Novel captures complexities of 1890s Chicago
With bravura writing, Rosellen Brown’s first book in 18 years delivers a timeless love story
The blue ink sinks into the notebook pages:
“The two major gambits of storytelling: 1) the story begins with a status quo that gets shaken; and 2) the story begins when a character goes forth to a new place.”
“Fiction is not a set of moral instructions.”
“The ending is a contrivance; the beginning is a mystery.”
They are the words of Rosellen Brown, spoken the summer of 1994 in the Italian hill town of Spoleto. She’d recently published her best-selling, bound-for-Hollywood “Before and After.” She’d not yet published “Half a Heart.” She’d made a name for herself as a socially engaged writer of gorgeous sentences whose contemporary stories often held the complicated weave of family and civic discourse at their heart.
Alongside Reginald Gibbons, Brown held court in a quiet classroom, in a garden restaurant, at a cemetery, in the open air, in a neighboring
Italian town. She spoke, and we workshoppers wrote her wisdom down.
For the past 18 years, Brown has continued to teach — now as an adjunct professor in the writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — and to work on her craft. Her first book in all that time — “The Lake on Fire” — is family intense and socially alert. It’s also a historical novel, the biggest star of which is 1890s Chicago.
This story begins when a character goes forth to a new place. Two characters, actually, a sister and a brother, and two new places. We first meet the siblings when they arrive at a Wisconsin farm where “Unpainted, gray as the sky, the buildings seemed to be riding an ocean of green.” Soon enough they’re leaving all of that
behind for a better life in the city, which “commanded sight, imposed hearing, and it stank.”
Sharing a room in a poor widow’s flat, Chaya, the older and more disciplined of the two, finds work in a cigar factory whose “sour smell, grassy-turned-rancid, lifted Chaya off the sore soles of her feet.” Asher, meanwhile, uses his inestimable charms and insatiable curiosity to navigate alleys and pickpockets in true Charles Dickens style. Ultimately, Asher will dazzle the rich with his recitations of the books he loves, while Chaya, introduced to the progressivist Jane Addams by the socialistleaning rich man she will marry, sets out to record the lives of the urban poor.
Asher is a Robin Hood with finely tuned sensitivities to the injustices of class and circumstance. Chaya strives to live a right life beside the man who offers physical and material comforts. The story that begins in the mysteries of a Wisconsin farm escalates toward the consequences of inevitable city strife.
“I like the sentence that begins romantically, then de-romanticizes itself,” Brown had said, in the echoing classroom walls of Spoleto, and “The Lake on Fire” offers one bravura sentence upon another. “She followed Gregory into its murky hallway, where the rankling smell of mildew mixed with the residue of some cooking disaster that must have charred the bottom of a good-sized pot,” Brown writes.
Her single sentences deliver more character insight than many authors can achieve in entire scenes. Consider: “She could not decide whether he was as good a man as he seemed, or was a practicing dissimulator who understood that some women are wooed more effectively by vulnerability than by mastery and menace.”
In “The Lake on Fire,” Brown has reconstructed late-19th-century Chicago with astonishing skill. She has made the vanished World’s Columbian Exposition, with its vaudevillelike Midway and its mammoth Ferris wheel, acutely alive. She has stained our fingers with her cigar factory and bulged our pockets with stolen jewels.
And yet, for all of its sensate qualities, Brown’s story is finally a love story, which is to say a timeless story about why and how and at what cost we take care of one another. “Organize your stories so that they conclude with a moment of emotional power,” Brown had said in Spoleto all those years ago. “The Lake on Fire” is her master class.