest housemom—and the setting seems somehow familiar, though actual description is rare. Paradoxically, these elements may begin to explain why I struggled with this book.

O Fallen Angel tells the story of Maggie and Mommy and their tumultuous relationship. In the present-day story, Maggie has moved to the “big bad” city—Chicago, I think—and slowly become a pill-addicted prostitute who has sex with strange men to kill the pain. Mommy makes egg salad with way too much mayonnaise and thinks things like, “Mommy can visit Europe when she goes to Epcot Center.” Both are, of course, archetypes of a Midwest Catholic household—or maybe the subject matter is just all too familiar for me, being a Midwest Catholic girl who moved to the “big bad” city.

Either way, it seems clear that Zambreno intended her characters to remain static as they move through the narrative. She keeps a very tight leash on this story, her voice never faltering from the on-guard judgment she casts upon her characters. Although they may deserve to be derided—they’re honestly very stupid and self-centered—the question arises whether it’s possible to write a good novel in which the characters are stereotypes who don’t change and whom readers are expected from the beginning to hate.

Semi-conclusion: I want to believe it’s possible.

Kate Zambreno

Zambreno’s book has been compared to the works of Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, who infamously wrote award-winning novels and plays with idiosyncratic voices that focused on societal clichés. Both Jelinek and Zambreno are fascinated by the roles women play in their respective “homelands” and the interplay of sexuality, family, abuse, and the encroaching outside world; but while Jelinek’s portraits of the absurd seem to expose hidden wisdoms, Zambreno’s portraits seem to highlight absurdities of which we’ve been aware for quite some time. It seems almost redundant to say that middle-aged women in the Midwest are stifled by their crippling religion and insularity and that young women growing up Catholic will often rebel to find peace, because they’re unsure of their own reality. So of course it’s possible to write a novel that challenges our ideas about what makes a “successful” character. It may even be necessary to write that novel. But I feel there must be a certain amount of love shown by an author to her characters. Judgment will be implied, judgment will always be there, but to sneer and only to sneer does not go far enough. Perhaps I would want Zambreno to love these characters so much that she hates them, but she stops short of that, and O Fallen Angel more often reads as though it were turning up its nose to strangers on the street.

The story of the father is occasionally alluded to, with the suggestion that Maggie may be in love with him, but this idea is brought to the surface and quickly dropped, despite being more complex and potentially enlightening than a few of the puns were. Another character, a roadside prophet, remains a bit of a mystery—drenched in beautiful imagery and language of fire and brimstone, he nevertheless serves mostly as juxtaposition, a welcome relief from the barrage of puns, rather than as a fully integrated character. These two underdeveloped pieces might have helped the novel insert a bit of depth into a scathingly funny character study.

Zambreno is clearly talented, though O Fallen Angel left me wanting more. I will, however, thank her for several jokes I will tell the next time I go back home to the Midwest.

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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is propelled by a mystery: a woman and her three young children have fallen from a Chicago rooftop, and nobody knows who’s responsible. “They looked like they were sleeping, eyes closed, listless. The baby was still in her mother’s arms, a gray sticky porridge pouring from the underside of her head. The pillow was heaped on top of the boy’s body, a bloody helpless pillow.” The sole survivor of the fall is 11-year-old Rachel Morse, whose mother was Danish and whose father was a black G.I., and the novel orbits around her life in the wake of this tragedy.

Sent across the country to live with her grandmother, Rachel becomes keenly aware of her biracial identity in a primarily black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon during the 1980s. Blue-eyed and “light-skinned-ed,” she speaks English and Danish, and finds it difficult to carve a place for herself as the new girl: “They tell me it is bad to have ashy knees. They say stay out of the rain so my hair doesn’t go back. They say white people don’t use washrags, and I realize now, at Grandma’s, I do. They have a language I don’t know but I understand.”

This is the debut novel from Heidi W. Durrow, winner of Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 Bellwether Prize “for best manuscript addressing issues of social justice.” The precision of the award puts a reader on guard for a polemic; while the grizzly premise of the novel suggests something closer to a whodunnit. Yet Durrow avoids taking either of these obvious paths, instead delivering a layered narrative that weaves themes of race, class, and beauty into a page-turning plot.

Heidi W. Durrow

The complexity requires an ambitious structure. Durrow dares to play with both time and point of view—Rachel’s narrative in the first person, witnesses to the rooftop tragedy in third person, journal entries from another key character. Each perspective serves to unravel the mystery one step further, as when Laronne, a neighbor who employed Rachel’s mother, speaks to a curious reporter at the scene of the fall: “A woman doesn’t sacrifice her babies that way. No matter what’s gone wrong. She’s not gonna hurt no kids. But maybe that man did.”

The story never strays too far from its central question—What happened that fateful morning?—but Durrow is at her best when the tragedy is off center-stage, when she explores Rachel’s private, painful moments. Under the care of a decidedly old-school grandmother, Rachel strains to understand her two heritages, a struggle brought into sharp relief when a family friend joins her grandmother in singing “Amazing Grace” in the aftermath of a funeral: :They finish the song with pitch perfect harmony… I want to be Lakeisha… She’s hugging Grandma, getting the sad stuck feeling out of her with a song. I am fourteen and I know that I am black, but I can’t make the Gospel sound right from my mouth.”

In other moments, clinging to her Danish identity, Rachel finds her mother’s language bubbling up as if from a forgotten source. “I don’t want being Danish to be something that I can put on and take off. I don’t want the Danish in me [to be] something that time makes me leave behind.”

Some of the most striking passages are flashbacks that focus on Rachel’s mother Nella’s efforts to stay sober, and to forge a better life in a country that is oppressively foreign to her. In one scene, Nella innocently refers to her own children by a racial slur that she heard her drunken boyfriend call them—she’d understood it to be a pet name. “My little jigaboos. That’s what Doug calls them. It’s so cute,” she tells a neighbor. The neighbor replies, “Nella, don’t say that again. It’s not cute.”

Throughout the book, Durrow underscores how our identities are shaped by those who surround us, for better or worse. At times the novel strains under its elaborate structure, and the pacing feels awkward as a result. A key secondary character disappears for several chapters, and conveniently returns “after roaming the country for the last six years.” Yet these weaknesses are only symptomatic of Durrow’s willingness to take gambles—a multitude of voices, a layered chronology, and urgent social themes.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky strikes a powerful balance between the story of a young woman learning to negotiate biracial life, and that of the lone survivor of a tragedy. “I think about these things,” Rachel says,

the way that science or math tells us certain things. Math can explain the reason there’s a one out of four chance that I’d have blue eyes. But it doesn’t explain why me. And science or math can’t explain what makes one person lucky, or what makes a person lucky enough to survive.”

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