Something to talk about
Novel deals with unspoken — indeed at times unspeakable — issues townspeople hardly whisper in public
James Janko’s “What We Don’t Talk About” is an enticing work of fiction that is self-identified as a novel but can also be termed a group of connected short stories.
It is generally set in the small fictional Illinois town of Orville in the 1960s. Besides the population, the town, the Illinois River that runs through it, and the farmland can be seen as characters as well.
As the title hints, the book deals with unspoken — indeed at times unspeakable — issues townspeople hardly whisper in public.
Racism is one overarching issue. Orville has the reputation for being a “sundown” town, meaning Blacks should get out by sunset or likely face the threat of intimidation or worse, violence.
In the opening story, Fenza, a teenage bully, advises an old Black man to leave town in about three minutes.
Fenza’s pal Gus, a kind person, steps in. Gus borrows a bucket and helps refill the truck’s overheated radiator and a bathtub in the truck’s bed holding catfish and carp. He tells the man to take all the time he needs.
Here’s how Janko describes the vehicle: “A pickup crept along the riverfront road. Fenza saw it first, a Chevrolet missing its front bumper, a heap maybe on its way to the junkyard east of town. Puffs of smoke oozed up from the hood. The muffler scraped and sparked over the crooked bricks of Canal Street. Whose truck, and who was driving? The half-light of dusk left room for wonder.”
The author’s power of language will magnetize the reader throughout the book.
Fenza and Gus are two of the recurring dominant characters. The boys are also symbols. Fenza represents a narrow-minded status quo shared by many of the townspeople. Gus represents an open-mindedness of thought and independence of spirit.
We see them and their circle of friends as they come of age, edging toward adulthood.
The boys, as teenage boys will do, try to crazily grab the attention of two of the local girls, the beauty Jenny and the tomboy Pat.
These girls have their own entwined stories to tell. Jenny’s is about racial identity, Pat’s is about sexual identity.
Jenny’s mom doesn’t want her inquisitive daughter to look into her own mother’s racial makeup, fearing it would be a weakness in the armor of the family’s residence in white-only Orville.
Pat isn’t so sure she is romantically interested in either Fenza or Gus. She feels a physical attraction to Jenny.
The arrival of the teaching nun Sister Clair is a breath of fresh air, though her ideas about war, civil rights and literature are too liberal for Orville’s older generation of Catholics.
However, she sets in motion events that challenge the town’s “sundown” rule through Kenny, a young Black man she had known in Alabama. While on active duty in Vietnam, Kenny turns his back on the military. Released from the brig and given a dishonorable discharge, he visits Sister Clair in Orville … after dark.
Another social issue highlighted is mental illness. The character of Crazy Ruth, locked up at home by her husband, rarely escapes. When she does, she wanders through town in bathrobe and slippers banging on a pan and shouting her love for Indians, for Blacks.
Gus finds her body in the river. Her husband, Will, a World War II veteran and church deacon, admits he dumped her body but had killed her in self-defense. Shame and guilt eventually get the best of Will.
Janko, an Albuquerque resident, said in a phone interview, “As a novelist, it’s easier to stick with a few main characters and easier to stay with one or two primary points of view. But that misses the complexity of the lived experience.”
He said his writing of the book was informed by Sherwood Anderson’s classic 1919 “Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life.” “It really gave the feeling of the whole town,” Janko said.
Janko himself grew up Catholic in La Salle, Illinois, about 100 miles southwest of Chicago. He termed it a “harddrinking, God-fearing town.”
Like Gus, the author was encouraged to become a priest but didn’t. Like the fictional Orville, La Salle was a real “sundown” town, one of some 230 in Illinois alone in the ’60s, Janko said.
On that subject, he directed readers to James W. Loewen’s book “Sundown Towns: The Hidden Dimension of American Racism.”