Schulz crafts an extraordinary picture of urban life in the Roaring 20s, where modern dreamers and their romantic illusions collide with American wealth and decadence on the eve of the Great Depression. The Big Town tells the story of a failed businessman whose dreams of prosperity hinge on the secret proposition of a millionaire industrialist and a dangerous relationship he falls into with a poor young woman, orphaned and chasing love in the great American metropolis. For more information and an excerpt, click here.
The Big Town, A Novel of Urban Dreaming in the Jazz Age
By Monte Schulz, Published By Fantagraphics, Reviewed By Stephen T. Vessels
The Big Town is a feast for the lover of elegant prose and thoughtful storytelling. Harry Hennesey is a latter day Everyman, gone to the archetypal American Big City of the 1920s to find his fortune. He is an authentic descendant of Bunyan’s Pilgrim, and of all of his offspring and echoes, from Dickens’ Copperfield to Steinbeck’s Tom Joad. At the same time he is a thoroughly modern protagonist, possessed of the spectrum of contradictions and complexities that render an individual distinct.
Harry is a philanderer who loves his wife, an insightful philosopher and naive fantasist, a savvy businessman and a rube. He sells the small town family home, and leaves his wife and children in austere circumstances to await his triumphal return. Confident that his success is inevitable, he enters the maze of the City, the great melting-pot metropolis, and thrusts himself with earnest enthusiasm and stalwart dedication into the labor of fulfilling his aspirations. It is inevitable that he will encounter turns he does not envision.
Permeating and encompassing their story is the City, an unnamed amalgamation of “real” American cities, that functions as both a symbolic referent and a window into the past. The author has an encyclopedic command of the period, which allows him to infuse the narrative with a wealth of authentic description and dialogue. This is not an exercise in verisimilitude for its own sake. Schulz paints a picture not only of a time but of the dreams that shape it. He treats those dreams the way Jung treated myths, investing them with life. The effect is the reverse of watching an old film and noticing how fake it all looks.
Engrossing. Masterful. Groundbreaking.
Stephen Vessels writes poetry and literary fiction and has reviewed arts and music for the Santa Barbara Independent.
Pingback: Monte Schulz: Dreaming Jazz America in "The Big Town" | WilderUtopia.com