{"id":65756,"date":"2026-04-10T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=65756"},"modified":"2026-04-10T00:11:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T05:11:50","slug":"just-slightly-outside-the-circle-peter-orner-and-sarah-wasserman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/just-slightly-outside-the-circle-peter-orner-and-sarah-wasserman\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Our partner podcast <\/em>Novel Dialogue<\/a> invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season\u2019s signature question is: Who was your favorite teacher and why?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner\u2019s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist\u2019s Daughter<\/em>. In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of \u201cMidwestern Weimar\u201d and the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, holding forth as many as six times a week for 60 years, wrote a garrulous, glamorous story of the city. While the increasingly unhinged narrator of his novel investigates the mysterious death of Kupcinet\u2019s daughter in 1963, Peter delves into his own family\u2019s history, anxiously asking, \u201cWe can\u2019t hurt our dead, can we?\u201d The novel swerves between fact and fiction, including photographs that are both real artifacts from the historical record and staged photos that participate in the fictional world of the novel. Peter laughs off this contradiction, remarking \u201cthe closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes.\u201d How to describe such a complicated novel? Sarah offers this gem: \u201cIt\u2019s as if Philip Roth were less cancellable and wrote a murder mystery,\u201d a line that results in a poignant conversation about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago in middle of the 20th century and what it means to be a cultural outsider, \u201cjust slightly outside of the circle.\u201d Peter brings the conversation to a close with a memory of going to the University of Tish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n