4 days ago
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- New York Times
A Real Murder Case From the 1960s Fuels This Moody Novel
THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST'S DAUGHTER, by Peter Orner
More than a novel, Peter Orner's 'The Gossip Columnist's Daughter' is a vibe.
Sure, there's a plot, and a pretty engaging one at that. Separated from the mother of his child and frustrated by a sputtering literary career, Jedediah Rosenthal, a professor of writing at Loyola University in Chicago, is much more entertaining company than his job description and track record might suggest. Jed narrates this story of his obsessive inquiry into a decades-old murder case, one tangentially related to a dramatic incident in his own family history.
As with Orner's previous fiction and his literary essays, what lingers is a mood, one that has something in common with the elegiac feeling you get from an Edward Hopper painting or a Miles Davis solo. What did John Steinbeck say about Cannery Row? It's 'a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light.' Ditto for Orner's Chicago, except the stink rises from bodies dumped in the river, the noise comes from the ghosts of the stockyards, and the light reflects off the snow during yet another endless winter.
The 'obscure episode in a now-distant time' that occupies our hero concerns Karyn Kupcinet, 22, the real-life actress who was either murdered or died by suicide in 1963, less than a week after the J.F.K. assassination; briefly, there were rumors that the two tragedies were linked, and the case remains unsolved to this day. The actress was the daughter of Essee and Irv Kupcinet. If those names aren't familiar, well, to quote Kevin Costner in 'The Untouchables,' you're not from Chicago.
Irv, known to almost everyone as Kup, was Chicago's one-man equivalent of Page Six. For 60 years, he wrote a Sun-Times gossip column replete with boldface names. He also hosted a pioneering but largely forgotten talk show, did color commentary for the Bears and had a cameo in Otto Preminger's 'Advise and Consent.' He died at 91 in 2003. It took 'a colossal amount of work,' Orner writes, 'to be that trivial for that long.'
Those who encountered Kup in his twilight and were unaware of his family tragedy could be forgiven for being befuddled by his longevity in the media business. His late-night show featured bizarre assortments of guests: Quentin Crisp chatted with Mr. T; a peeved Robert Goulet fended off questions about alcoholism while Don Rickles and Tommy Lasorda tried to change the subject. Kup would appear on the evening news, giving canned answers to canned prompts about celebrities — 'I hear Madonna was in town, Kup'; 'Actually, Walter, it wasn't Madonna; it was her husband, Sean Penn.'
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