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Overview
In a novel as brawling and boisterous as Chicago itself, Scott Simon delivers a tale both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving, capturing the multiethnic tumult of big city politics.
The mayor of Chicago is found in his office late at night, murdered, facedown in a pizza. As police race to find the killer, the interim mayor, Sundaran “Sunny” Roopini, tries to juggle his responsibilities as a recently widowed father of two teenage daughters while herding his forty-nine fellow city aldermen toward choosing a new mayor. Over the course of four days, this raft of colorful characters–heroes, rascals, and pinky-ringed pols of all creeds, colors, and proclivities–will clash, as Sunny, a flawed but decent man, tries to hold together his family and his city.
Synopsis
The acclaimed author of the intensely powerful novel Pretty Birds, Scott Simon now gives us a story that is both laugh-out-loud funny and heart-piercing–as sprawling and brawling as Chicago, where politics is a contact sport.
The mayor of Chicago is found in his office late at night, sitting in his boxer shorts, facedown dead in a pizza. The mayor was a hero and a rascal: dynamic, charming, ingenious, corruptible, and a masterly manipulator. The city mourns. But it’s discovered that the mayor was murdered–shortly after he may have begun to squeal on some of his colleagues at City Hall. Over the next four days, police race to find the mayor’s killer, while the politicians who bemoan his passing scramble for his throne.
At the center is Sundaran “Sunny” Roopini, forty-eight, alderman of the Forty-eighth Ward, and vice-mayor. Sunny is an Indian immigrant, a restaurant owner, and a recent widower. He is getting tired of politics and wants to hold on just long enough to do the best for his two restive teenage daughters. But as acting interim mayor for a few days, Sunny must deal with forty-nine other aldermen who have their own clashing ambitions.
How will Sunny do what’s best for both his family and city in a time of crisis?
As The Last Hurrah embodied urban politics for a previous generation, Windy City captures politics in the multiethnic tumult of today’s big city, where a stalled subway raises fears of a terrorist attack and smoke-filled rooms are abolished by no-smoking statutes. The story takes a raft of colorful characters–pinky-ringed pols, pious reformers, money-grubbers, and wheeler-dealers of every creed, color, and proclivity–through City Hall corridors, neighborhood restaurants and clubs, weddings, sex scandals, gospel churches, police stations, and sting operations to deliver an ending that is unexpectedly noble.
Windy City is a roller coaster of a novel that dips and soars through the amusement park of politics. With echoes of Primary Colors and Thank You for Smoking, Windy City will win votes as the best political novel in many years. Its personal story–about a flawed, decent man thrust suddenly under hot lights–will also win hearts.
Praise for Windy City:
“Delectable… Offers an insider’s view of the kind of urban political fray–albeit fictional–that Barack Obama emerged from as an Illinois state legislator representing Chicago’s South Side…. Windy City’s articulate and witty protagonist … must juggle dirty secrets and deal making…”–USA Today
“Comic but sneakily affecting… The rich multiculturalism of the American city is not a new phenomenon… rarely, however, has it been depicted with such unabashed affection... The zeal with which he celebrates the city, warts and all, is hard to resist.. Simon’s choice of hero…is an immensely appealing figure.”–Washington Post Book World
“Pitch-perfect… Scott Simon, NPR host, knows his way around politics… His dialogue throws off sparks and shrieks like a Chicago El-car…Recommended to all political junkies.”–The Roanoke Times (Virginia)
“A hilarious satirical novel about politics.”–Clarence Page, The Chicago Tribune
“Entertaining and well-observed… renders the inner workings of City Hall with wit and aplomb….Some of Simon’s Chicagoans may be con artists, crooks, amoral opportunists or blowhards, sometimes all of the above, but the author still treats them with great affection and respect, creating an impressively large and diverse cast of characters”–Adam Langer, The Chicago Tribune
“[A] great novel… filled with emotional turmoil, gritty political decisions, murders, homicide attempts, a suicide and even a touch of romance…[a] human and fully realized portrait of the people caught up in contemporary public life.”–Time Out Chicago
“[A] big-hearted bear-hug of a novel… embracing roots and family, eccentricities and failings, and dappled with the sights, sounds and grit of the Windy City–makes this an energizing and loving contemporary urban fable.”–GO Magazine, AirTran Airways
“A rather sentimental, positive picture of the democratic process.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Windy City is funny and tender… full of boisterous love for the sport of politics and Chicago. The best political novel in years.”–Christopher Buckley, author of Boomsday and Thank You for Smoking
The Barnes & Noble Review
Watching this year's election, as exciting and historic as it's sometimes been, you could be forgiven for concluding that politics is rote: candidates give the same speech, use the same carefully selected clichés, and appear alongside the same glossy placards and crisp, bright flags. But the hyper-professionalized campaign obscures the fact that 99.9 percent of politics takes place not on national stages but in ward offices, state assemblies, and community school board meetings where there are many political ideologies, strange conspiracy theories, and eccentric obsessions as there are voters. Democracy is the ultimate amateur's game, and its messy strangeness is what makes the rough and tumble of self governance so endlessly fascinating, enlightening and, yes, entertaining. And this is why, now as the campaign reaches its spring doldrums you might want to turn to Windy City, an entertaining fictional chronicle of murder and political intrigue in Chicago written by NPR host and journalist Scott Simon. While the book is perhaps a bit too cartoonish, it certainly isn't drab.
Editorials
Gary Krist
…comic but sneakily affecting novel about Chicago politics…[Simon] is clearly infatuated with Chicago, and the zeal with which he celebrates the city, warts and all, is hard to resist. His book is larded with insider bonus features that hard-core Chicago aficionados will delight in, whether it's a blow-by-blow description of how Mexican chilaquiles are made or a knowing dissertation on the agony of the long Chicago winter…Windy City, for all its emphasis on the sausage-factory venality of big-city politics, seems intended mainly as a big, sloppy valentine to the cultural jambalaya that is 21st-century Chicago. The Second City has taken a lot of abuse in its day, from writers as various as Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Norman Mailer and Dave Barry. It's good to see the old place shamelessly flattered for a change.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
In his second novel, the host of National Public Radio's Weekend Editionpaints a detailed portrait of Chicago politics, beginning with the sudden death of the mayor. The focus quickly shifts to Indian vice-mayor Sunny Roopini, who must assuage a traumatized electorate while laying down a few paving stones for the mayor's successor. Matters are further complicated when the police discover deadly amounts of liquid nicotine on the late mayor's pizza, a revelation that inspires a mayoral staffer to leap from his apartment window. Roopini's brief interim mayorship proves to be a minefield of favors, accommodations and downright extortion-the latter by a U.S. Attorney determined to dig up any ethical hiccup he can. The suffocating political life is enough to beckon Roopini toward retirement (particularly with his two daughters on the cusp of adulthood), but the city doesn't seem willing to let him go. The proceedings can be fascinating, but Simon is too attached to his (admittedly impressive) descriptive powers, dragging the narrative through a swamp of mannerisms, fashion sketches, culinary processes and (especially) political maneuvering. Politics junkies will get off on the detail, but readers with less than a passing interest in the sausage-making that goes on at City Hall may be frustrated. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
Horse-trading and headcounts consume Chicago's aldermen as they choose a successor to their murdered mayor in NPR host Simon's second novel (Pretty Birds, 2005). The African-American mayor has been found dead at his desk. This opening inevitably revives memories of Harold Washington, Chicago's only black mayor, also found dead at his desk, in 1987, from a heart attack. However, Simon has added a twist: His mayor has been poisoned. Somebody sprinkled nicotine distillate on the mayor's pizza. Perhaps sensing that crime writing is not his forte, Simon moves the investigation to the back burner; this is not a whodunit. Sunny Roopini, the protagonist, has been sworn in as acting interim mayor. The 48-year-old Sunny, the mayor's protege, is an immigrant from India. He has two teenage daughters; his wife was recently gunned down at a currency exchange (she was an innocent bystander). Old trouper that he is, the genial Sunny continues the glad handing he has perfected during his years on the council. His ward is one of the city's most diverse, and Sunny is the very model of a multicultural alderman; he has even added Italian dishes to the menu at the Indian restaurant he owns. Food matters here; the characters plough their way through a heap of ethnic specialties. Ethnicity matters too, in this city of 100 languages. But there is no racial animosity: In Simon's Chicago, there's good-humored accommodation. This makes the competition among the 50 aldermen to become the next mayor about as exciting as a pillow fight. Simon's attempts to whip up some excitement are lame; one leading contender has been filmed taking a bribe (he acquits himself honorably), another confesses to having had sex with twomale cops, part of his security detail. The climax is an interminable roll-call vote. Simon's boring trivialization of Chicago politics is a major disappointment after the phenomenally good Pretty Birds.The Barnes & Noble Review
Watching this year's election, as exciting and historic as it's sometimes been, you could be forgiven for concluding that politics is rote: candidates give the same speech, use the same carefully selected clichés, and appear alongside the same glossy placards and crisp, bright flags. But the hyper-professionalized campaign obscures the fact that 99.9 percent of politics takes place not on national stages but in ward offices, state assemblies, and community school board meetings where there are many political ideologies, strange conspiracy theories, and eccentric obsessions as there are voters. Democracy is the ultimate amateur's game, and its messy strangeness is what makes the rough and tumble of self governance so endlessly fascinating, enlightening and, yes, entertaining. And this is why, now as the campaign reaches its spring doldrums you might want to turn to Windy City, an entertaining fictional chronicle of murder and political intrigue in Chicago written by NPR host and journalist Scott Simon. While the book is perhaps a bit too cartoonish, it certainly isn't drab.The book opens with the tragic death of the city's beloved black mayor: a larger-than-life, loquacious, polysyllabic, and gluttonous bachelor, clearly modeled on the late Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor. In Simon's alternate world, the mayor drops dead while feasting on his nightly pie of Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. Police quickly ascertain that the midnight repast was poisoned and the mayor a victim of foul play, not merely his capacious appetite. Sundaran Roopini, a middle-aged Indian immigrant, restaurateur, widower, and alderman from the city's North Side, finds himself roused at 3 a.m. and summoned to City Hall, where he is told the news and sworn in as the city's interim mayor. The novel follows Roopini over the next three days as he negotiates a pitched battle among several aldermen to succeed the mayor, an assassination investigation, and the memorialization of a beloved leader. Roopini, nicknamed Sunny and mistaken for an Italian because of the vowel that ends his surname, is a winning character: sharp, liberal, but decidedly non-idealistic. "A campaign promise is like shouting out 'I love you' during orgasm," he says. "You mean it. You mean it absolutely in that moment. But any adult should know that you might not be able to mean it next week." But for all his wit, Roopini is a tragic figure. The father of two teenage daughters, he continues to mourn the murder of his beloved wife, shot dead a year earlier in a senseless stick-up at a money exchange across the street from the Indian restaurant he runs. So palpable is his grief that those around him "assign each bulge and wrinkle" on his once-boyish, now weathered face "to his tragedy."
In following Roopini from Lithuanian beer house to West Side black church to Chinese banquet hall, Simon ably conjures the polyglot patchwork quilt of ethnic Chicago with its balkanized neighborhoods, local pride, and warring factions. (Simon's particularly adept at depicting the Windy City through its food. Somehow the gustatory always prompts his best writing, like his description of a Loop buffet where they "carved corn beef thin enough to read baseball scores through the slice.") He also gives a fairly accurate picture of something rarely delivered in either fiction or film -- the day-to-day mechanics of the life of a nonprime time politician. At a community zoning meeting in his ward, the sleep-deprived Sunny (now interim mayor for a few days but unable to extricate himself from attending the meeting) fights to keep his eyes open as the room spirals toward chaos:
"Look how developers leveled lower Manhattan!"Having covered zoning meetings in the real-life 48th Ward, I can say with confidence this is only slightly exaggerated."Developers!" gasped Floyd Porteus, who ran a stationery shop and newsstand on Sheridan Road. "That was terrorism!"
"By the U.S. government!" shouted several people from their seats..."The FBI and Enron wanted to suck the American people into war. Just like Pearl Harbor!"
"That's nuts!"
"You don't know that Roosevelt planned Pearl Harbor?...Then you're nuts."
Add to meetings like this the wedding banquets and fundraisers, the vote counting and forced bonhomie between colleagues and the general truck-and-barter of favors and influence and jobs, and you begin to understand why politicians are always so eager to move up the ladder. "You're a gifted politician," the local U.S. attorney says to Sunny at one point. "I wonder why you've spent all this time in the minor leagues." After 20 years in politics, Roopini is contemplating getting out of the minor leagues -- either by retiring from politics and opening a new, more upscale restaurant or running for Congress. But we get the sense that for all his arm's-length irony (and self-loathing in the wake of his wife's death), Sunny actually likes the unapologetic weirdness and rough edges of salt-of-the-earth ordinary working people that politicians like himself spend most of their time with. Explaining why he loves election night he says, "There's something majestic about it. For a few hours, everything that self-important people hope is in the hands of a lot of people who fill coffee mugs."
But while Chicago's political and culinary delights come across in all their charm and unpretension, the book can also be treacly and grating. In his earnest attempt to conjure the colorful world of Chicago politics, Simon often slips into caricature: a militant black alderman from the South Side brandishes a gun on the council floor to demonstrate the insufficient security, a grizzled Greek alderman is discovered having an affair with both (!) the male cops on his security detail. The dialogue, of which there is quite a bit, is often mannered and over-thought. And when he's not showing off his wit through his characters, Simon's often heading straight through tenderness into sentimentality. At a wedding banquet for his niece, Alderman John Wu says, "Here, sometimes you got to scream to be heard. But you get to scream, loud as you like. I think we have the best of both here -- Chinese people and American freedom. This city gets cold. But it's great." Roopini follows up just a few pages later with his own toast to the young couple, in which he invokes the "brave giddiness in suddenly realizing that two people who began on opposite sides of the world can come to this great, vast, churning place and find that in all of the important ways, they are from the same family tree."
The problem isn't that these sentiments aren't true; it's that they're so baldly and repeatedly stated by the characters throughout the book. More problematically, they also push out the cruelty, pettiness, and real ugliness that politics can often engender. Every conflict is a bit too good-natured. One recalls the real-life Harold Washington, who was opposed by a bloc of white aldermen with such unwavering viciousness that his years in office came to be known as Council Wars.
But I'm willing to forgive nearly all of these flaws, if for no other reason than Simon's evident affection for Chicago comes through so thoroughly. And I will pay him this compliment: reading the book made me long to be back in the City of Big Shoulders, braving the cold in a bar, drinking an Old Style or eating Polish sausage and some deep-dish pizza while talking about the Bears and whichever local pol had the misfortune of having just been indicted. --Christopher Hayes
Christopher Hayes is Washington Editor of The Nation.