A vibe ... What he has constructed is a moody and engrossing meditation on the ephemerality of memory, the persistence of family myths and a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago. A memorable novel of the stories and people everybody has already forgotten.
Exuberant ... Packs the punch of his short stories, dramatizing a real-life unsolved murder, both a homage to Hollywood noir and a meditation on how and why our deepest connections can betray us ... His novel derives its evocative power from the language of duplicity and disinformation, the callous ways we talk past each other, stunted in echo chambers of our making. The rest is gossip.
Orner’s novel is a rich and messy—sometimes deliberately, sometimes not—study of a man compelled to solve both a murder mystery and a more existential one ... A clean resolution was never in the offing—Orner is no detective novelist, and Jedidiah no detective. But both understand families, and the melancholy charm of this novel, which still flashes through all that red string, is that even with all the facts at hand, families will forever be sources of loss, frustration, and mystery.
A work of exquisite emotional distillation ... Orner evokes the mid-twentieth-century zeitgeist and the present while charting the highs and lows of ambition, fame, and clout.
Reads a bit like a detective novel, and a bit like a celebrity memoir ... Has a bit of self-deprecating humor that not only makes Jed likable but also enlivens the story.
The reader is kept at a distance from the story’s nub, such as it is, and schmoozed into submission ... There are things to enjoy here, especially for those who retain some memory of Kup’s ubiquitous presence and posh nightclub milieu. Orner conveys what a certain slice of Chicago felt like in the early 1960s, a time when folks dressed up to go out and the world didn’t seem entangled in permanent crisis ... With its bleakly depressive, self-lacerating mood and zig-zaggy storyline, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter raises questions about its own raison d’être ... What the book isn’t, though, is a satisfying whole that readers can sink their teeth into.
Searching ... Jed spins indelible stories of his grandfather’s legal troubles, Solly’s untimely death, his parents’ divorce, and his painful separation from his partner. Eventually, he lands on a satisfying solution to the mystery. It’s a rewarding literary experiment.
