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Blue in Chicago: And Other Stories
Blue in Chicago collects together the sharp, bittersweet stories of Bette Howland and restores to our libraries an extraordinarily gifted writer who was recognised as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life.
Bette Howland was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighbourhood in Chicago, a divorcée and single mother, to the disapproval of her family, an artist chipped away at by poverty and perfection. Each of these sides of her life plays a shaping role in her work. Mining her most precarious struggles for her art in each of these stories, she chronicles the fears and hopes of her generation.
Blue in Chicago: And Other Stories introduces UK listeners to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humour.
Published in the US under the title Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.
Contents:
- A Visit
- Blue in Chicago
- To the Country
- Twenty-Sixth and California
- Public Facilities
- Golden Age
- How We Got the Old Woman to Go
- Aronesti
- Power Failure
- German Lessons
- Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
Bette Howland was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighbourhood in Chicago, a divorcée and single mother, to the disapproval of her family, an artist chipped away at by poverty and perfection. Each of these sides of her life plays a shaping role in her work. Mining her most precarious struggles for her art in each of these stories, she chronicles the fears and hopes of her generation.
Blue in Chicago: And Other Stories introduces UK listeners to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humour.
Published in the US under the title Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.
Contents:
- A Visit
- Blue in Chicago
- To the Country
- Twenty-Sixth and California
- Public Facilities
- Golden Age
- How We Got the Old Woman to Go
- Aronesti
- Power Failure
- German Lessons
- Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
316 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 7, 2019
61 people are currently reading
2165 people want to read
About the author
Bette Howland
9 books43 followersWriter, critic, and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient Bette Howland died last week at the age of 80. “No matter what her subject is, Mrs. Howland is always looking for the bone and marrow of Chicago,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in a 1978 review of Blue in Chicago. “And always the prose with which she searches is arrhythmical, nervous, self-questioning, passionate. You can’t fall into step with her, because the moment you do she shifts her cadence and takes off for another part of town, another time, another thing about Chicago.” However, though much awarded and clearly brilliant, she has in recent years been more-or-less forgotten by the literary establishment. “What happened to a career that held such talent and promise?” A.N. Devers asked in a 2015 piece about Howland and her rediscovery by Brigid Hughes, Howland was nomadic and often lived in isolation. Why did she retreat from what she had earned for herself? What role has the literary community played in allowing her work to fall from memory? Her son Jacob thinks the MacArthur is part of the answer.” Indeed, she didn’t publish anything else after winning the award.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
November 20, 2019
"What better way to tell your mother what you think of her than not to have children?"
Also, my essay about the book for the Chicago Tribune:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...
When I was an aspiring fiction writer going to high school in the Chicago suburbs, I longed to read the best authors who took our nearest city as their subject. When my English teachers at Downers Grove North assembled literary lists in response to my request, without fail they included a handful of worthy dudes: Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Stuart Dybek.
While I appreciated those guys, I often wished I could encounter voices that spoke of the city in different tones and from different angles. To put a finer point on it, I wanted to read some 20th-century Chicago-based fiction by a woman. Now, over two decades later, the publication of the collection “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” has given me — along with the rest of the world — a new chance to encounter a talent who could fill that space: Bette Howland.
Born Bette Lee Sotonoff in 1937 to Jewish immigrants, Howland died in 2017. She married Howard Howland, a biologist, in 1956, and they had two children, then divorced, leaving her a single mother supporting herself as a part-time librarian and doing editorial work for the University of Chicago Press.
Although she moved away in 1975, she took Chicago and its people as her frequent subjects, often focusing both on the Jewish milieu of her own extended family and on the working-class residents of overlooked neighborhoods. In “Twenty-Sixth and California,” for instance, a panoramic and righteously wry exploration of the criminal courthouse that still stands on that site, she quips, “On the slopes along the front steps — the name, Criminal Courts, set in a mound— signs warn you: Keep Off the Grass. Though the grass looks tough enough to fend for itself.” She continues, “I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to build a city on this site. There is too much energy here. Along with the power of construction goes the power of destruction. Tohu and bohu. Vacant lots, buildings condemned, neighborhoods decayed. Chicago isn’t a city: just the raw materials for a city. The prairie is always reasserting itself, pressing its claims.”
Reading her for the first time this past summer felt like receiving an unexpected note slipped under the door from someone I’d never heard of, but who totally got me — who knew what I wanted to hear about, and how and why I wanted to hear it, and who just told me, page after beautiful page. Set in Uptown, the lovingly comic story “Public Facilities” draws on her time as a librarian, painting an exquisite a portrait of a library as a gathering place for people “who have no place to go.” She captures the late-'60s milieu of that neighborhood with a documentarian’s eye and a sardonic tone, noting that “The streaked grime — melting snow — characteristic of the bricks of Chicago in winter in winter, can be seen here even on the faces. Mexican, Korean, black, Puerto Rican, pensioned-off Jew: they get along more or less without racial strife. To tell the truth, that’s the least of their worries."
Titanic literary critic Harold Bloom died while I was planning this essay, and the timing felt significant. In his 1994 book “The Western Canon,” Bloom — discussing 26 writers, 22 of them men and four of them women — declares, “You must choose. Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class, and gender.” His insistence that engagement with literature is a zero-sum, either/or, utterly binary game remains an enduring and specious bummer. I don’t want to choose, and with a writer like Howland, I don’t have to. Of course a book can be aesthetically good and present a perspective that’s underrepresented. Of course readers can enjoy both a book’s inherent qualities and consider it in light of the identity of its author. And of course those qualities shouldn’t be treated as isolated or inseparable, especially when the canon itself has been so narrowly shaped along lines of race, class and gender.
If you look at her résumé, Howland seems a canonical shoo-in. She wrote three books over the course of her lifetime, including “W-3,” “Blue in Chicago” and “Things to Come and Go.” She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in 1981, and a MacArthur genius grant in 1984. Yet she came dreadfully close to being completely forgotten.
Thankfully, the canon is less a monument carved eternally in stone and more of an ongoing sculpture, a malleable clay capable of being molded and shaped, added to and subtracted from. Through sheer luck, Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space, happened to scan through the dollar cart at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan in 2015, where Howland’s memoir “W-3” caught her eye. No average browser, Hughes included a portfolio of Howland’s work in a special issue of her magazine, which explored “a generation of women writers, their lifetimes of work, and questions of anonymity and public attention in art.” Ultimately, Hughes founded A Public Space Books, which included “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” on its first-ever list, the book’s jacket copy declaring that it “restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life.”
This deliberate act of recovery is exciting unto itself because it illustrates the adaptability of the canon, but it is even more so because the book in question is thrilling and worth rediscovery. Howland’s sense of humor illuminates every page, and even her sharpest barbs glint with wisdom and humanity, as in the story “How We Got the Old Woman to Go” when her protagonist observes, not without compassion, “What better way to tell your mother what you think of her than not to have children?”
Her lyrical passages approach not merely poetry, but something like the sacred, almost holy in their cadences. In the story “To the Country,” assorted lower-middle-class city dwellers head southeast around Lake Michigan to soak up some peace away from the wear of daily life. But this restoration proves chimerical, the lakeshore not an idyll, but a place equally beset by problems as anywhere else. “So where is it then?” the breathless final passage demands. “Where is the rightful life that is awaiting us? Where is that undiscovered territory? Where the air is clear and consciences are clean? How do we get there? How do we cut our paths through this wilderness? How do we run up our flags and stake our claims?”
At last Howland’s claim has been re-staked, hopefully with a degree more permanence this time, for the rightful (after)life that awaits her work is that she be recognized as a Chicago writer of near-universal delight.
Also, my essay about the book for the Chicago Tribune:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...
When I was an aspiring fiction writer going to high school in the Chicago suburbs, I longed to read the best authors who took our nearest city as their subject. When my English teachers at Downers Grove North assembled literary lists in response to my request, without fail they included a handful of worthy dudes: Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Stuart Dybek.
While I appreciated those guys, I often wished I could encounter voices that spoke of the city in different tones and from different angles. To put a finer point on it, I wanted to read some 20th-century Chicago-based fiction by a woman. Now, over two decades later, the publication of the collection “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” has given me — along with the rest of the world — a new chance to encounter a talent who could fill that space: Bette Howland.
Born Bette Lee Sotonoff in 1937 to Jewish immigrants, Howland died in 2017. She married Howard Howland, a biologist, in 1956, and they had two children, then divorced, leaving her a single mother supporting herself as a part-time librarian and doing editorial work for the University of Chicago Press.
Although she moved away in 1975, she took Chicago and its people as her frequent subjects, often focusing both on the Jewish milieu of her own extended family and on the working-class residents of overlooked neighborhoods. In “Twenty-Sixth and California,” for instance, a panoramic and righteously wry exploration of the criminal courthouse that still stands on that site, she quips, “On the slopes along the front steps — the name, Criminal Courts, set in a mound— signs warn you: Keep Off the Grass. Though the grass looks tough enough to fend for itself.” She continues, “I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to build a city on this site. There is too much energy here. Along with the power of construction goes the power of destruction. Tohu and bohu. Vacant lots, buildings condemned, neighborhoods decayed. Chicago isn’t a city: just the raw materials for a city. The prairie is always reasserting itself, pressing its claims.”
Reading her for the first time this past summer felt like receiving an unexpected note slipped under the door from someone I’d never heard of, but who totally got me — who knew what I wanted to hear about, and how and why I wanted to hear it, and who just told me, page after beautiful page. Set in Uptown, the lovingly comic story “Public Facilities” draws on her time as a librarian, painting an exquisite a portrait of a library as a gathering place for people “who have no place to go.” She captures the late-'60s milieu of that neighborhood with a documentarian’s eye and a sardonic tone, noting that “The streaked grime — melting snow — characteristic of the bricks of Chicago in winter in winter, can be seen here even on the faces. Mexican, Korean, black, Puerto Rican, pensioned-off Jew: they get along more or less without racial strife. To tell the truth, that’s the least of their worries."
Titanic literary critic Harold Bloom died while I was planning this essay, and the timing felt significant. In his 1994 book “The Western Canon,” Bloom — discussing 26 writers, 22 of them men and four of them women — declares, “You must choose. Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class, and gender.” His insistence that engagement with literature is a zero-sum, either/or, utterly binary game remains an enduring and specious bummer. I don’t want to choose, and with a writer like Howland, I don’t have to. Of course a book can be aesthetically good and present a perspective that’s underrepresented. Of course readers can enjoy both a book’s inherent qualities and consider it in light of the identity of its author. And of course those qualities shouldn’t be treated as isolated or inseparable, especially when the canon itself has been so narrowly shaped along lines of race, class and gender.
If you look at her résumé, Howland seems a canonical shoo-in. She wrote three books over the course of her lifetime, including “W-3,” “Blue in Chicago” and “Things to Come and Go.” She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in 1981, and a MacArthur genius grant in 1984. Yet she came dreadfully close to being completely forgotten.
Thankfully, the canon is less a monument carved eternally in stone and more of an ongoing sculpture, a malleable clay capable of being molded and shaped, added to and subtracted from. Through sheer luck, Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space, happened to scan through the dollar cart at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan in 2015, where Howland’s memoir “W-3” caught her eye. No average browser, Hughes included a portfolio of Howland’s work in a special issue of her magazine, which explored “a generation of women writers, their lifetimes of work, and questions of anonymity and public attention in art.” Ultimately, Hughes founded A Public Space Books, which included “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” on its first-ever list, the book’s jacket copy declaring that it “restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life.”
This deliberate act of recovery is exciting unto itself because it illustrates the adaptability of the canon, but it is even more so because the book in question is thrilling and worth rediscovery. Howland’s sense of humor illuminates every page, and even her sharpest barbs glint with wisdom and humanity, as in the story “How We Got the Old Woman to Go” when her protagonist observes, not without compassion, “What better way to tell your mother what you think of her than not to have children?”
Her lyrical passages approach not merely poetry, but something like the sacred, almost holy in their cadences. In the story “To the Country,” assorted lower-middle-class city dwellers head southeast around Lake Michigan to soak up some peace away from the wear of daily life. But this restoration proves chimerical, the lakeshore not an idyll, but a place equally beset by problems as anywhere else. “So where is it then?” the breathless final passage demands. “Where is the rightful life that is awaiting us? Where is that undiscovered territory? Where the air is clear and consciences are clean? How do we get there? How do we cut our paths through this wilderness? How do we run up our flags and stake our claims?”
At last Howland’s claim has been re-staked, hopefully with a degree more permanence this time, for the rightful (after)life that awaits her work is that she be recognized as a Chicago writer of near-universal delight.
September 20, 2020
'Short stories' doesn't quite cut it. There is an echo between the texts, a vibration, not to mention the recurring themes and characters, and the main protagonist: Chicago. It's like street photography in literary form. Plus it's very funny, in a bittersweet sort of way. Bette Howland sure had class.
January 14, 2025
Tremenda pereza. El libro es bueno, pero el estilo narrativo de la autora no es para mí. Es como estar dentro de una mente con TDAH y pa eso ya yo hablo con mis voces, gracias.
Muy buena crítica social, eso sí. Plasma la cotidianidad muy bien, trata las tensiones familiares estupendamente, describe genial las ambigüedades y conflictos internos que todos arrastramos de aquí para allá mientras hacemos nuestras movidas rutinarias.
No la volvería a leer, pero ahí queda, pal recuento.
Muy buena crítica social, eso sí. Plasma la cotidianidad muy bien, trata las tensiones familiares estupendamente, describe genial las ambigüedades y conflictos internos que todos arrastramos de aquí para allá mientras hacemos nuestras movidas rutinarias.
No la volvería a leer, pero ahí queda, pal recuento.
July 28, 2021
Beautiful language and the very poetic text is like a picture of the day. She created a text in which reality is so mixed with dreams that it haunts you. The stories are terribly smart, funny, and emotional.
September 29, 2019
Some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read. Much sadness that there will be no more.
March 14, 2021
This book is unlike anything else I’ve ever read. It’s chock-full of wit, and its insights are incisive and overflowing. HOWEVER: observation, for me, resonates in a two-fold lens - publicly but also personally. And so, I found this book to give name externally, and yet, it never connected internally. The first six stories are worth the read, but overall, the narrator fell flat.
July 11, 2019
Episodic and impressionist. Sometimes I found the time shifts hard to follow - almost all the stories in this collection work like collages - but some worked so well, they were heartbreaking. Every image and metaphor was painstakingly wrought. Even though much of Howland’s writing focuses on the city, on Chicago, I found her at her best when writing about the natural world. Recommend for lovers of Lucia Berlin and Grace Paley - she’s somewhere between those two, I think.
February 3, 2022
The first few stories are very good, often set in institutions, kind of days-in-the-life-of - a courthouse, a library (loved the generous take on patrons), an old people's home ('Scolding, to the old, must seem a way of life') - Chicago being a big character here, the cold coming off Lake Michigan, the prairie at the edge of the city. But it is in the two longer novellas that Howland's writing really takes off, more discursive than you'd expect, taking time to describe incidentals with accuracy and enjoyment. ('Clouds loafed in the blowsy blue sky; underfoot, leaves were running for cover'). One is set in Germany centred on a young wife who follows her soldier husband there but cannot find lodgings with him and chronicles her problems (and delights) in not knowing anyone, a different language spoken and nurturing her toddler son who has learning difficulties (doesn't speak). Some brilliant observations and insights, but this piece is surpassed by Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, a 90 page closely printed story of a famous philosophy teacher. A ladies' man, this is narrated by his last lover and covers his last days in hospital and his full Jewish burial (although he isn't technically a Jew). Fabulous writing which takes many unexpected turns, a sense that this writer will do things her own way. I was happy to follow her. Inspiring, a real pleasure.
April 27, 2022
2.5* I will admit the writing was great. But I have to ask myself what's the point if the author doesn't make me care about the story being told. I wasn't invested really in any of the stories.
August 4, 2020
I am blown away by Howland's writing. What a tragedy that she was not, is not better known. Glad she is back in print and her words won't be lost forever.
January 24, 2021
“Now please. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to embarrass anybody. I get discouraged myself, when people start talking about dreams. Especially in stories. Because what’s to keep us from telling lies? Making it all up? Are there rules? And besides, everyone knows that dreams aren’t just dreams. Someone is trying to tell you Something — with a capital S. I don’t know about you, but that makes me nervous. All right. I apologize. But what can I do? I’m not trying to put one over on you. (I told you to begin with I was sleeping — remember?) This isn’t really a story — and I was dreaming. And I’d just like to see if I can get things straight. In the dreams my sons are just learning to walk; bold staggering steps and shy shining faces. One light head, one dark head, at the same level. My daughter is older (though that can’t be right, can it?). Her short skirts lift and stick out in front and show her bare narrow legs, the puckered trim of her bloomers. What’s odd is her hair; smooth heavy hair, straight-hanging, as if water weighted, and so long it surrounds her. She is mantled in hair; a dark shining cloak. Some children are born that way; right from the beginning; come into the world wrapped in the mysteries of their own personalities. You can see my daughter is one of these. My heart glares with gladness; as dazzling, as hard to bear, as the sun burning snow. Because I know what’s going on — I recognize this dream. I’ve had it so many times before — though never in my sleep. It’s here, this is it. I’m getting my wish. My children are small again. We have it all to do over.” — “Power Failure”
January 14, 2025
I've picked up and put down this book so many times, and I can't bring myself to finish it. I gave up around p238 because the energy just died for me. I was completely captured in the first few shorts, the writing was so gritty and had so much wit, which I loved. But I don't know what happened in the second half because it just dipped. It became incredibly heavy to read and just didn't interest me at all.
June 4, 2019
Surprised! Great reading.
January 2, 2024
I kept heading the wrong way. You know how it is: the wrong lane, the wrong turn, and you’re stuck; nothing to do but just keep going, on and on, until the next exit.
August 1, 2024
Llegiu la Howland ❤️🩹🥺.
Quina plorera amb el final.
Quina plorera amb el final.
August 31, 2025
In Frankrijk gelezen. Op een of andere manier kwam ik hier zo niet doorheen. Uiteindelijk herriner ik me meer hoe gefrustreerd ik was dat het nog niet uit was dan waar het überhaupt over ging. Eigenlijk hou ik denk ik gewoon niet zo van short story bundels. Ik wil echt in een verhaal kunnen komen. Wel goed geschreven.
April 12, 2020
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is a really interesting collection of short stories/vignettes/impressions that straddle the border between fiction and non-fiction, or between, as Howland is said to have described her work, invention and imagination. In both her writing style and her thoughts on race, class, and gentrification (without using that word), Howland seemed ahead of her time. The most successful pieces in the collection ("Blue in Chicago," "Public Facilities," "Golden Age," "How We Got the Old Woman to Go") are those focused on her hometown of Chicago and her upbringing and family -- the divorced daughter of very working class Jews. It is such a shame that her writing, story, were "lost," and that attention is resurging only now after her death.
November 4, 2021
Started off really beautiful, portraits of Chicago life, of ordinary people and the invisible downtrodden. The writer has a descriptive and observational writing style, with very poetic and imaginative descriptions of ordinary scenes that evoke strong feelings - of heartache, forlorn and nostalgia. However, I found the second half of the book harder to get through, instead of her personal stories it became a mish mash of fiction - by then her heavy writing style became quite hard to follow. I persevered through but I couldn’t bring myself to read the last chapter. And fell asleep several times along the way, picking it up and closing the book repeatedly. I did enjoy her poetic observations at the start, and my favourite story was the one where she sat and observed a courtroom, with subtle commentary on racial inequalities and the Black community in the inner city. But she couldn’t keep my interest and I felt anxious and eager to turn the page, finish the chapter as if I wanted to just get it over and done with.
April 2, 2021
Feel like I missed the big deal a little. Her writing was decent, definitely some stand out moments, but most of the stories either felt a little structurally loose like candy floss. For the most part there did not feel like there was much to hold many of them together.
On the reverse side of that, some of stories and characters felt somewhat inert. It was clear they were fully developed in Howland's mind but she seemingly was unable to translate that onto the page and as a result many of the stories felt like excerpts from larger works but not in a hyper engaging, well developed way, rather in a 'you have rushed into this and done a very poor job of laying this out for the reader way' which was admittedly quite frustrating.
So yeah, didn't knock my socks off but it also didn't make me want to smash anything, I can say that for it at least.
On the reverse side of that, some of stories and characters felt somewhat inert. It was clear they were fully developed in Howland's mind but she seemingly was unable to translate that onto the page and as a result many of the stories felt like excerpts from larger works but not in a hyper engaging, well developed way, rather in a 'you have rushed into this and done a very poor job of laying this out for the reader way' which was admittedly quite frustrating.
So yeah, didn't knock my socks off but it also didn't make me want to smash anything, I can say that for it at least.
January 25, 2025
“I was wondering what role such forces must have played in my life. It always feels depleting to make these self-discoveries.” While it may seem paradoxical for prose to be at once stark and ornamentally lyrical, Bette Howland (1937-2017) was not a writer to shy away from such a challenge of contrasts, and the eleven stories collected in Blue In Chicago – by turns autobiographical and surreal, introspective and profoundly political – are a powerful, riveting, destabilising testament to her skill.
Until this month, Bette Howland had not been published in the UK. The narrative is simple, if not somewhat baffling: Howland published three books in the US, including a memoir and a book of three novellas; was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984; and continued to write but never published again, almost lost to obscurity until a portfolio of her work was featured in A Public Space magazine in 2015, leading to the 2019 republication in the US of her short stories, and subsequently her first ever UK publication, Blue In Chicago. Howland did not live to see the full extent of the resurgence in her work, but it is easy to imagine a writer so prescient foreseeing a late, mostly posthumous success from day one – so great is Howland’s insight, so acute her sense of life and its ways.
In many ways, Blue In Chicago is a book about “mothers and daughters”, many of the stories repeating that refrain and circling over these matrilineal and matriarchal dynamics and relationships in a keen frenzy, always trying to understand the mother better, the distance between them. And this is only one path through which the primary concern of these eleven stories emerges: the unsaid, the dark chasm between what can and what must be said.
The jarring, unreal opener ‘A Visit’ is less about a singular visitation and more about the act of visiting, the loose transience of time and place; it is a purgatorial vision, briefly obsessing over death and loss, the farawayness of what gets left behind in life. And yet the story, obscure as it is, seems insistent upon hope and brightness, perfectly setting the tone for the following stories: “The light went out. Through the dark I came up. I was looking for you, I went looking for you. My arm was still aching.” Aching, as Howland’s prose does, feeling the extent of the human condition, searching in dimness, darkness – catastrophe uncertain and quick.
Meanwhile, the titular story is almost frustratingly slow and sprawling, a wedding and the journeys to and from it, the oppressive ennui and familial angst of the palpably autobiographical(ish) narrator. This is a narrator who recurs throughout these stories (such as in ‘Golden Age’ and ‘How We Got The Old Woman To Go’), surrounded by the same cast of eccentric aunts and uncles and overbearing mothers, stories as concerned with the intensely personal as with Jewishness, womanhood, Chicago, America. Howland seems at times to lay her life bare – or an imaginative approximation of it – so that she can gain some ground on the societal structures she is entrenched in, view it from above, critically and openly. (Howland herself had brilliant insight into the difference between “invention” and “imagination” in the question of how fictional or not her writing was – Honor Moore’s afterword to this edition elucidates it brilliantly.)
‘Twenty-Sixth and California’ is an ingeniously choral vision of a city courtroom, and ‘Public Facilities’ brings to strange vibrant life an overused and underfunded public library; with greater directness, ‘German Lessons’ explores the indirect, rumour and suggestion and unarticulated fear, while in ‘Aronesti’ the (rare) male protagonist feels “a swarming emptiness, a stray grief”, haunted by the lost Ada, unable to fully immerse himself in life: “Death was a dark world, and she was wandering through it.” Each story is densely decorous and somehow shockingly sparse, bony, sharp.
The final story of the collection is its lynchpin, one of the finest pieces of writing and irrefutable proof that Howland was – and remains – a paramount, singular voice in American literature. ‘Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage’ is the longest story in the collection, comprising just over a quarter of the total book; its narrator restlessly grieves the late Victor Lazarus, regretting unasked questions and losses impossible to quantify. Victor Lazarus was her lover, but such a description feels cheap, an injustice to the person constantly asking herself – and asked by others – “what am I to you?” The clearest answer is also the most ambiguous: “Just say I’m the witness. The witness at the scene.” Staggering back and forth over a handful of days in June 1995, the story of the protracted self-inflicted death of a Great Man (who “had it all and blew it all, that’s his story”) is punctuated with deep grief, yes, elaborate yet earnest, but also with such irony and acerbic wit, such punchy verve, that Lazarus appears resurrected at every turn of his dying and every drawn-out moment of his funeral. She is bearing witness; she is trying to decode a life and death that were not hers but which are part of her accumulated living nonetheless; she is left with “The old words, the good words, the words I don’t know, the words everyone knows.”
Howland has these words too, is obsessed with them, and with laying them out in such a way that those who need them can pick them up and run with them. It’s as if they were fruit hanging from the trees described at the end of ‘Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage’, the penultimate paragraph of this glittering, shimmering collection: “They’re burnished with sound, you can all but see it. I don’t know what they’re saying, but it seems urgent.” The unsaid, loud and clear.
Until this month, Bette Howland had not been published in the UK. The narrative is simple, if not somewhat baffling: Howland published three books in the US, including a memoir and a book of three novellas; was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984; and continued to write but never published again, almost lost to obscurity until a portfolio of her work was featured in A Public Space magazine in 2015, leading to the 2019 republication in the US of her short stories, and subsequently her first ever UK publication, Blue In Chicago. Howland did not live to see the full extent of the resurgence in her work, but it is easy to imagine a writer so prescient foreseeing a late, mostly posthumous success from day one – so great is Howland’s insight, so acute her sense of life and its ways.
In many ways, Blue In Chicago is a book about “mothers and daughters”, many of the stories repeating that refrain and circling over these matrilineal and matriarchal dynamics and relationships in a keen frenzy, always trying to understand the mother better, the distance between them. And this is only one path through which the primary concern of these eleven stories emerges: the unsaid, the dark chasm between what can and what must be said.
The jarring, unreal opener ‘A Visit’ is less about a singular visitation and more about the act of visiting, the loose transience of time and place; it is a purgatorial vision, briefly obsessing over death and loss, the farawayness of what gets left behind in life. And yet the story, obscure as it is, seems insistent upon hope and brightness, perfectly setting the tone for the following stories: “The light went out. Through the dark I came up. I was looking for you, I went looking for you. My arm was still aching.” Aching, as Howland’s prose does, feeling the extent of the human condition, searching in dimness, darkness – catastrophe uncertain and quick.
Meanwhile, the titular story is almost frustratingly slow and sprawling, a wedding and the journeys to and from it, the oppressive ennui and familial angst of the palpably autobiographical(ish) narrator. This is a narrator who recurs throughout these stories (such as in ‘Golden Age’ and ‘How We Got The Old Woman To Go’), surrounded by the same cast of eccentric aunts and uncles and overbearing mothers, stories as concerned with the intensely personal as with Jewishness, womanhood, Chicago, America. Howland seems at times to lay her life bare – or an imaginative approximation of it – so that she can gain some ground on the societal structures she is entrenched in, view it from above, critically and openly. (Howland herself had brilliant insight into the difference between “invention” and “imagination” in the question of how fictional or not her writing was – Honor Moore’s afterword to this edition elucidates it brilliantly.)
‘Twenty-Sixth and California’ is an ingeniously choral vision of a city courtroom, and ‘Public Facilities’ brings to strange vibrant life an overused and underfunded public library; with greater directness, ‘German Lessons’ explores the indirect, rumour and suggestion and unarticulated fear, while in ‘Aronesti’ the (rare) male protagonist feels “a swarming emptiness, a stray grief”, haunted by the lost Ada, unable to fully immerse himself in life: “Death was a dark world, and she was wandering through it.” Each story is densely decorous and somehow shockingly sparse, bony, sharp.
The final story of the collection is its lynchpin, one of the finest pieces of writing and irrefutable proof that Howland was – and remains – a paramount, singular voice in American literature. ‘Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage’ is the longest story in the collection, comprising just over a quarter of the total book; its narrator restlessly grieves the late Victor Lazarus, regretting unasked questions and losses impossible to quantify. Victor Lazarus was her lover, but such a description feels cheap, an injustice to the person constantly asking herself – and asked by others – “what am I to you?” The clearest answer is also the most ambiguous: “Just say I’m the witness. The witness at the scene.” Staggering back and forth over a handful of days in June 1995, the story of the protracted self-inflicted death of a Great Man (who “had it all and blew it all, that’s his story”) is punctuated with deep grief, yes, elaborate yet earnest, but also with such irony and acerbic wit, such punchy verve, that Lazarus appears resurrected at every turn of his dying and every drawn-out moment of his funeral. She is bearing witness; she is trying to decode a life and death that were not hers but which are part of her accumulated living nonetheless; she is left with “The old words, the good words, the words I don’t know, the words everyone knows.”
Howland has these words too, is obsessed with them, and with laying them out in such a way that those who need them can pick them up and run with them. It’s as if they were fruit hanging from the trees described at the end of ‘Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage’, the penultimate paragraph of this glittering, shimmering collection: “They’re burnished with sound, you can all but see it. I don’t know what they’re saying, but it seems urgent.” The unsaid, loud and clear.
August 12, 2024
Descriptively evocative, if emotionally distant stories.
Once upon a time, Bette Howland wrote three books, and received distinguished literary honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a MacArthur genius grant. She also, which doesn’t seem hugely uncommon for up-and-coming female writers of her age, became a muse, protegee and sometimes-lover of a “male great,” Saul Bellow. However, after decades of obscurity, she was all but forgotten.
Howland passed in 2017, and her most recent set of short stories was published in 2019. In fact, A Public Space Books was founded in part for that purpose. On their website, they call Howland “a brilliant observer and writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humor.”
Howland was born in 1937 to a Jewish immigrant family in Chicago, and her family and environs are often a big part of her work. Auntie Hodl, for example, appears both in the stories “Golden Age” and “How We Got the Old Woman to Go.” Uncle Rudy is also in a few. These treatises about her family life often feel fractious, as assimilation threads in and the world changes around them. Howland’s narrator, like Howland herself, is often a divorced mother who feels her family’s judgment.
Two stories, “Twenty-Sixth and California” and “Public Facilities,” feature head-hopping, stream-of-consciousness reports about two very different (though perhaps also somewhat similar) Chicago institutions—the criminal courthouse and a branch of the public library. In segregated Chicago, where victims and perpetrators vs the administrative class are divided by race, Howland writes, “This is where the lines are drawn. It is the only line. For everyone else, the impression is of a sort of soup kitchen; something being ladled, doled out—made to go around. The law is a tedious, passionless process, and they have all fallen into its hands.” The library, like the courtroom, also feels like a sort of purgatory for poor and elderly patrons based on a lack of other options: “There are no clean, well-lighted places. Bus stations are sorrowful, with all those black boxes that come to life if you drop in a quarter. The downtown movie houses which used to stay open all night—the ushers nudged you by the shoulder if you started snoring out loud—have changed over to porno flicks and charge too much money.”
These descriptions are visceral yet cold, removed from any sense of individual interiority. Even in her family stories, Howland flits around so often that it’s difficult to grasp onto the personal. Conflicts are described in generalizations, like in “How We Got the Old Woman to Go:” “They themselves had never wanted children. They should have never had daughters in the first place. No wonder it had all been so difficult. They had been bilked, conned, hoodwinked, sold a bill of goods….Now they saw what the daughters were saying. These daughters wanted just what the mothers wanted out of life. Only they wanted more. And they wanted it now. And they knew how to get it. They weren’t going to run the race for happiness in any three-legged sack.”
And personal growth exists less than does trumpeting revelation: “No whistles blowing, no white flags waving. But it had suddenly dawned on me: my statute of limitations had just run out. The old woman is dead. My own children are grown. Soon I will be forty. Move over, Mother. I’m in the middle now.”
Howland’s longest short stories are perhaps the most and least impersonal. In “German Lessons,” she tracks the wife of a soldier and mother to a young child as she navigates a different country. The titular story serves as a rambling goodbye to a dying friend—a once-great professor who lost his clout, and now exists between worlds as he’s an expert on Jewish subjects and wants a Jewish burial, though he’s not of the tribe himself. (Howland’s shortest story, the flash fiction “The Visit,” is the most supernatural, and it’s also about crossing over to death.)
Judaism makes an appearance in pedestrian ways—in Shabbat dinners and aging minyans (quorums for prayer services.) In “Blue in Chicago,” the narrator is venerated by her goysche family for racially-tinged reasons: “Papa [was] thrilled at having the prospect of a Jewish daughter-in-law breeding with the race—for he believed that all Jews were cultured, cosmopolitan, intellectual and rich. I had never run into this wacky Puritan Jew-worship before, for obvious reasons: I didn’t fit the description, and I didn’t know anyone who did.” It’s Israelis, the far-off Jews, who seem to breathe life and purity into the culture, as described in “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage:” “What’s Shavuot? Oh, she must mean Sh’voos! That’s how we used to say it on the West Side of Chicago. By the rivers of Babylon. The Feast of Weeks. The Pentecost. And bat mitzvah was bas, and Shabbat was Shabb’s. The creation of the state of Israel has sure fixed up our diction.”
I came out of this collection roiling with a lot of heady ideas. It was more difficult to keep track of the characters and the plots. I admire how Howland makes descriptive writing sound easy to pen (it most certainly isn’t.) What’s difficult is sticking with the rest of it. I can’t say I came away from this understanding a particular MC’s heart…unless, of course, we’re talking cumulatively of Howland’s herself. And that’s certainly something.
Once upon a time, Bette Howland wrote three books, and received distinguished literary honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a MacArthur genius grant. She also, which doesn’t seem hugely uncommon for up-and-coming female writers of her age, became a muse, protegee and sometimes-lover of a “male great,” Saul Bellow. However, after decades of obscurity, she was all but forgotten.
Howland passed in 2017, and her most recent set of short stories was published in 2019. In fact, A Public Space Books was founded in part for that purpose. On their website, they call Howland “a brilliant observer and writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humor.”
Howland was born in 1937 to a Jewish immigrant family in Chicago, and her family and environs are often a big part of her work. Auntie Hodl, for example, appears both in the stories “Golden Age” and “How We Got the Old Woman to Go.” Uncle Rudy is also in a few. These treatises about her family life often feel fractious, as assimilation threads in and the world changes around them. Howland’s narrator, like Howland herself, is often a divorced mother who feels her family’s judgment.
Two stories, “Twenty-Sixth and California” and “Public Facilities,” feature head-hopping, stream-of-consciousness reports about two very different (though perhaps also somewhat similar) Chicago institutions—the criminal courthouse and a branch of the public library. In segregated Chicago, where victims and perpetrators vs the administrative class are divided by race, Howland writes, “This is where the lines are drawn. It is the only line. For everyone else, the impression is of a sort of soup kitchen; something being ladled, doled out—made to go around. The law is a tedious, passionless process, and they have all fallen into its hands.” The library, like the courtroom, also feels like a sort of purgatory for poor and elderly patrons based on a lack of other options: “There are no clean, well-lighted places. Bus stations are sorrowful, with all those black boxes that come to life if you drop in a quarter. The downtown movie houses which used to stay open all night—the ushers nudged you by the shoulder if you started snoring out loud—have changed over to porno flicks and charge too much money.”
These descriptions are visceral yet cold, removed from any sense of individual interiority. Even in her family stories, Howland flits around so often that it’s difficult to grasp onto the personal. Conflicts are described in generalizations, like in “How We Got the Old Woman to Go:” “They themselves had never wanted children. They should have never had daughters in the first place. No wonder it had all been so difficult. They had been bilked, conned, hoodwinked, sold a bill of goods….Now they saw what the daughters were saying. These daughters wanted just what the mothers wanted out of life. Only they wanted more. And they wanted it now. And they knew how to get it. They weren’t going to run the race for happiness in any three-legged sack.”
And personal growth exists less than does trumpeting revelation: “No whistles blowing, no white flags waving. But it had suddenly dawned on me: my statute of limitations had just run out. The old woman is dead. My own children are grown. Soon I will be forty. Move over, Mother. I’m in the middle now.”
Howland’s longest short stories are perhaps the most and least impersonal. In “German Lessons,” she tracks the wife of a soldier and mother to a young child as she navigates a different country. The titular story serves as a rambling goodbye to a dying friend—a once-great professor who lost his clout, and now exists between worlds as he’s an expert on Jewish subjects and wants a Jewish burial, though he’s not of the tribe himself. (Howland’s shortest story, the flash fiction “The Visit,” is the most supernatural, and it’s also about crossing over to death.)
Judaism makes an appearance in pedestrian ways—in Shabbat dinners and aging minyans (quorums for prayer services.) In “Blue in Chicago,” the narrator is venerated by her goysche family for racially-tinged reasons: “Papa [was] thrilled at having the prospect of a Jewish daughter-in-law breeding with the race—for he believed that all Jews were cultured, cosmopolitan, intellectual and rich. I had never run into this wacky Puritan Jew-worship before, for obvious reasons: I didn’t fit the description, and I didn’t know anyone who did.” It’s Israelis, the far-off Jews, who seem to breathe life and purity into the culture, as described in “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage:” “What’s Shavuot? Oh, she must mean Sh’voos! That’s how we used to say it on the West Side of Chicago. By the rivers of Babylon. The Feast of Weeks. The Pentecost. And bat mitzvah was bas, and Shabbat was Shabb’s. The creation of the state of Israel has sure fixed up our diction.”
I came out of this collection roiling with a lot of heady ideas. It was more difficult to keep track of the characters and the plots. I admire how Howland makes descriptive writing sound easy to pen (it most certainly isn’t.) What’s difficult is sticking with the rest of it. I can’t say I came away from this understanding a particular MC’s heart…unless, of course, we’re talking cumulatively of Howland’s herself. And that’s certainly something.
May 28, 2019
I wrote a review for this book for Full Stop! Read it here: http://www.full-stop.net/2019/05/28/r...
Read
September 28, 2023The first 4 stories are amazing but I didn't care for the others. "Public Facilities" is probably the best story written about a public library.
August 22, 2019
SIX WORD REVIEW: Knows Chicago and funerals and family.
Read
December 27, 2019It was dated. Not bad, but I never appreciated it as much as the editor had wanted. Never finished the last longer story.
March 31, 2022
Non l’ho neanche finito, senza capo né coda né tanto meno senso
January 31, 2021
There's sadness, but so much is very funny.
I love this, from "To The Country," in which a narrator is sharing a summer cabin with a couple, whom we never meet.
"Belle and Emile save all our trash so they can take it to the recycling center at the Bethlehem Steel plant. That is their hobby." --
----
"Our refuse isn't enough for them; they go around collecting from other cabins, too. Tins, jars, soda bottles, beer cans, great green jugs of Gallo and Pio Vino. The stuff is stashed all over the place. Shopping bags buckle under their loads. Stacks of Sunday papers, comics, rotogravures. Then there are the ecological experiments: piles of browning corncob (for fuel?); rheumy watermelon rinds. Belle and Emile know how I love to throw things out, so they leave notes for me:
>This is not garbage. Please save >
I love this, from "To The Country," in which a narrator is sharing a summer cabin with a couple, whom we never meet.
"Belle and Emile save all our trash so they can take it to the recycling center at the Bethlehem Steel plant. That is their hobby." --
----
"Our refuse isn't enough for them; they go around collecting from other cabins, too. Tins, jars, soda bottles, beer cans, great green jugs of Gallo and Pio Vino. The stuff is stashed all over the place. Shopping bags buckle under their loads. Stacks of Sunday papers, comics, rotogravures. Then there are the ecological experiments: piles of browning corncob (for fuel?); rheumy watermelon rinds. Belle and Emile know how I love to throw things out, so they leave notes for me:
>This is not garbage. Please save >
April 17, 2022
Mostly vignettes that make playgrounds out of wordplay, that obsess over the little details that make up a character, that make up Chicago.
Not much goes on in the stories, but so much is to be seen and heard, so much to pull out of a city.
My favorite is Power Failure. About a mother and dreams of her children, dreams that warp and shape who they are and her current reality.
For those who don’t mind getting a bit lost in scenes, in meandering thoughts and observations. For those who enjoy the likes of Renata Adler, Lucia Berlin, and Claire-Louise Bennet.
Not much goes on in the stories, but so much is to be seen and heard, so much to pull out of a city.
My favorite is Power Failure. About a mother and dreams of her children, dreams that warp and shape who they are and her current reality.
For those who don’t mind getting a bit lost in scenes, in meandering thoughts and observations. For those who enjoy the likes of Renata Adler, Lucia Berlin, and Claire-Louise Bennet.
November 19, 2024
Este libro no es para mí. Me da rabia porque adoro la editorial, pero no he conseguido conectar con la prosa de la autora. Algunos relatos sí me han gustado (el de la biblioteca y el de los juzgados), pero el resto y las dos novelas cortas me han resultado aburridos y no conseguía engancharme.
Tal vez, en otro momento, pueda que le encuentre el gusto. Pero no ahora.
Tal vez, en otro momento, pueda que le encuentre el gusto. Pero no ahora.
January 6, 2025
I really wanted to like this book. There were so many aspects of the book that I could relate to, being from Chicago, familiar with the neighborhoods, ethnicities she includes, etc. but, I realized that I also found it depressing… yes the city might have its depressing qualities, her observations might be accurate, but I didn’t want to continue reading the stories.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews