In the back of Stuart Brent’s bookstore on Michigan Avenue, Larry Heinemann stands a few feet from walls that hold framed photographs of celebrated Chicago writers, among them Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren. There’s a move and pull to this room, a certain flow and rhythm that’s really a competition to be heard. Some other writers have come by to pay their respects. At the moment, Cyrus Colter, a tall, distinguished lawyer who didn’t start writing until he was in his 50s, is trading war stories with Heinemann. The savvy, animated Brent is racing around the room, weighing in with his tales of Hemingway.
With his new novel, Heinemann wanted to go completely outside himself. He wanted to write a book that was flat-out funny, a book with no body count, one in which everybody, perversely, gets exactly what they want. These stories, he says, walk by his door every day; why not write them down? He’s lived in Chicago his entire life, except for those two nightmarish years in the Army, so why not write a book about the neighborhood?
Cooler by the Lake unfolds in the forlorn, working-class neighborhoods around North Ravenswood and Peterson, and concerns Maximilian Nutmeg, a 50-ish scam artist Heinemann describes in his opening sentence as a “mildly incompetent, mostly harmless petty crook, always hustling for money.” With the exception of Max’s devoted wife Muriel, the book is peopled by the absurd and grotesque, such as Belle-Noche, Max’s nymphomaniac sister who has three daughters and one son by four different lovers, “each daughter more remarkably endowed and blindingly ugly than the one before.”
“There isn’t one straight-up person in the whole book. They’re all a little cranky, they’re all cross-eyed, an amalgam of all these odd characters. How bizarre and peculiar can you make these people? That’s one thing I learned from Paco’s Story–just load it up. Let’s make the gag as big as we can so everybody will get it. The gag is, these women are named after flowers and they couldn’t be uglier. The only thing that recommends these women is they fuck like mink and they enjoy it. When Paco’s Story came out I did a very modest book tour and was interviewed by Pat Holt, who was the book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. We’re talking about the book, and finally she leans over the table and says, ‘You know what disturbs me the most about your books? All the women in your stories like to fuck.’ I thought, what an odd thing to say. I figured, what the hell, this is my book, I can make anybody as horny as I’d like.
Pat Strachan edited Heinemann’s first two novels before leaving Farrar, Straus. She called the notion of sexism or misogyny “ridiculous.” The new work is “a comic novel, and I don’t think the men come off terribly well, either.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Ellen Levine, Heinemann’s New York literary agent since 1974, is more emphatic. “I didn’t find the book either of those things [sexist or misogynist]. I found it very funny. The book has to be read with a sense of humor. What you’re saying is the first I’ve ever heard spoken about this issue. I think he’s really a feminist. I’ve watched him be very supportive of his wife, in terms of her going back to school and starting a career in this point of her life. He’s very sensitive to women.”
They met at a college dance almost 26 years ago, six months before Heinemann left Fort Knox, Kentucky, for Vietnam. Edie Smith, from Long Island, New York, was doing her undergraduate work at Nazareth College in nearby Bardstown. “He was a clown, very funny and very easygoing,” Edie says. “He told some good stories, about his family, about his grandfather.” Edie Heinemann says everything about her husband, including his complicated relationships with women, his moods, his present sense of humor, and why he became a writer, was forged by Vietnam.
