Joseph G. Peterson is nothing like Robert, the unemployed drunk at the center of his first novel, Beautiful Piece. “I have a feeling my editor thought some Charles Bukowski figure was going to come storming through the door,” he recalls. And Peterson, calmly spooning from a bowl of chicken gumbo at Hyde Park’s Medici, is about as far from bad-boy Bukowski as one can get.
But “you have to know these guys to write about them,” he says. And the characters that populate his work—the “Mike Ditkas” of the world “who never make it into literature”—are the kind of guys he grew up fishing with on the Des Plaines River in Wheeling, Illinois.
Fishing, drinking, and sleeping with femme fatale Lucy are the main preoccupations of Peterson’s antihero, as is avoiding Lucy’s dangerous fiancée, Matthew Gliss. “If you’ve ever in the sack with me and you see him walking through the door, watch out […] He has a 10mm automatic and I’ve seen him shoot it down at the dump,” Lucy tells Robert. “The damage it does to steel is incredible.”
It’s the eye for detail that makes Peterson’s story, set during a Chicago heat wave, burn more brightly than other attempts at modern noir. In a favorite passage, Peterson employs one of the philosophical musings that is likely to become his trademark: “I would say to myself: You were given the blood ax to wield, not so it can collect dust and rust in the corner. Wield it!” The blood ax is metaphorical; the Glock that Robert asks his cantankerous drinking buddy to find is not.
That drinking buddy, the Vet (one of Peterson’s most indelible creations) is someone else Peterson may have bumped into growing up in Wheeling. He likens the Vet to the racist old coots in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. But Peterson doesn’t pass judgment. “I let my characters make the case for their own humanity,” he says. The reader feels both disturbed by the Vet’s objectification of Vietnamese prostitutes and sympathetic to the trauma that led him into their arms.
Peterson, who writes “after 11 at night, when no one is looking,” came to Chicago with a different pursuit. After a physics teacher introduced a young Peterson to Descartes, he realized he would do “whatever it took” to go to the University of Chicago. He met his goal, in part, by saving money from a job in Prairie View. When he got to the U of C, “all these kids [were there] from Dalton and all these Ivy League places,” he remembers, “and [t]here I was, this kid from an aluminum mill.”
The kid from the aluminum mill studied philosophy and literature, but decided that “philosophy was kind of a remote discipline.” Over the course of a 20-year writing career, he realized, “You can do some of the same things in fiction.”
That minimalism, experimentalism, and repetition is on display in Beautiful Piece, which Peterson describes as reminiscent of both Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s The Americans. “You can be more adventurous in film and music these days than you can in fiction,” he laments, citing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as an example. With Piece, he challenges the “very conservative format” of contemporary fiction.
Certainly a novel in which the main characters have a “long, rational argument about a nonsensical metaphor” can be considered unusual, but it’s what most interests Peterson as a writer. Protagonist Robert’s brain “operates obsessively in a rational way,” Peterson explains. It’s reflection on how Peterson views the writing process. “Writing’s an obsessive behavior. You almost have to be obsessed with it to pull it off.”
His current obsessions include a second novel, Wanted: Elevator Man (due spring 2011), about “a guy, Barnes, who’s haunted by the larger-than-life shadow his father casts as one of the developers of the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan.” Also forthcoming is the play Muse, about a Chicago-based playwright who co-opts her manicurist’s private journals to overcome her writer’s block. The female protagonists are somewhat of a departure for Peterson, who confided to his editor, “I don’t think there’s a single woman who’s gonna like [Beautiful Piece].” Peterson’s own wife disproved that statement, though by her own admission she was nervous to read it. And the blurbs on the back of the book are both by female academics.
If the violence of Beautiful Piece upsets some readers, that’s partially the point—an idea Peterson the philosopher traces to Aristotle. “You can say things in writing that are not socially acceptable,” he says. “But if you write artfully enough, it becomes educational.” And maybe even a great read.
