All This Heavenly Glory
Looped
Set against her later missteps and unfortunate encounters, the stories from Charlotte Anne’s youth highlight just how few steps children are removed from their adult selves. A dateless teen, she still hasn’t seen much satisfying relationship action by the time she’s 30. But she’s well educated, pretty, and hardly impoverished, and though her parents are divorced, it’s not a source of great trauma. Hers is a basically happy childhood that nevertheless results in adult drift–a common enough progression in the real world, but rare in fiction, where grownup troubles usually have clear antecedents in dysfunction. It’s refreshing to see a less tidy cause and effect on the page.
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What Cast of Shadows wants to be is a novel of ideas, but Guilfoile, a former adman, McSweeney’s humorist, and author (with John Warner) of the Dubya-bashing parody My First Presidentiary, abandons his probe into the fundamental nature-or-nurture question at the heart of his tale. In particular, the repeated forays into Shadow World, an alternate digital universe where much of the second half of the novel takes place, dilute his original inquiry and snuff whatever narrative drive he’s been able to generate. And upon return to this flesh-and-blood existence, one notices how thinly drawn the characters are, more game pieces than people.
The main players stake out their territory early. First are Brad and Alice, bandmates and coworkers in a Wicker Park cafe-cum-flower shop. Then, in quick succession, Winston introduces aspiring filmmaker Ellen; Florence, a 73-year-old widow who lives in a Belmont Avenue high-rise; Art Institute employee Nathan and his caterer boyfriend, Robin; south-side mailman Alphonse; and finally Greek diner owner Elias and Uptown high school student Ng.
