John Guzlowski's Little Altar Boy: a Book Review

In a previous blog post, I wrote admiringly about a scene from John Guzlowski's novel, Little Altar Boy.

You can read it: here

Now that I've finished the book, I wanted to write a more comprehensive review. So, here you go...

As often happens, a writer I know, John Guzlowski, sent me an email as part of a mailing list. The email was regarding the release of his book, in this case Little Altar Boy. I get quite a few notifications like this either by email or by Twitter. More often than not, I ignore them. But, over 20 years ago, John was my thesis director in graduate school. “Even if it doesn’t seem up my alley,” I thought, “I’m going to buy John’s book.” It was described as a “police procedural,” which isn’t necessarily my go-to reading material.

The book arrived a few days later, and I gave the opening pages a glance… then longer than a glance. And then, after five days passed, I was finished. The book sucked me in from the opening pages and wouldn’t let me go.

The plot centers around two mysteries, which come into focus pretty quickly. There’s been a murder of a beloved figure in one of the Chicago neighborhoods. Hank and his partner Marvin are assigned to solve the murder, working against murky details and a story that just keeps getting seedier. At the same time, Hank’s daughter has gone missing. She’s nineteen, headstrong, and has been, for some time, running with a questionable crowd. Hank and Marvin have to put their detective skills to use trying to find her, while at the same time trying to solve a murder case that continues to move from one frustrating dead end to the next.

Hank is a recurring figure from Guzlowski’s earlier novel, Suitcase Charlie (which I have not read, but now intend to). Even though Little Altar Boy functions like a sequel to Suitcase Charlie, a reader doesn’t have to have read the latter to appreciate the former. Little Altar Boy stands just fine on its own.

Set in 1960s Chicago, Little Altar Boy makes a character of the city as much as any other character in the book. Guzlowski remembers well the details of his own upbringing in the Windy City.

I can say this much… the plot of the book kept me engaged and guessing as to who the culprit might be in the official murder case. I was pretty certain who the murderer might be… and, to my satisfaction, I was dead wrong.

As a father myself, I was also invested in the search for Hank’s daughter.

The book goes farther than simply being a police procedural, however. When I knew John in my mid-twenties, he was a literature professor at Eastern Illinois University. His appreciation for and understanding of Bernard Malamud helped me enormously as I worked on my graduate thesis. John’s office could have been used on a movie set for the quintessential English professor’s office. It was an inviting space that inspired conversation regarding literature. There was a true reverence for books, literature, and the big questions about life.

So, yes, Guzlowski wrote a “police procedural” (and a satisfying one), but just as the book shows, you can take the young intellectual out of hardscrabble Chicago, but you can’t take the hardscrabble Chicago out of the young intellectual. Similarly, you can make the English Professor a crime novelist, but you can’t make the crime novelist forget that he’s an English Professor.

I found Little Altar Boy to be as literary as it was a crime novel. The book takes on the mystery of life as much as it takes on crime-related mysteries. Hank is a conflicted character with a difficult past in a tough situation. As he often does, he lashes out at his circumstances, gas-lighting himself into believing that what he’s doing is necessary, even when he knows that he’s doing wrong and is simply lashing out at the unfairness of an ugly world looking to fleece anyone with enough goodness and innocence that they are too tender to survive. Hank knows the underbelly of the world that functions beneath the façade of our waking, drinking coffee, going to work, and planning our next vacation. Through war or through police work, Hank knows too well the harsh, self-serving, hedonistic world that we live in.

As I recall, Guzlowski was also a fan of The Beat writers and lived through the counter culture shifts of The Beat generation moving into the hippy generation. Aspects of Little Altar Boy reminded me of John Clellon Holmes' book Go (considered the first Beat novel). Guzlowski can’t forget that 1960s Chicago is feeling the counter culture thinking that’s beginning to permeate society beyond the fringes. I remember Guzlowski talking to me about how his own adolescence was influenced by the writing and the music surrounding his upbringing… and likely driving him toward literature as a calling.

This was pleasing to me… to see the flashes of John’s own interest in those times. While looking for Hank’s daughter, Hank and Marvin find themselves in a blues club of sorts on the South Side of Chicago. The scene reads as though plucked from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, though through the eyes of two cops who in their own subconscious way are almost ready to “tune in, turn on, and drop out”:

            “The guy with the harmonica put down his harp just then, held it tight to his chest, and shouted a lick from some blues song, some holler, that went all the way down to Dixie and even further than that, down to the Delta, down to Parchman Farm, down to the wet brown mud of the black Mississippi. He shouted, ‘Say, old man, what kind of woman is this? I said, Say old man, what kind of woman is this?!” And then he shouted it all again, asked it in a blues growl that tied him to the plantation fields and the whips that broke the soul of the South and damned their white masters sure as Jesus was standing on the levee calling for the flood.”

What kind of woman is this? Who is this cruel, beautiful woman?

She’s Life.

And Guzlowski’s book is teeming with it… including an ending that satisfies with its homage to the way things really are versus how we wish them to be.

If you're interested in John's book, you can get it: here.

Jeff Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.