Readers and writers blog

Reading about all the fake memoirs in the news these days, it struck me as odd that some of the writers with the most interesting biographies — life stories that would make the greatest memoirs — choose instead to write novels.

What brings this to mind is Joseph Cigan, a Chicago writer whose first novel, Sniper in the Mist, we are now serializing.

I mean, Ernest Hemingway, whose decades of fiction reflected everything about his life, never finished his memoirs, A Moveable Feast.* And Harper Lee apparently put all of her life into one major work, To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel, considered by some as the best of the 20th century.

So what the hell is with James Frey, who faked drug addiction in A Million Little Pieces, Monique De Wael and her phony memoir of the Holocaust, and now Margaret Seltzer, a white suburbanite, whose Love and Consequences tale of surviving sexual abuse, foster care and gang violence turns out to be a complete fraud, including her claim to native American heritage?

The answer seems to be that most readers, like a lot of TV viewers, prefer reality to art.

That’s too bad. Because Cigan’s work proves to us that art is reality. Put another way, well-written fiction, like good theater, leaves us no choice but to believe that it is a reflection of reality.

In our recent blog entry about the second installment of Sniper in the Mist, we quoted Cigan’s description of his protagonist, Joseph Varga Jr., escaping as young child with his family from communist border guards and their police dogs in the thickets of former Yugoslavia. Not coincidentally, Cigan and his family made a similar escape to Austria in the early 1950s.

In that and other chapters of his book, Cigan writes about his East Lake View neighborhood and the tough guys, junkies, rock ‘n’ rollers and other characters of various ethnic persuasions he grew up with in the 1960s.

In today’s installment, Chapter 4, he talks about Chuito:

Flako’s brother Chuito was and remained an enigma to me. We called him the day tripper ’cause he always dropped his acid during the day. We’d see him walking in the park with his leather, a purple silk shirt, pork pie hat and dark shades, sporting a cane and a “Giaconda Smile.” The smile became a grin when he’d see someone he knew. He’d just stroll by with a little bop in his walk, neck arched a bit and leading with his chin. He avoided getting strung out on junk like his brother, but I knew he chipped, dabbled that is.

Making five hundred dollars a week, when that was some real money for a working man, with two young babies and Ruthie in his life, the chump burns out his veins as well as his life, slumped into a corner where the dogs piss and the winos vomit.

We suspect that Chuito in fact existed, although maybe not by that name and maybe not in one body. That’s what we suspect. But what we believe, reading Cigan’s novel, is that this sad chipper, Chuito, is real.

In fact, Cigan’s writing reminds us a lot of Jack Kerouac’s, but — and here we apologize to the icon of the Beat Generation — with a better style. There, we’ve said it.

So check it out, and don’t forget . . .

• Our other offering today: Chapter 6 of Steve Karmazenuk’s science-fiction novel, The Unearthing, in which a Canadian defense minister and an American air force lieutenant colonel get involved in the investigation of a huge alien ship unearthed from the sands of New Mexico.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*His fourth wife did.