Product Description

Newlyweds Jack and Chloe are building a life together in a modest Chicago apartment. The city is theirs to enjoy as Jack struggles to pursue a writing career and Chloe works downtown, applying herself to the world of high finance. While Jack aspires to be the perfect husband, his own self-doubts and Chloe's office flirtations cast shadows. Jealousy and mis-behavior undermine their notions of themselves and of each other, and their lives take on uncomfortable parallels with the volatile, chaotic existence of their raffish, menacing neighbors. In the intense heat of one Chicago summer, Jack and Chloe's marriage roils into a queasy chemistry of vanity, lust, and greed. Thompson writes with piercing insight and emotional truth, setting off literary fireworks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1076875 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-29
• Released on: 2005-03-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .77" h x 5.56" w x 8.44" l, .61 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Thompson (Wide Blue Yonder, etc.) dissects the breakup of a marriage in cool, convincing detail, capturing the fraught day-to-day dynamics of conjugal life in this neatly crafted novel. Jack Orlovich and Chloe Chase, both in their mid-20s, have just moved to an apartment on the gritty near-north side of Chicago, Chloe's new corporate job at a downtown bank. Jack has given up teaching high school English in order to write a novel, which gives him plenty of free time to joust with the couple's noisy new neighbor, Rich Brezak, a surly, womanizing young man with a penchant for full-volume reggae music. During frequent trips upstairs to ask for a lowering of the volume, Jack becomes involved in the lives of Brezak and the other wild kids upstairs, whom he finds repellant but also admirable, the way they "didn't try to pretend that one thing was its opposite, or that they didn't feel what they felt." Chloe, busy at work, grows increasingly disenchanted with their home life, and Jack begins to suspect that she is cheating on him. Addicted to his beautiful, high-maintenance wife, he loves her more than she will ever love him, but he doesn't usually like her, especially as she begins to drink too much. In tracing the widening fissures in the couple's relationship, Thompson paints a compelling picture of Chloe's fundamental dishonesty and the insecurities of a woman often hated or loved unreasonably for her beauty. Thompson's quiet observations sometimes verge on the simplistic, and Jack and Chloe can seem rather blandly archetypal, but the gradual unfolding of motive and shifting of sentiments reveals much about the mechanics of love, betrayal, lies and jealousy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Apartment buildings are lively microcosms and, in the right literary hands, can generate dramatic situations rife with irony and revelation. Thompson, author most recently of Wide Blue Yonder (2002), makes the most of a seen-it-all four-flat in blustery Chicago in this compulsively readable tale about a phenomenally toxic marriage. New to the city, handsome but oh-so-juvenile Jack, a wanna-be but hopelessly inept writer, and Chloe, his beautiful and untrustworthy bank-executive wife, find themselves contending with unsavory neighbors: pissed-off and racist Mr. Dandy, deaf and widowed Mrs. Lacagnina, and a loud, rude, and studly young pothead living above. Jack can't resist the partying upstairs, especially a regular on the scene, a wry young woman with a withered leg, and ambitious Chloe increasingly resents having to support her floundering spouse. The wild mischief and mayhem these two smart, complicated, and self-loathing spoiled brats enact are wickedly intriguing, and suspense runs high as Chloe sneaks around and Jack runs violently amok. Like Maxine Chernoff and Joyce Carol Oates, Thompson, a stellar stylist, offers unexpected twists, piercingly insightful descriptions, venomous dialogue, and unfailing empathy in a galvanizing novel of hazardous love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A cage-rattling, profoundly satisfying book."

-- Pam Houston, O, The Oprah Magazine

"Mesmerizing...City Boy abounds in...mordant wit and keen psychological observations."

-- Boston Herald

"The dark and punishing terrain of the broken human heart is flawlessly charted by Jean Thompson in City Boy."

-- Baltimore Sun