`Love' hurts in Stephen Elliott's trip to Chicago

By Laura Anderson

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, November 3, 2002

Good fiction satisfies; great fiction challenges. Stephen Elliott's second novel, "What It Means to Love You," is without question a rough, often painful journey through the steamy underworld of Chicago, yet the trip is infinitely rewarding.

Elliott holds the coveted Truman Capote fellowship in the Wallace Stegner creative writing program at Stanford, as have Larry McMurtry and other distinguished writers in years past. In his semi-autobiographical first novel, "A Life Without Consequences," he told of a boy who, after suffering terrible abuse from his father, ran away to a life on the streets of Chicago.

In "What It Means to Love You," which also draws upon personal experience, he introduces Anthony, who has managed to graduate from college but is drawn back to Chicago's seedy Halsted Street, where he becomes a dancer in a men's nightclub. Anthony is intelligent and hungers to be "normal," but he is sexually confused and drawn to a world that is dark and often ugly. Yet out of the squalor, Elliott creates beauty, as when Anthony recalls his childhood:

"Anthony dreamt that he was above the world in heaven. God wore a silver robe. His foster parents were there as well, praying, but they weren't praying for Anthony's soul, they were praying for their own. Anthony wondered why they were praying for themselves when he so clearly needed their prayers more than they did."

We meet Lance, Anthony's fellow dancer, and his girlfriend Brooke, who has run away from her wealthy, abusive father and at 17 is a high-priced prostitute. Lance goes to jail and is brutalized by other inmates. Brooke returns home to Michigan to confront her father. Anthony quits dancing for a more respectable job as a doorman. When Brooke returns to Chicago, Anthony protects her while Lance sinks deeper into drugs and despair. Like Brooke, we come to see that Lance is doomed but Anthony will rise above the ugliness that both attracts and repels him.

As he discovers the power of love, Anthony can answer the question that the author raises in the title of the novel:

"What it means to love you. It is every piece of music, every smell in every kitchen. It is everything I eat. It runs in the street during the rains. It's the dirt on the windows, the voice through the telephone lines. I took a taxi at night. I was alone and the world was alone with me. I drove through a deserted city looking for a strand of your hair. You are a fire that burns me, always. Every other thought is small compared to the story of us which is the story that defines who I am. When I run I run toward you. All other memories become small bruises, insignificant events. And when you are gone you stay -- without you I am cold."

Writing like this should not be ignored. Life on Halsted Street is painful, but there is a Halsted Street in every city, and we grow as we come to understand the people who live and love and suffer there. "What It Means to Love You" is edgy, cagey and dark, but always honest and sometimes luminous.

Laura Anderson is a writer in Washington, D.C.

What It Means to Love You

Stephen Elliott, MacAdam/ Cage, $19.50