Joseph G. Peterson

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Balladeer of the city’s broken and forgotten men, Joseph G. Peterson looks for inspiration in urban side streets and alleys, where crooked schemes are hatched, where lives end violently, and where pretty much everyone is up to no good. Depicting the lives of people who have woefully lost their way in the world—criminals and victims, the unemployed and unemployable, the neglected and the indigent, the lonely and the alone—Peterson nonetheless brings a poet’s touch to his work, which is redolent with allegory, allusion, and Nabokovian wordplay. His last novel, Beautiful Piece, garnered praise from across the literary spectrum. Enter Wanted: Elevator Man, his powerful and ambitious new novel and the story of Eliot Barnes Jr., a man at the end of his proverbial rope.

Haunted by the larger-than-life shadow of his father, a scientist who may have helped develop the atomic bomb, twenty-nine-year-old Eliot Barnes, Jr., is an apple that’s fallen far from the tree. Saddled with a useless degree in literature, caged in a rundown apartment he can’t afford, and embittered by his failure to live up to the future’s promise, Barnes, who dreams of a corner office—an aerie roost high above the city, working with the higher-ups—begrudgingly accepts a job as an elevator man in a downtown Chicago skyscraper. Thus begins a profound but comedic meditation on failure in this life, how one comes to terms with not achieving one’s dreams, the nature and origin of such dreams, and, fittingly, the meaning of the American dream itself.

As unflinching as Nelson Algren and as romantic as Saul Bellow, Peterson’s novel boasts wildly surreal plot twists and a lethal wit that frequently erupts into full-on hilarity. Wanted: Elevator Man is the perfect tale for learning to cope with diminished expectations in these dark and desperate times.

My Review:… (altro)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The beauty of genre work is also its curse, and the thing that mostly defines it as a genre piece to begin with; namely, almost all stories written within a certain genre are nearly identical in their generalities, with it being all about the tiny little details when it comes to a fan of that genre liking this particular title over that one, and with non-fans of these tropes simply out of luck altogether. I was thinking about this all over again recently, in fact, while reading through Chicagoan Joseph G. Peterson's new noir tale Beautiful Piece; for while it's perfectly fine for the stylish crime thriller it is, the book is exactly and precisely that and not the tiniest smidge more, essentially padding out a single-sentence plot into an entire manuscript (nervy loner has affair with beautiful femme fatale whose gun-toting boyfriend is violently psychotic), and not even bringing anything original to the writing style that wasn't already perfected in the genre way back in the 1940s. As such, then, it's one of those well-done but largely forgettable tales that litter the genre shelves, one that goes down like warm butter but that leaves just about as much of a lasting impression too, a pleasant weekend diversion for existing noir fans but easily skippable for those who aren't. A middle-of-the-road title, which is why it's getting a middle-of-the-road score today.

Out of 10: 7.9… (altro)