‘Carpets like flattened small animals’

Can this superb collection of cool, satirical stories rescue the late Bette Howland from obscurity? By Orlando Bird

FBLUE IN CHICAGO by Bette Howland 336pp, Picador, £12.99, ebook £8.99

or a long time, the American writer Bette Howland was in danger of becoming a name familiar only to fans of Saul Bellow, and the real anoraks at that. She had an affair with him in the 1960s, and after they pivoted to a long and (for Bellow) unusually reciprocal friendship, he was a staunch supporter. But Howland – who published a memoir in 1974, and much-praised collections of stories in 1978 and 1983, then went silent until her death in 2017 – deserves a lot better. Blue in Chicago, which mixes those stories with previously unpublished ones, comes amid a resurgence of interest in her writing. It’s a remarkable book, the first of hers to appear in Britain, and I hope there’s more on the way.

Howland writes what she knows. Like Bellow, she had a tough upbringing in Chicago, the child of working-class Jewish parents. Most of these stories are set in or around the city – where “the prairie is always reasserting itself, pressing its claims” – and most are narrated by women with the same backstory as her. But decades before we were bickering about autofiction, Howland was impatient with the question: “When people worry about whether something is fiction or non-fiction, they are worrying about how much invention there is. They should be worrying about how much imagination there is.” For Bellow, we have Zachary Leader’s 2,000-page biography; in Howland’s case, we don’t know how many of her characters are based on real people, or how many of the names have been changed. Does it matter? Not at all.

What matters is that this is captivating writing: rhythmic, alert, empathetic. These qualities are amplified by the absence of a titanic ego (“I’m not the leading lady type,” says one narrator, “not even the heroine of my own life”). Instead, the speakers emerge through their perceptions of the world. Often the scale is small, but teeming with life. The title story, for instance, presents a panorama of family frictions. The narrator travels from her home in south Chicago – an area she moved to “because it doesn’t have relatives” – to a cousin’s wedding. Her mother is unimpressed by the occasion: “She was reliving the scene of her own greatest humiliation – the day of my wedding.” Her uncle pretends to be “deaf, slow, thick, stubborn” so he doesn’t have to deal with anyone.

Howland’s narrators all have an eye on the bigger picture, too. “Twenty-Sixth and California”, the story of a Chicago courtroom, is minutely observed (“Flypaper shades – long tattered strips – buckling at the window”) but it’s also about deprivation and the “canned belligerence” of the legal process. (Lawyers come out of this book badly, as do doctors.) Many tales end in disappointment – or without redemption, anyway. In “To the Country”, we escape the city, only to find that rural life is “the same old story”. In “Public Facilities” (a highlight) the grizzled habitués of a shabby library take on an abusive interloper – and win. But then the cops show up – and, as they hear what happened, become “more and more unmoved”.

What lifts all this is Howland’s humour. In the same story, she describes a cinema “where the toilets keep running but never flush; the carpets… remind you of small animals flattened on a highway”. She’s lethally observant, zooming in on bodies (“Like a dog with its teeth sunk into your leg – that’s how my mother holds her tongue”).

Her cool satirical swing shouldn’t be mistaken for flippancy. “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage”, a novella, sounds hackneyed: a woman addresses her dead former lover, a brilliant academic wrecked by drink. In fact, it’s the most sustained display of Howland’s probing intelligence – densely allusive (Shakespeare, the Old Testament, Wallace Stevens, Gerard Manley Hopkins) and out to upturn assumptions about identity and belonging.

These aren’t perfectly crafted stories: some meander, some fizzle out, many suffer from lurching digressions. There’s never much of a scheme. But I’m not sure this would improve them. “Life – a real life – is lived day to day,” we’re told. That’s what we get. I haven’t enjoyed another book more this year.

PROBING Bette Howland, c1980