'Riding down 95th, Kedzie, or 103rd, he muses that 'everything we think is important or unique about our lives means nothing in the face of history. Even our tragedies are entirely ordinary.' And yet life still has to be lived.'
Riding down 95th, Kedzie, or 103rd, he muses that “everything we think is important or unique about our lives means nothing in the face of history. Even our tragedies are entirely ordinary.” And yet life still has to be lived. As he mops floors in a crumbling rehab center or coaches bored, unathletic kids in tennis after school, Aleks dreams of escape. He’s not the only one.
Aleks’s travails are engaging in no small part because of Meno’s sure grasp of Chicago geography and the city’s topographic, economic, racial, and ethnic particularities. It’s a rich and underexplored terrain in both literature and pop culture. This is not the Chicago of Ferris Bueller, the Blues Brothers, or Al Capone, but the patchwork, maddeningly contradictory city longtime residents know and grudgingly adore.
As Aleks scrambles from dead-end job to dead-end job, even the mindless factory work he tries to avoid dries up. More and more of the storefronts he passes on his bike rides are boarded up. It’s as if the neighborhood is becoming as hopeless as Aleks’s sister, brother, and mother. But despite the long odds stacked against his characters,keeps their story buoyant when it could have been a maudlin litany of misery and complaint. These people have hope and keep trying.
Before passing away, Aleks’s grandfather gives him a pile of notebooks filled with musical notations—his own brother’s attempt to tell their family history, encoded in compositional language. Adapting his dead relative’s work, shows Aleks a way out. “As I ride it’s like the entire block is a symphony, the entire neighborhood, the south side, the city, all the instruments ringing out, everything—even the street signs—having something to say.