Review: Chicago: A Novel of Prohibition

Chicago: A Novel of Prohibition by David Mamet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This has to start with the dialogue, with the things these characters say and write. After all, it’s Mamet, and no one has a better ear for making music out of the hunger to sound tough.

Consider, for instance, the way our journalist-protagonist Mike Hodge puts it in one news story, “Jackie Weiss had died of a broken heart, it being broken by several slugs from a .45.” Yeah, that’s funny, and yeah, it’s in bad taste. But that just makes it funnier.

At one level – the level of the blurb on the back – this is a story of Hodge looking to get revenge on the gangsters who kill his girlfriend. [SPOILER] And that level works well enough as tight noir: her murder is parallel to but ultimately separate from a Syndicate consolidation around the murders of a pair of Jewish gangsters – Jackie Weiss and Morris Teitelbaum – but it turns out to be tied even more tightly to an IRA plot to steal tommy guns for its rebellion. Hodge goes from potential source to potential source, learning things he doesn’t want to know and getting slowly closer to figuring out whom he ought to try to kill himself.

Most of this book turns out to be conversation, though – from Hodges’s extended philosophical and artistic disputes with his friend and colleague Parlow, to his seeking information from his wise African-American madame friend Peekaboo, or his encounters with one after another underworld character who might be able to help him. In the hands of a lesser writer, it would get boring quickly, and the eventual resolution wouldn’t carry much weight. In Mamet’s hands, though, we get gems like these:

+ The first phrase he’d heard, in basic training, was that those looking for sympathy could find it in a dictionary, between “shit” and “syphilis.”

+ Peekaboo explains why a cheating husband should go to exceptional lengths to pretend innocence to his wife. “She knows the truth. She needs to be assured her husband is observing the proprieties.”

+ A friend observes to Ruth, moll to one of the murdered Jewish gangsters, that knowledge is power. Ruth answers, “Power is power. People say differently don’t understand power. Or knowledge. Knowledge is what gets you killed.”

+ A tough old detective type tells Hodge that the Chinese invented gunpowder “to foil the evil spirits.” “The question is, then” Mike said, “what is evil?” “Well, that is decided,” Doyle said, “by the fellow holding the gun.”

+ In the wake of Annie’s murder, Hodge descends into serious alcoholism. “He comprehended perfectly the concept that time would heal grief, but had lost all understanding of ‘time.”

+ Parlow tries at one point to rally him. “You were humbled by your love, you were humbled by her slim white body, you are humbled by death, but real humility is nothing to be proud of. And you, full stop, stink.”

+ When he returns to The Tribune and hands in a sob-sister type story, his editor responds with, “You either go out and drink less, or drink more. Something. But don’t break my heart come in here with this fucking valentine to your long-lost talent. Because someone at Hull House may care, but I’ve got to write a newspaper.”

+ Or the same editor later in his rant, “I don’t understand writer’s block. I’m sure it’s very high toned and thrilling, like these other psychological complaints. I, myself, could never afford it. As I had a Sainted Mother at home who, without my wages, would have been hard put to drink herself to death. Further: I think, if one can afford it, but one has nothing to say, one should not write. This is not writer’s block but common courtesy.”

+ Or, as a kicker, “Like most men who think they understand men,” Mike thought, “this man only understands fools.”

That’s a lot of top-shelf quotes, but I’ve restrained myself from others. As I say, it’s the dialogue – the particular Mamet poetry – that makes this go.

I can see the appeal of Prohibition Chicago for Mamet – who’s celebrated the sleaze of the city going back over the most recent half-century in works that stand among the best plays of our era. In many ways Chicago toughness came to a head in Capone’s city – a point Mamet helped to cement in contemporary readers’ imagination with his writing the screenplay for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables.

In that regard, the tone here is just right. This is a way of looking back at the events of the 1920s with the sharper-edged language of today to shine light into corners the real journalists of the time allowed to remain dark. As such, this is solid historical fiction, work that gives you a fresh sense of the era, a book that makes you think your grandparents may not have been as sweet as they seemed when your parents bundled you up to see them in their retirement homes.

I feel a bit compelled to point out that this is not particularly good history. Dean O’Banion is somehow still alive after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And Nails Morton, long dead, would not have had the sort of residual gang that turns out to be responsible for blackmailing out IRA partisans.

I’ll acknowledge those points as the bugaboos of my work as a gangster historian, though. I won’t let those cultivated inaccuracies or the sometimes winding plot stand in the way of the general excellence of the prose here.

Mamet knows his way around a typewriter like few people, and it’s great to see him taking on the tommy gun era – with the tommy gun famously called a “Chicago typewriter” – in a way that makes it fresh and makes it sing. This may not be his best work, but even second-tier Mamet is worth celebrating.


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