Memoir of a native son’s son

Chi Boy is in style and in form a pastiche, with the city of Chicago as its axis mundi. Keenan Norris presents Chicago as both the existential and the historical touchstone for the composite American that is the Black man, from Richard Wright to Jeff Fort to Barack Obama to those who died young either in the city or in deep connection with it: Emmett Till, Yummy Sandifer, and even a young Black woman, Hadiya Pendleton. Chicago in Norris’s narrative is the essence of the Great Migration in all its potential and all its tragedy, a chronology borne out in the unique political machine that was Richard Daley’s mayoralty and later in the city’s scandalously relentless murder rate.

At the same time, Chi Boy is a book written by a son about his father. Its formal arrangement as pastiche foreshadows this throughout and brings it into utter and utterly beautiful relief in the closing chapters.

There is method to Norris’s juxtaposition of pastiche with memoir: those closing chapters in which the author reconnects with his dying father would be far less forceful without the preceding, ruminative assemblage of history, social analysis, family lore, and speculation that are the circumstances of “the boy who would become the man who would become my father.”