Bellow’s heirs

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: In Granta’s special issue on Chicago, Don DeLillo, he who chronicled New York’s underbelly in Underworld, pays warm tribute to Nelson Algren. “He was a writer of compassion whose work carried the voices and longings of people in the jails, the shanties, the backstreets…,” says DeLillo. In a way, the issue—it includes a piece by Algren on the violent death of a pugilist in the ring—also carries the voices of people on the fringes of society, the marginalised and the dispossessed who usually are the Blacks, Hispanics and almost always the immigrant. In the process, we perhaps miss out on the jazz clubs of downtown Chicago and the vibrant culture touristy brochures boast of, but that’s a minor quibble.

This special issue edited by new Granta editor John Freeman creates a Chicago peopled with new voices, and looking beyond Saul Bellow and Algren. Chicago still is a violent place where as Alex Kotlowitz chillingly documents “death has become ritualised”. In Khalid, where the eponymous tragic hero falls victim to his gang’s bullets, Kotlowitz writes that over the last 20 years, “roughly 15,000 people have been murdered in the city, most of them shot, most of them African-American and Latino, most of them young men, most of them in impoverished neighbourhoods on the city’s West and South sides.” He struggles to understand why the young don’t fear death, and realises, “if you are Black or Hispanic in Chicago, it’s impossible not to have been touched by the smell and sight of violent death. It’s become routine, or at least expected.”

Chile-born photographer Camilo Jose Vergara has a series of pictures on West and South neighbourhoods after having followed Chicago’s progress for four decades. Some of the answers to Kotlowitz’s questions are to be found in the photos.