The Neighborhood Division: Stories by Jeff Vande Zande

The Neighborhood Division: Stories by Jeff Vande Zande is the best book of fiction I’ve read in a long long time.  

 

I’ve been a serious reader of novels and short story collection for pretty much my entire adult life (55 years at least) but I haven’t read a book as good as this one in probably about 5 years, not since Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.

 

Vande Zande’s got what Donna Tartt’s got, an incredible sense of language, an ability to understand people, and a gift for creative narrative.  In each of the stories in this volume, Vande Zande writes of people facing real problems that separate them from the people in their communities.  In an early story called "The Long Run," for instance, he writes of a person lost while running in a new neighborhood.  His simple story of being lost quickly evolves into a metaphor for his relationship to his wife and his father and the person the main character understands or doesn’t understand himself to be.  Every other story in this collection is just as strong, just as satisfying.

 

I found this collection especially important in this time of pandemic because so many of the stories deal with isolation, real isolation and psychological isolation, and people trying to understand how they can make sense of the lives they are no longer connected to.  Reading the book was like getting live reports from the pandemic world around me.

 

Jeff Vande Zande is one great writer, and I’m going to read another of his books tomorrow.

 

Here's a piece of the story "The Long Run" that I mentioned earlier:

 

He kept running.

 

A block ahead, an old man turned out of a driveway toward him, moving meticulously behind a walking stick. Andy stopped a few feet in front of him.

“Do you know where this road goes?” he asked, pointing. The old man turned and looked down the street. “Well--”

“I’m just wondering if there’s a back way into the Alpine neighborhood.”

 

The man turned back toward Andy. He put both hands on his stick and leaned. “Which Alpine?”

“Terrace.”

 

He looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure where that one--”

 

The sweat on Andy’s upper lip began to cool. “It’s where the old boy scout camp used to

 

be.”

 

The old man smiled. “Okay. I know where you mean, now. I was a part of that camp when I was a kid.” His forehead furrowed. “There’s a back way, but you gotta know your way around. Better off just sticking to--”

 

 

Andy told him that he wanted to make a circle so he didn’t have to backtrack. “You said there’s a way?”

“There’s a way.” He turned again and pointed into the distance. “Just stay on Third. It’s going to twist you through some neighborhoods, but you’ll come out on Lee. Take a right on Lee and go past East Ridge. When you come to West Ridge, turn in there and follow it around to Maltby. Take Maltby to Hamburg and that should get you there, but--”

“Lee to West Ridge, West Ridge to Maltby and Maltby to Hamburg,” Andy recited.

 

The old man nodded, dabbing his fingertips at the snow in his eyebrows. “What do you think of our April weather?”

Andy launched back into his run. “It’s not too bad,” he called back over his shoulder.

 

He guessed that the houses along Third represented the older part of the town – what it used to be before all of the Alpine Terraces, Vistas, Ridges, and Views began to spring up. The homes around him were small, neat, and not separated by acres of lawn. A few men were on a roof pitching shingles into a dumpster in the driveway. A plastic Santa Claus was still tied to the chimney.

Andy’s sweat held a skin of warmth around him. The cold and snow in the air did nothing. Starting to climb a hill at the end of Third, he checked his watch. Twenty minutes. His thighs burned against the hill’s incline. He clapped his hands a few times, encouraging himself. “Come on,” he whispered, smiling.

Just past the crest of the hill the road came to a T intersection. Must be Lee, he thought, but the sign had too many letters. The words came into focus. Meadow Valley Lane.

 

 

Andy stopped and caught his breath. Meadow Valley Lane curved to the right on his left and curved to the left on his right. It was flanked in both directions by newer builds that had probably gone up within the last five years.

Where was Lee? Andy shivered. He’d stood still too long. Turning to the right, he started running again.

______

 

Here's a link to the Amazon site about The Neighborhood Division.  Just click here. 

Life in the Pandemic

My pandemic poem Life in the Pandemic appears in New Verse News, a great online journal of poems about the news.

Life in the Pandemic

Things are slowing down.

It takes me 2 days to drink a cup of coffee,
A week to read a book,
A month to water the bushes we re-planted in June.

I move from one room to another
looking for shoes I haven’t worn in 2 months.
If I come across my car keys
I won’t recognize them.

I’ve stopped listening to the news
Stopped looking out the window
Stopped wondering what tomorrow
Will be like.

I started this poem in March
Maybe I’ll finish it
By Christmas.

https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2020/07/life-in-pandemic.html

Review of Little Altar Boy from Crime Fiction Lovers

John Guzlowski’s riveting new police procedural takes you back to the time before sustained pressure on the Catholic Church brought to light its widespread and systemic problem of child sexual abuse. The victims’ quest for justice has taken years to play out and is ongoing, paralleled by revelations about how powerful men (mostly) continue to take sexual and psychological advantage of those on the wrong side of the power differential.

It’s the late 1960s, in the post-Christmas dark night of winter, and Chicago police detective Hank Purcell is at home, waiting for his 19-year-old daughter Margaret to appear. She has new friends, new habits and new attitudes, none of which make him happy. He thinks she’s doing drugs – smoking marijuana and maybe more. His vigil is interrupted by a rare visit from Sister Mary Philomena, a nun who’d helped him with a case some 10 years before. Short, plump, formidable. She’s a grade six teacher at the local Catholic School, Saint Fidelis – an ironic name there – and she’s troubled.

She tells him she’s seen the parish’s popular young priest, Father Bachleda, with an altar boy, appearing to fiddle with his pants. Whatever, it isn’t right. She doesn’t want Hank to make an arrest, just give a warning. When he finds out about the nun’s visit, Hank’s partner, Marvin Bondarowicz, would prefer to string Father Bachleda up, no questions asked, but Hank had promised the nun a warning only, which he and Marvin deliver. A day or two later, Sister Mary Philomena has been brutally murdered, with even worse to come.

Author John Guzlowski does an excellent job describing how Hank and Marvin move forward on the case, navigating all its ramifications, personal and political. These actions are balanced with their attempts to locate Hank’s daughter, Margaret, who has gone missing. It appears she has hooked up with exactly the kind of people Hank spends his life trying to take off the streets. Any parent will understand the helplessness and desperation Hank and his wife Hazel feel as Margaret slips inexorably from their grasp. Hazel counsels understanding, but Hank has seen the results of this downward slide too many times to take the warning signs lightly.

Hank and Marvin have been partners for many years and, in any situation, the relationship between them settles into established grooves. Both suffer the PTSD-like effects of their military service and their years in the Chicago Police Department. Marvin drinks on the job and tends to be violent, and Hank isn’t a by-the-book cop either. Their relationship is believable and nuanced and, at times, humourous. They aren’t surprised when the powers-that-be try to put a lid on their investigation.

The pair are trying to resolve not one, but two compelling dilemmas: they’re clearly outraged by the evidence of child abuse among the clergy, but, while they’re trying to save the world’s altar boys, what about Hank’s own child, beset by a whole different class of predator? Hank’s wife Hazel is a useful foil for the two detectives, pressing for handling Margaret’s situation differently. But it seems there are no right answers; each course of action threatens consequences more chilling than the wind blasting off Lake Michigan.

Guzlowski is an award-winning author who has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes and five Pushcart literary prizes for work published in small presses. No surprise, then, that the writing of this book is especially fine. First, there’s the grounding in real events. (In a Q&A provided by the book publicist, Guzlowski says, “In my parish when I was a child, there were five priests. Three were pedophiles.”) He arrived in the United States in 1951, the son of Polish slave labourers in Nazi Germany. They relocated to Chicago, and his evocation of the city, which long clung to its strong ethnic neighborhoods, is spot-on.

Little Altar Boy is a book that never takes the easy way out, and Guzlowski doesn’t arrange events for a tidy, Hollywood-style ending. Instead, what he writes is true to his characters in a way that will draw you in, tight.