Book review: ‘Love and Shame and Love’

Life is just a long string of memories. Even our present is being pushed each second into the past. Peter Orner uses that fact to engaging effect in his new novel, “Love and Shame and Love.” The book tells the story of a young man named Alexander Popper and his family strictly through anamnesis’ ethereal prism. Each chapter is a solitary memory, dusted off and glowing with latent emotional residue.

It’s a nontraditional storytelling device that results in a book of brief chapters, sometimes no more than a paragraph, each of which could easily stand on its own. The story jumps back and forth — like memory itself — between early family history and fairly recent recollections. The former touches on Popper’s grandfather’s time as a Naval captain at the end of World War II, and the latter explores Alexander’s failed relationship with his first true love, a hyper-literate philosophy major named Kat.

Then there is everything in between — a melancholic laundry load of family stories laid to dry on the page.

In a manner of speaking, nothing happens in “Love and Shame and Love.” That is to say that there is no action, no narrative through-line to tether the reader, except perhaps for the exquisitely rendered city of Chicago itself, where the book takes place. So it stands as a feat of laudable literary skill that Orner manages to use one-off vignettes to get at the really big happenings in life.

Popper’s mother, Miriam, cheats on his father, Philip. There is a terrible fight followed by a nasty divorce. Popper and his brother Leo move with their mother from the family home to a new apartment. Popper’s grandfather Seymour loses his business and is investigated for fraud. He knows that his wife Bernice has never really loved him. Kat gets pregnant and leaves Popper.

These are the big things, told in little pieces throughout the book. Sometimes only hinted at — words like sunshine glancing off the lonely windowpanes of Popper’s life.

A telling example of how this technique works can be found toward the end of the book. Chapters are usually titled with the name of a family member or a place, and a date. In this case it’s “Miriam, Highland Park, 1979.”

“She gets up early and sits at the kitchen table without coffee — coffee would come later — and faces not the graying windows but the rest of the house, where everyone lies asleep. No stranger here, but even so this isn’t her house. She sits at the table wearing her frayed orange morning sweater. I’ve lived here for eleven years? You leave a place long before you leave it…You think all you have to do is take root. Fill up the drawers with clothes, the cabinets with pots. She listens to the low growl of the refrigerator as the day begins to rise over the lip of the window.”

A few more paragraphs and the chapter is over, but the reader is left with a vivid sense of why Miriam left Philip. It wasn’t one instant — one thing that he did — it was the slow, steady build of the years, each vaguely unsatisfying, laying on her shoulders like dead weight.

It is surely no coincidence that one of Orner’s two previous works of fiction is a book of inter-related short stories called “Esther Stories.” Orner’s work has also appeared in the “Best American Short Stories” anthology. Orner, a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, was born in Chicago, and his familiarity with that proud city is palpable, as is his deep knowledge of its history, its notoriously corrupt politics and Jewish enclaves (the Poppers are Jewish).

Early on in the book, Philip takes Popper to an unusual place for his 13th birthday: “This is how it was for certain boys in Chicago, the sons of lawyers. In some families, Alexander Popper’s included, forget the bar mitzvah. To leave boyhood behind you went to see Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz for a chat…A federal judge! Think, son, of the heights to which you yourself might one day rise!”

The judge drones on about the Constitution and grills Popper about the Bible before the book skips forward and Popper is suddenly at college in Ann Arbor in 1988 and falling in love for the first time. The youthful fever of the experience is palpable, as is Orner’s commitment to his understated brand of ephemeral fiction and the complex inner lives of his characters.

jessica.gelt@latimes.com