Chicago loop - Softcover

"Riveting...CHICAGO LOOP is an icy tale brilliantly imagined."
THE BOSTON GLOBE
He knifes silently through the shadows of the steamy Chicago summer night, prowling for lonely souls who need his help. The desperate come to him, answering his ads with promises of romantic evenings and possibly a future, never suspecting that they are the prey, chosen to statiate a twisted sexual desire.
Parker Jagoda is also a successful businessman with a wife, a child, and a house in the suburbs--respectable, health-conscious, and polite. Nobody knows about his jagged double life, his dark, hungry obsessions. He has fooled everyone except those who gasp their last dying scream. And, of course, he has not fooled himself--which may be the only glimmer of hope left inside the darkest of hearts....

A parable of particularly male madness, Theroux's forceful, disturbing novel follows to their farthest reaches the compulsions of a successful Chicago real-estate developer who lives in the suburbs with his wife, a model, and their infant son. Parker Jagoda, 37 years old, has a secret life, begun via personal ads, with two young women, one of whom he brutally mutilates and kills. In a fugue state he continues to work, to see the other woman and to arrange with his wife elaborate hotel-room "dates" that involve unpredictable role-playing sex games. As he reads newspaper accounts of the search for the killer, dubbed "Wolfman," Jagoda slowly recalls his last encounter with the victim and is filled with a self-absorbed remorse that makes him physically and mentally ill. Abandoning his career and family, he gradually assumes the identity of his victim, disappears into the city and finally ends his life in a powerful, inevitable conclusion. Giving us no history and little information about the rest of his protagonist's life, Theroux focuses tightly on Jagoda's perceptions, describing grim horrors and his character's escalating isolation in simple, Kafkaesque prose. There is no moral to this tale--only the experiences of the journey, and questions raised by Jagoda's initial denial and eventual assumption of culpability. Part of Random House's Literary Landscapes fiction group, this latest by the author of Mosquito Coast and The Great Railway Bazaar maps its interior landscape as immediately as it does its modern urban location. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.