For years, the Rosenthals and the Kupcinets were all but joined at the hip. Jedidiah\u2019s grandfather Lou accompanied Kup to Los Angeles to identify Karyn\u2019s body and return it home. But that act of support would prove to mark the end of the pair\u2019s fast friendship. Jedidiah is determined to find out why, but he\u2019s also questioning his own motives. As a college writing professor whose last book came out more than a decade ago, is he just on a desperate hunt for new material? Is he distracting himself from his crumbling marriage? Is he trying to revive a classier, giddier, more socially upscale era in his family\u2019s history?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a little bit of all of that. Orner\u2019s novel is a rich and messy\u2014sometimes deliberately, sometimes not\u2014study of a man compelled to solve both a murder mystery and a more existential one, while wondering if he\u2019s fit for the job. \u201cAt best, I\u2019m a haphazard, distractible researcher with an indifferent cat for an assistant,\u201d he muses. But Karyn\u2019s death does offer a novelist plenty of material. She\u2019d parlayed some TV work into a role in a Jerry Lewis film, but evidence found after her death suggests she was cracking under some kind of strain. She abused diet pills and wrote odd and threatening notes to her boyfriend (and, oddly, herself) while filling notebooks with despairing messages: \u201cI\u2019m no good. I\u2019m not really that pretty.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was found with a broken hyoid bone, suggesting strangulation, but the chief suspect, her boyfriend, had a clean alibi. The case, in the novel and in reality, remains unsolved, so stories rush in to fill the gap. Indeed, Jedidiah was beaten to the punch by James Ellroy, who accessed the police files for a 1998 GQ article. But Jedidiah isn\u2019t satisfied with his conclusion: \u201cEllroy\u2019s theory is that Cookie, while dancing naked and ecstatically\u2026(and also loaded and junked-up), fell, and somehow broke her hyoid bone. She then crawled up onto the couch, where she died.\u201d <\/p>\n
If only it stopped there. J.F.K. assassination buffs whipped up a story connecting Karyn to her journalist father, who had connections to Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby, who might have told Kup that\u2014well, the red string gets pretty tangled around the corkboard. Jedidiah is sane enough to reject that conspiracy theory, but he\u2019s doing some stringing of his own, suggesting that Kup used his clout to cover up the truth about Karyn\u2019s death, with the help of infamous mob fixer Sidney Korshak, setting off a rift between the Kupcinets and the Rosenthals that\u2019s become Jedidiah\u2019s inheritance.<\/p>\n
What Faulkner did for bitter Mississippians, Orner does for glum Jewish Chicago families: In story collections like Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge and novels like Love and Shame and Love, he has specialized in studying the ways families fracture and decline. Daughter is of a piece with that work, thick with earnest laments (\u201cWho else but the Rosenthals would have dropped everything?\u201d), keen observations about the city (\u201cChicago is giddy for knocking buildings down.\u2026 Where\u2019s the money in history?\u201d), and self-deprecating humor. Jedidiah has a habit of talking through his writerly and familial struggles with his cat, who mocks his intentions: \u201cYou\u2019re no better than Ellroy. You think you are, Mr. Iowa MFA. Get over yourself, Mr. Literary, the fewer books you sell, the better you think you are.\u201d <\/p>\n
Jedidiah, via Orner, isn\u2019t the man to solve the murder, and that inevitability gives the novel its emotional weight. But it also makes it somewhat centerless as it bounces from Hollywood to Chicago clubland history to mob tales to riffs on Saul Bellow. The line between a novelist telling a story about a frazzled novelist and a frazzled novel gets a bit blurry. The cat has thoughts on this, too: \u201cIsn\u2019t your whole point\u2014if you had a point, which you don\u2019t\u2014that families lie to themselves, and that these lies get handed down as love.\u201d A clean resolution was never in the offing\u2014Orner is no detective novelist, and Jedidiah no detective. But both understand families, and the melancholy charm of this novel, which still flashes through all that red string, is that even with all the facts at hand, families will forever be sources of loss, frustration, and mystery.\u2022<\/p>\n
THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST’S DAUGHTER, BY PETER ORNER<\/p>\n
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