If James McManus is rarely mentioned among Chicago’s most celebrated and beloved writers, he has only himself to blame. And he does blame himself.
“My books were inaccessible to a degree,” he says, understating the deliberately cryptic, volatile and anarchic nature of his work, which has made him the Unanovelist of local authors. Especially provocative was “Chin Music,” a 1985 novel that opens at a Sox game and winds up an apocalyptic fantasy, with mass looting, suicide and homicide on Michigan Avenue and other parts of the nuked metropolis.
McManus, 44, admits that much of his work has been willfully alienating, not simply because of its high quota of sex and scatology but also because of its dense, hot-wired prose. “A lot of people whose opinion I trust say that my books were obscure, which to a great extent they were, and sexist, which I’m less certain about. But (James) Joyce was my hero for so long that I felt it was a badge of honor to really challenge the reader, image by image, sentence by sentence. I don’t feel that way anymore.”
Without renouncing the Joycean influence or apologizing for his previous books, McManus has moved into more accessible–and hospitable–country with his latest novel, “Going to the Sun” (HarperCollins). Hoping to attract readers rather than to test their capacity for rude language and ruder behavior, McManus talks about his “concerted effort to make this book stylistically and emotionally available.”
“As a writer, I think I’ve been a very slow learner,” says McManus, whose resume includes a story collection and two volumes of poetry, as well as four novels. “By the time I got to this book, I had learned some things about characters’ emotions and storytelling that I just wasn’t good at, or interested in, earlier.”
If it was a slow transformation for McManus, it was also an agonizing one. Penny, the heroine and narrator of “Going to the Sun,” has diabetes, a disease with which McManus has a long and painful familiarity. His father, who died in 1990, was diabetic, and his daughter Bridget (to whom the book is dedicated) was diagnosed with it when she was 4. Now 21, Bridget McManus was the obvious inspiration for Penny in the novel, but his daughter’s condition is much more debilitating, McManus says, taking inventory of her medical history, the laser surgeries and vitrectomy, her dependence on insulin.
“I can calmly sit here and talk about it, but it really enrages me,” says the novelist during a conversation in an office at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he heads the creative writing program. “I really hope the book gives readers a powerful sense of just how difficult the disease is, without rubbing their noses in it.”
McManus hasn’t spared the unpleasant clinical details, but he has artfully spliced them into a narrative that’s less about Penny’s medical tribulations than her perilous bicycle journey from Chicago northwest toward Alaska. The trip is a spiritual as well as a physical marathon for 29-year-old Penny. A grad student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she’s returning to the Alaskan wilderness where, seven years earlier, her boyfriend was dismembered by a bear (and died with a euthanasic assist from Penny).
Besides her expected problems with diabetes and her bicycle, Penny is severely tested by the people she meets while pedaling across North Dakota and Montana. Among them are three cretinous teenagers and a man claiming to be a pro basketball player, whose identity Penny questions even as she’s making love to him in a motel. In her more despairing moments, Penny, a Ph.D. candidate in Irish literature, finds consolation in the words of Samuel Beckett, the subject of her unfinished dissertation–and a writer who’s as much a literary hero to McManus as Joyce.
Even though Beckett is a tandem spirit on Penny’s journey (and the finale, a dizzying descent down a mountain highway, has a Beckett-like ambiguity), McManus says he was cautious about letting any academic or “postmodernist” digressions throw his narrative off course. “The notion of aestheticizing and playing literary games just seemed outlandishly inappropriate,” he says, “as well as offensive.”
A wider audience this time
While “Going to the Sun” lacks the hallucinatory extravagance and the neurotransmitter style of his novels “Chin Music” and “Ghost Waves,” McManus didn’t push the book to the opposite extreme, making it as cold-blooded and austere as his first novel, “Out of the Blue,” which may have been the classic illustration of his earlier unemotional, and uncommercial, approach to storytelling.
A kidnap thriller set in and around Winnetka’s Hubbard Woods, the 1983 novel had all the surface elements for a best seller. But the prose was so skeletal, the tone so detached that the book found only a minimal readership.
“I thought I was being aggressively succinct,” McManus says. “Given the . . . suspenseful plot, it’s hard to imagine how that book could be written so idiosyncratically that it wouldn’t sell a lot of copies. But the `old Jim’ managed to do it.”
With “Going to the Sun,” McManus has gotten not only uplifting reviews (Publishers Weekly said the book “could not be more American”; Tribune reviewer Geoffrey Johnson called it “exquisitely crafted, heart-wrenching”) but also encouraging sales figures. With 20,000 copies in print since the book’s publication on Valentine’s Day, McManus says, “It’s already outsold my first three novels combined, in hardcover and paperback.”
Even more gratifying than the sales figures and royalties, adds McManus, is that the “book is much closer to my heart than anything else I’ve written. There’s a lot of grief and rage in it, but it’s more naturalistic and not so flagrantly poetic. It’s the new Jim.”
Testimony that McManus has mellowed, personally as well as professionally, comes from a friend of many years, James Park Sloan, teacher, novelist and author of the new biography of writer Jerzy Kosinski. “This novel, like Jim’s earlier books, is brilliant and severe,” Sloan says of “Going to the Sun,” “but he has connected with the travails of ordinary people in a stronger way. I’d always known that he was a warmer person underneath than he seemed, but now it has come to the surface.”
Born in the Bronx, McManus moved to the Chicago area with his family when he was 4, and it has been his home ever since. Despite the inner and outer turmoil in his books, he lives, quietly and modestly, in Kenilworth, with his second wife, Jennifer Arra. “It’s not so far removed from civilization that I feel isolated,” says McManus, who clearly stays in touch with urban hot zones, from the lofts and clubs of River North to the commodities market (which provided the background for his 1988 novel, “Ghost Waves).”
Troubled times bring changes
According to McManus, his reformation was the consequence of a series of personal upheavals. “My life changed pretty dramatically in ’89 and ’90,” he says, in part because of the effects of a divorce. “I doubt that a divorce automatically makes you want to become a different kind of writer, but I don’t think it was a coincidence that my sensibility became a little more generous and available and less angry.”
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If his discontent is not so apparent on the page as it once was, McManus hasn’t quite lost his mean and angry look. Even though he was elevated to professor after more than a decade at the School of the Art Institute, he seems distinctly unprofessorial. With his goatee, rough-cut hair and diabolical eyes, he resembles a subversive undergrad, one as eager to test the boundaries of good taste as the Art Institute student who painted the late Mayor Harold Washington in panties and bra. “Absolutely sympathetic” to the renegade student’s cause, McManus gave him a cameo in a poem in his 1993 collection, “Great America,” which was about the “bronco turbulence” buffeting the country.
It was during the turbulent stretch in his own life that McManus began the novel that became “Going to the Sun.” The first draft, he says, “was a 900-page manuscript about a person who has diabetes, in which I did a lot of obsessing about the nature of disease and the likeliest prospects for a cure. It wasn’t terribly novelistic. It was something I was doing for my daughter.”
While brooding about the book in 1989, McManus drove to North Dakota with his son, then 10. En route, it occurred to the author, a recreational cross-country cyclist, that a bike expedition to Alaska would make the ideal framework for his novel, a way to harness the information about diabetes to an on-the-road narrative. With his wife, Jennifer, driving a backup car, he made two more trips along the route by bike, stopping in motels, checking out landmarks and assembling the raw material for “Going to the Sun.”
Even after the book “coalesced” for him, McManus says, it didn’t relieve him of his obsession.”It was not fun to live with me during the composition process,” he says, a statement with which his wife readily concurs. “Christmas was the only day he allowed himself to be disturbed,” she says. “It made life complicated, but I understood where the book was coming from–it was close to his emotional core in a way none of his other books was.”
Though “Close to the Sun” represents McManus at his most accessible, the “old Jim” accidentally turned up in proof copies of his book, which he’d passed along to friends and colleagues for an early reading. Typically, the book contained numerous typographical errors, among them a scrambled paragraph at the very end–“printerbabble” that readers just naturally assumed was a “Joycean” message from the playful author. When they learned it was a mistake, McManus says, “it was quite a joke–but not to me.”