In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Review of Books, The New Chicago Renaissance series revisits exemplary works of literature about Chicago from the last 10 years and explores their continued relevance. Join us all year long as 12 leading writers and artists explore books that they love and why they’re meaningful to our understanding of modern Chicago.
In Chicago, authenticity is everything. Chicagoans can sniff out a poser from a mile away—whether a fake foodie (ketchup on a hot dog? A dead giveaway), a fair-weather sports fan, or a politician whose hot air is unusually blustery.
This is why Joe Meno is one of our city’s most important chroniclers and an easy choice as representative of the New Chicago Renaissance. Meno, a long-time creative writing teacher at Columbia College, has published more than a dozen books, plays, short story collections, and mixed media experiments like Question Mark, Ohio, a novel “written across the internet.” But it’s Meno’s trilogy of Chicago coming-of-age novels—2004’s Hairstyles of the Damned, 2012’s Office Girl, and 2022’s Book of Extraordinary Tragedies—that best illustrate his inextricable link to this big, brawny city.
These novels all explore how to be genuine in a world that more often rewards artifice. All three are about young Chicagoans striving; striving to make art, striving to connect, striving to be punk as fuck, striving to make ends meet, and yes, striving to be real.
In the Chicago depicted in these stories, authenticity is, by definition, interesting. But trying to be interesting is not always authentic—and in fact, often isn’t. Meno’s characters pass poor judgement on their peers whose attempts at being interesting fall flat, inauthentic. Odile in Office Girl, for instance, flat out asks new people she meets, “Have you ever done anything remarkable?”
In Hairstyles, our high school-age protagonist Brian Oswald and his crush-slash-best-friend come of age in the early 1990s suburban Chicago punk scene. Writing about music, especially punk, can expose a writer’s inauthenticity if he knows not of which he writes. Meno not only has the writerly chops but also the pedigree: He was a one-time contributing editor to the famous independent zine, Punk Planet.
In Extraordinary Tragedies, the 2008 financial meltdown has made life exceedingly difficult for South Sider Aleks, an early-20s fellow striving to take care of his sick older sister and her daughter, as well as his 13-year-old brother Daniel, who is all adolescent hormones and angst. Aleks wavers between staying the course of what he knows is right and what is expedient, between art and making ends meet, between succumbing to our fate and rising above it. There aren’t more fierce battles for authenticity than what’s involved with those such struggles.
Aleks, like Brian Oswald in Hairstyles, and Jack and Odile in Office Girl whom we’ll get to in a minute, is perfectly representative of a Joe Meno Chicagoan. His head-down, do-what-I-have-to-do pluck belies a sweet soul. Like Chicagoans heading outside in the depths of winter to help their neighbors shovel, a toughness on the exterior protects a Midwestern generosity on the inside. When these two elements are in balance, you have a truly authentic Chicagoan.
And then, there’s the short beautiful novel Office Girl, a criminally underrated book. Office Girl is a somber story about making art and doing what makes you authentically happy, everyone else be damned.
Find people who inspire you, the novel preaches, and disconnect with everyone else, which in the case of these characters—two mid-20s Chicago artists Jack and Odile—is about 99 percent of other humans. “People are just one big useless hassle,” Odile thinks to herself. If maybe swinging to the wrong side of the misanthropic line, still, it’s so real. So real and so relatable.
Later, as the two become closer and graduate their friendship to romance, Jack tells her, “I just can’t be around people all the time because it makes me sad to be around them sometimes.” It’s not that they dislike people. It’s that they dislike fake people. And in your early 20s, everyone seems fake. This idea is their main point of connection. Well, that, and their art.
When I read Office Girl in 2012, I’d only lived in Chicago for a few years, and I was still searching for—though finally beginning to catch on to—what this city needed from me to be happy here. When I moved here from Milwaukee to be with my then-girlfriend now-spouse, I was deeply unsure about the city itself. The crowds, the traffic, the crime, the cougars (yes, the first week I lived here, animal control shot and killed a cougar just a few blocks from where I’d moved. That was not the welcome to the City of Big Shoulders I’d been hoping for).
Even after those first few years, I still hadn’t fully convinced myself I was in the right place. Was I cut out to be a Chicagoan? When I told people I lived in Chicago, did they see me as a real Chicagoan, or a fellow who was in over his head? A phony?
Chicago, if you’re not from here, can be intimidating. That was true for me, and that’s true for Odile, who is from Minneapolis and also is never quite sure she’s where she’s supposed to be. Her solution to her restlessness is to start a new movement to make art that’s real and fresh and that no one has ever done before.
Office Girl is still my favorite of Meno’s books, and when I read it nearly a decade-and-a-half ago, something clicked. Holy shit, I thought, I totally understand these characters—real Chicagoans. I didn’t ride a bike around in the dead of winter, as these characters do (all Meno’s characters do a lot of winter bike-riding in this trilogy—which, also, real), but I did feel a connection to their version of striving. This book made me want to stay. It made me want to convert my skepticism about Chicago into the deep, authentic love for this big, bruising city that so many here feel.
Jack and Odile in Office Girl. Brian Oswald in Hairstyles. Aleks in Extraordinary Tragedies. All of these characters are searching for what’s real through art, just as Joe Meno himself is doing with these novels, just as I did as a new Chicagoan. These novels explore the fictional authentic—and if you’ll buy the idea that nothing is more real than fiction, then what these novels are really doing is mining the truth of what it’s like to be young and creating and being part of a grand Chicago tradition.
Joe Meno’s novels both augment and stand in conversation with other Chicago artists whose work explores authenticity, relationships, and art. When I reread these novels recently to prepare for this piece, I thought immediately of the films and shows of Joe Swanberg, like Drinking Buddies and the anthology series Easy. I also thought of Wellness by Nathan Hill, a novel, like Meno’s work, that sets us in the past in a Chicago neighborhood (Wicker Park) and beautifully captures the vibe before gentrification caused it to lose much of its character. And loss of character means loss of authenticity.
How to avoid that sad transition from authentic to artificial is the serious business of Joe Meno’s characters in this trilogy of novels. Though they may have come from elsewhere, maintaining their identities as Chicagoans, artists even—like Meno himself—is the only thing that matters in the end.
