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    Chicago: A Novel
    Chicago: A Novel
    Chicago: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    Chicago: A Novel

    Written by David Mamet

    Narrated by Jim Frangione

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    A big-shouldered, big-trouble thriller set in mobbed-up 1920s Chicago—a city where some people knew too much, and where everyone should have known better—by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Untouchables and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross.

    Mike Hodge—veteran of the Great War, big shot of the Chicago Tribune, medium fry—probably shouldn’t have fallen in love with Annie Walsh. Then, again, maybe the man who killed Annie Walsh have known better than to trifle with Mike Hodge.

    In Chicago, David Mamet has created a bracing, kaleidoscopic tale that roars through the Windy City’s underground on its way to a thunderclap of a conclusion. Here is not only his first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building to for his whole career. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era, suffused with trademark ""Mamet Speak,"" richness of voice, pace, and brio, and exploring—as no other writer can—questions of honor, deceit, revenge, and devotion, Chicago is that rarest of literary creations: a book that combines spectacular elegance of craft with a kinetic wallop as fierce as the February wind gusting off Lake Michigan.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateFeb 27, 2018
    ISBN9780062842985
    Author

    David Mamet

    David Mamet’s numerous plays include Oleanna, Glengarry Glen Ross (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award), American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, Boston Marriage, November, Race, and The Anarchist. He wrote the screenplays for such films as The Verdict, The Untouchables, Ronin, and Wag the Dog, and has twice been nominated for an Academy Award. He has written and directed ten films, including Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, House of Games, Spartan, and Redbelt. In addition, he wrote the novels The Village, The Old Religion, Wilson, The Diary of a Porn Star, Chicago, and many books of nonfiction, including Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business; Theatre; Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, and two New York Times bestsellers The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture and Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. His HBO film Phil Spector, starring Al Pacino and Helen Mirren, aired in 2013 and earned him two Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Directing. He was cocreator and executive producer of the CBS television show The Unit and is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company.

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    Reviews for Chicago

    3/5

    42 ratings11 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I have to say I really dislike Alaa al-Aswany's writing. In both Chicago and The Yacoubian Building his characters are simplistic archetypes. One senses that he is trying to imitate the style of Naguib Mahfouz but Mahfouz left us with so much material that why does anyone need to try to replicate his work. Al-Aswany's recent comments giving the Egyptian military carte blanche to kill opposition protesters in the street makes me wish he would retire from writing and public life entirely.
    • 5/5
      Great dialogue from Mamet. Very interesting book to read
    • 4/5
      This book as noted is not about Chicago but rather about Egypt.It is unsparing in its criticism of the modern dictatorship and the corrupt " police " state with its dependence on American aid and goodwill.The hypocrisy of muslim devoutness is contrasted well with the support religion provides for the faithful.The undecurrents of Egyptian sectarian strife are touched upon and the author's disenchantment with capitalism is portayed against a background of "60s left-wing idealism --- the noblest charecter is an American vietnam era idealist.I felt the exploration of the Egyptian psyche and the muslim subjugation of women was handled very well.This novel was written 4 years before the fall of Hosni Moubarak and has many similarities in narrative with Aswani's first important work the " Yakobian Building".The book will be very much appreciated by Egyptian immigrants to the US.VM
    • 3/5
      Chicago excels when the characters fume, debate, shout, scheme, and fight. The novel is brilliant when characters soliloquize their guilt about leaving Egypt for the Midwestern United States. Unfortunately, the book fails on too many other fronts to truly be a successful novel.Chicago is unrecognizable as the story's setting. Though Aswany begins the novel with a brief, but dramatic sweep of Chicago's history, the rest of the story might as well be anywhere. Actually, the story feels like it is set in some alternate universe which is not quite the United States but strangely similar; the story simply feels like Aswany doesn't *get* the United States. This is most pronounced when he explores Racism (with a capital R) while following Carol, the novel's only black character. Ultimately, the novel feels rootless, which is so strange as the novel is all about rootings and uprootings.For all of its faults, this book leaves me curious about Aswany. Even though I didn't love Chicago, I look forward to reading more by him.
    • 3/5
      I liked this novel in the end, but I wasn't sure at first if I would. The characters do not at first appear to be connected, and it is at first difficult to imagine where the novel is going. What's great about it is that the novel is written and structured so that you want to keep reading and find out what happens to them- after the first half of the book. I put it down for nearly a week about a third of the way through. This novel is much more political than I anticipated, and the characters are almost universally unlikeable. To be fair, everyone has an ugly side, and not everyone reacts to stress and pressure with grace. That said, I also found the American characters strange. They seemed flat, not like real people- it was something about the dialog that made them seem like cardboard cut-outs and not real people. They don't talk like any of the Americans I know. It's about Egypt more than Chicago, really. I liked the novel in the end, but only after I thought about it for a day and a half.
    • 4/5
      There were so many times I put this book aside that it took about three weeks to read 116 pages. It was slow and meandering. When asked what it was about, I couldn’t answer. It was mostly boring. However, by the end of page 116 I could have answered and the story became focused. I read to the end (p.117 to p. 332) in less than eight hours straight, fully absorbed in the story and characters.I’d recommend readers to persevere through the first 116 pages as information presented there, though seemingly disconnected, does help develop the main character (and introduce others) and will be useful. It’s really a good story once you get through them.One thing I especially liked was that I did not guess the resolution at all, but it clearly fit both the story and the character.
    • 2/5
      I am not a big reader of novels and this was a reminder of why. The book cover touts David Mamet I guess that is the bigger draw then the title, "Chicago." What interested me originally when I came across it was excitement of reading about the real "gansta" era of this city. I also started my career with the newspaper feature within but not as a reporter.The book is about the experiences and musings of a couple of Tribune reporters who brush up against the gangster element from this time period late 1920's I believe. That is about as much as a I got out of the story. It was not very exciting or entertaining but just kind of droned on with the dialogue of these reporters. To me a real yawner, back to my nonfiction.
    • 1/5
      The publisher’s blurb on the cover of this book announced that it was David Mamet’s first novel for more than twenty years. Let’s hope it is at least another twenty years before he troubles the book reading public again, because I can’t remember when I last found a novel so utterly impenetrable.
    • 3/5
      Great dialog; colorful language; but a bit over engineered! I thought i was reading a play rather than a novel.
    • 1/5
      Weirdly anachronistic dialogue combined with deceptive marketingMamet can usually be counted on for memorable tough-guy dialogue laced with a liberal use of profanity and the breaking of all rules of grammar ("There is nothing that I will not do" - Spartan; "Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only." - Glengarry Glen Ross; "Don't you want to hear my last words?" "I just did." - Heist; etc.). The dialogue in this latest novel (not his usual genre, so one wonders whether an abandoned screenplay or theatrical work was recycled) uses an odd out-of-period Elizabethan or Victorian English in the mouths of the supposed 1920's Prohibition era Chicago characters. At one point after a character jumps into a grave (à la "Hamlet") I though the plot might continue with Shakespearean allusions but that didn't come to pass. Although the Thompson machine gun depicted on the cover does make a late cameo appearance in the plot, the story has actually very little to do with the gangsters and the Chicago bootlegging wars between the O'Banion and Capone gangs that one would expect in a book promoted as "A Novel of Prohibition." Instead we mostly have two newspapermen fumbling their way through an investigation of a series of homicides that turn out to have nothing to do with the illegal alcohol trade. #ThereIsAlwaysOneI listened to the Audible audiobook and was startled to hear about a character's "late demise by lead" with "lead" pronounced to rhyme with "heed" instead of "led."
    • 3/5
      Chicago Tribune reporter Mike Hodge is an aviator who survived the Great War. He’s covered many stories, written about politicians, gangsters, drug addicts. He knows jazz musician, prostitutes, and bootleggers. He’s also in love with Annie Walsh. And when she falls victim to a killer, Mike sets out to find the murderer . . . and exact revenge.Set during prohibition in 1920s Chicago, this is a story peopled with a variety of characters: reporters, murderers, and the mob . . . all in a sweeping portrait of Chicago’s underworld. As might be expected for a mob-heavy tale set during the prohibition, there is a great deal of violence and corruption. Readers will find minimal exposition; the story unfolds through dialogue. The weaving of real characters and events into the fictional storyline is a strength of the tale; many readers are likely to find this a creative and interesting page-turner.