No question, Shonk has it as a novelist
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April 18, 2010
BY HEDY WEISS Sun-Times Theater Critic
In her first book, The Red Passport, Chicago writer Katherine Shonk gave us a collection of sharply observed, often bittersweet short stories about Russians (and visiting Americans) who were trying to make some sense of the seismic shifts that were part of post-Communist life in the 1990s.
Now, seven years later, Shonk’s first novel has arrived, and though her story unfolds much closer to home (primarily in Chicago and Evanston), her distinctive voice — the ironic, self-mocking sense of humor, the flair for capturing the ache of imperfect romantic love, the observation of quirky behavioral details, the starchy appraisal of flawed character, the telling sense of family dynamics — is once again on display.
In Happy Now? Shonk spins a tale of love, grief, guilt and suppressed anger as she homes in on Claire Kessler, a thirtysomething artist, builder of dollhouses and part-time “home stager” whose marriage of less than two years comes to a stunningly unexpected end when her husband, Jay Blaisdale, an academic psychologist researching child behavior, jumps to his death from a high-rise balcony.
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LOCAL APPEARANCES
Katherine Shonk will read from and sign copies of Happy Now? at:
* 7:30 p.m. April 21 at Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark.
* 6 p.m. April 29 at Barnes & Noble DePaul, 1 E. Jackson.
(Photo by Michael Rastall)

On the surface, such a story might seem like fodder for a Lifetime television network drama or a women’s magazine story. But Shonk (the sort of writer Saul Bellow might have dubbed “a first-class noticer”) makes gold of it — invariably stripping away sentimentality and replacing it with the mix of caustic intelligence and biting wit of someone who feels things deeply but never loses the ability to step back a bit and see the dysfunctional theater of it all.
And when it comes to profoundly private devastation, she can conjure that, too — whether in the form of a saved cell phone message from her husband that she believes recorded his final heartbeats, or the devoted vigil of her adoring and worried father, who watches her every move from his car during the weeks after Jay’s suicide.
Shonk also plays deftly with the timing of her revelations — moving backward and forward to parse out bits of information about the story’s central relationship (its gentle pleasures, its pervasive little aches, its unspoken tensions), as well as the flawed intimacies of many of her other characters, including the memorable cat her husband left behind.
The daughter of parents who divorced almost too civilly when she and her younger sister, Nomie (now married and pregnant), were still in grade school, Claire was something of a contented loner before she met Jay, though she was not beyond signing up with eHarmony. (The hilarious freak-show parade of dating stories here are laugh-out-loud funny: “At a friend’s party a man flirted with her and asked her out, but he rushed through their first date and shook her hand at the end of it, only to show up the next week at her group art show with his mother, who bought a work from someone else.”)
Jay, of course, was different. She gently picked him up while sitting in a cafe and overhearing him ask the manager about a long-defunct record store she knew. He had his first attack of depression before they wed and another profound bout during their honeymoon in Hawaii. He began seeing a therapist. Yet what began to seem predictable but manageable to Claire — they had bought a house and she was even thinking about a baby — was perhaps more than she was able or willing to fully face.
Was Claire oblivious, or detached, or incapable of complete intimacy? Or was Jay simply determined to end things in the most radical, perhaps even selfish way? And did the meticulously prepared binder he left behind for her (full of practical information, as well as a suicide note) provide the best indication of who he really was?
Shonk is not one to deliver easy answers. After all, the title of her book ends with a question mark.

Anyone who has passed up a popcorn car-chase flick in favor of a good indie knows how powerful a simple, skillfully told, character-driven story can be. Katherine Shonk does, and Happy Now? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), her first novel, is proof. ... Shonk's incisive writing feels effortless, at times stealthy. She's so economical in her descriptions-of a character's mannerisms, clothes, psyche-that she can evoke a resonant image in the space of a sentence.