THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD, second bite of the apple for a story I neglected in 2014

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD
BILL HILLMANN
Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago’s Far North Side, a few decades ago—a rough-and-tumble place, awash with racial tensions and petty crime.

Joey, the youngest child in a mixed-race family, is pushing his way up through the cracked pavement of a chaotic life: parish festivals and block parties on long summer nights, fistfights in back alleys on boring empty days, long walks up and down Clark Street pocketing envelopes of collection money for his older brother, Lil’ Pat. It’s easy enough to pretend it’s all normal, until he sees Pat murder a man in a neighborhood drugstore. Now he’s haunted by the memory of blood pooling on the green tiles under the flickering fluorescent lights, torn by the conflict between love of family and disgust over what they do—and desperate to survive the insanity without being swept up in it.

This revised second edition of Bill Hillmann’s modern classic features a new introduction by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. It’s a perfect primer for a great book that deserves a place alongside the likes of Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell on the top shelf of Chicago literature.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read the first edition of this around 2014, and wasn't very impressed. It was too fragmented, too unorganized (not disorganized...there was too little structure to call it that). So Curbside Splendor, the prior publisher, never got a review for that ARC they sent me. Naughty of me, I know, and sorry to their shade for being so thoughtless.

This time round, I'm not sure why, I felt less put off by the read eleven years on. It's still a bit more episodic for my liking, but has more a feel of purpose, of intent behind the disjunctures. I'm not going to nominate it for the awards circuit, in fiction anyway, because it feels a lot more like a roman à clef now, a memoir in a lot of makeup.

I could invest more in the story being told, the decay of a moral code and the complete surrender of decent people to evil blandishments making brummagem promises we, the readers, know for sure and certain will be broken. If it sounds like a dream come true, an answer to all your prayers, and you say "yes", prepare for the worst. The kind of people who make big promises without clear plans and transparent methods intend to use you then throw you into the machine you helped them make.

That's decidedly true here, we see it happen again and again. I wonder if under-sixty me had just not yet grown inured to the terrible cost of stupidity...? It's in your face, it's omnipresent, it is the welkin the suffering stooges cry into.

And I can't even work up schadenfreude. It's happening all over in 2025 and it makes me deeply ill; but I can't laugh at "Them" anymore.