Young love is often dramatic, engrossing, fleeting, explosive and complicated. Jane Fields, however, has a particularly labyrinthine case of puppy love.
Fields, the fictional protagonist in Laura Krughoff’s debut novel, “My Brother’s Name,” is in love with a girl named April. But April thinks Jane is a man named John. John is, in fact, Jane’s schizophrenic brother, who concocted a plan to have Jane pretend to be him and report back on each day’s happenings. For reasons that can only be defined as crazy, Jane becomes a willing participant in this plan.
“I think it is really easy to come under the influence of powerfully charismatic people and let charismatic people define your reality,” Krughoff said, explaining the hold that John has over Jane. “I think of people in my own life who just have that charm that when they are in the room, you feel like the sun is shining and you would just say yes to them because they are charming and charismatic and it feels good to be in their company. … For Jane, (John) is just one of those people that makes the sun shine.”
Jane’s reverence for John is felt from the book’s first line: “I did not grow up in my brother’s shadow. I grew up in his light.”
The novel, published this month by Scarletta, explores this odd sibling relationship and questions the limits of familial love.
A Ravenswood resident, Krughoff grew up in Morristown, a rural Indiana town with a population of fewer than 2,000. She moved to Chicago to attend Loyola University in 1996 and is in her sixth year in the doctoral course at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s program for writers. A Nelson Algren Award runner-up for her short story “The Beekeeper’s Son” and a Pushcart Prize winner for her piece “Halley’s Comet,” Krughoff has wanted to be a writer since she “knew there were stories.”
This novel sprang from an idea Krughoff had for a short story in which a brother made his sister “pass” for a man in order to join his drum line. “The older brother made the younger sister bind her breasts and cut her hair,” Krughoff said. “I never wrote that story, but the characters Jane and John just sort of stayed with me.”
Jane and John also stayed with Desiree Bussiere, publicity director at Scarletta, who cited character development as one of the reasons she acquired Krughoff’s book for the publisher.
David Michael Kaplan, one of Krughoff’s former fiction writing professors at Loyola University Chicago, said he remembers her as “one of (his) very best writers.”
“Her fiction features utterly believable characters who engage us with the poignancy of their lives as they struggle to live up to others’ expectations and their own,” Kaplan wrote in an email. “This struggle for identity, self-definition, a place in the world, is another strong feature of her work, all captured in prose as spare and haunting as a Midwestern winter.”
Krughoff also has written about identity in the context of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.
“We are committed to identities in certain ways, but we also think of identities as really performative and flexible,” she said. “So there is this tension of you are who you are because you are born that way, but you also get to decide,” she said. “I wanted to look at that tension between the identities we are born with and this idea that it is also possible to perform (an identity).”
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The characters’ identity crises drew Andrea Witzke Slot, a lecturer in the UIC Department of English, to the novel.
“Both siblings experience identity crises of very different kinds, and there are moments of real fear for both characters as the lives they know spiral away from them,” she wrote in an email.
In Krughoff’s eyes, Jane is neither a lesbian nor transgendered. She is just a young woman searching for companionship that feels right in an effort to find herself.
“I don’t think the way (Jane) feels about April is an anomaly,” Krughoff said. “She falls in love and head over heels in a lot of ways. … She looks at people and she needs them and she bonds to them and she loves them.”
Courtney Crowder covers the Chicago literary scene for Printers Row Journal.
“My Brother’s Name”
By Laura Krughoff, Scarletta, 248 pages, $14.95