Thompson, Jean 1950–

PERSONAL: Born 1950.

ADDRESSES: Home—Urbana, IL. Office—University of Illinois, Department of English, 200 English Bldg., 608 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail—jlthomp@uiuc.edu.

CAREER: University of Illinois, Urbana, from creative writing and rhetoric instructor to professor emerita.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Book Award nomination, 1999, for Who Do You Love; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship; Pushcart Prize.

WRITINGS:

The Gasoline Wars (short stories; includes "Dry Spring" and "The People of Color"), University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1980.

My Wisdom (novel), F. Watts (New York, NY), 1982.

"Little Face" and Other Stories, F. Watts (New York, NY), 1984.

The Woman Driver (novel), F. Watts (New York, NY), 1985.

Who Do You Love (short stories), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1999.

Wide Blue Yonder (novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2002.

City Boy, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Epoch and the New Yorker.

SIDELIGHTS: Author Jean Thompson has earned acclaim for both her short stories and her novels. She published her first book, the short story collection The Gasoline Wars, in 1980 and quickly became recognized for what Dorothy Wickenden described in New Republic as "a resoundingly distinctive voice." The tales comprising The Gasoline Wars are precise evocations of the more somber aspects of small-town life. In "Dry Spring," one of the volume's most lauded stories, the heroine grimly notes signs of decay in her surroundings, her physique, and her marriage to a mediocre writer, and in "The People of Color" another beleaguered heroine sympathizes with her new neighbor, a battered wife.

The Gasoline Wars readily established Thompson as an important new writer. David Evanier, for example, wrote in the New York Times Book Review of the collection's "immediacy" and "real characters." He called Thompson "a real writer to watch." Wickenden deemed The Gasoline Wars "an honest and sympathetic collection," and she especially appreciated the "subtle currents of humor and irony" in the tales. Terence Winch, writing in the Washington Post Book World described Thompson's stories as "intelligent, honest and technically impressive." For Winch, The Gasoline Wars was both an "exciting and accomplished" debut.

Thompson followed The Gasoline Wars with My Wisdom, a novel about a young woman's experiences in life and love. The novel's heroine is Mary Ann Edwards, who hails from the middle-class Midwest. Perceiving herself as a daring adventurer, Mary Ann leaves college in the early 1970s. After an emotionally shattering romance while living among the countercultural set, however, she settles for a relatively conventional life and marriage. Her marriage eventually comes undone, particularly after a neighbor indulges in a spree of horrific violence. Mary Ann then flees to her sister's home in San Francisco. There she discovers that her sister, a lawyer, is consorting with terrorists. More escapades ensue before Mary Ann once again accepts a less harrowing life as a wife and mother. Caroline Thompson, in her review of My Wisdom for the Los Angeles Times, hailed the book as "solid and true," concluding that Thompson "writes as well as anyone."

After publishing My Wisdom, Thompson produced another short story collection, "Little Face" and Other Stories, and another novel, The Woman Driver. The latter work concerns an abandoned wife's romantic travails, including an affair with a married man who was also her best friend's lover. Almost fifteen years separate those works from her more recent short story collection Who Do You Love, which received a number of glowing reviews for its portraits of the hopeless and downtrodden in Middle America.

The fifteen stories in Who Do You Love present broken marriages, lives reduced by disturbing memories, unfulfilled dreams, or unfulfilling jobs. As a Publishers Weekly reviewer put it: "Lost souls populate the bleak terrain…. These hapless folk live precariously, seemingly trapped in an endless gray November." The author does not condescend to her characters, however, but portrays them with a touch of humor and hope. In the New York Times Book Review, Katherine Dieckmann declared the story collection a "quietly devastating book, where characters' emotional needs are rarely stated and are never met without a sizable measure of concession and loss." The critic continued: "People in Thompson's world all tend to be caught at a moment when the known borders shift. The pressure of sudden revelation renders experience at once acute and vague, as though feeling too much requires a long nap."

Its grim subject matter notwithstanding, Who Do You Love received numerous positive responses from reviewers. Newsweek critic Jeff Giles wrote: "Jean Thompson's short-story collection Who Do You Love is a beautiful book, but a hell of a sad one…. The best stories here are so sympathetic and true that they glow a little." In Booklist, Michele Leber observed: "In just a few pages Thompson insinuates us into her characters' lives and makes us care about them." Dieckmann contended that Thompson "impresses as an astute observer of cloaked feelings and stalled dreams…. Few fiction writers working today have more successfully rendered the sensation of solid ground suddenly melting away, pinpointing that instant when the familiar present is swallowed up by an always encroaching past or voided future." The critic concluded: "Thompson is to be commended for creating profoundly bruised characters without a trace of condescension or pity, yet being brave enough to leave them struggling once their stories are told."

Thompson's 2002 work, Wide Blue Yonder, "follows four characters floundering amid life's disappointments" in Springfield, Illinois, related a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Elaine is a divorcée and business owner whose compassion complements her skewed viewpoint. Josie, her daughter, is dissatisfied with almost every aspect of her life, from her parents' divorce to her days in Springfield. However, Josie finds a ray of hope in her new policeman boyfriend and her schemes to remand herself to his custody by getting arrested. Meanwhile, Elaine finds herself responsible for Uncle Harvey, a good-natured but increasingly mentally and physically challenged old man. Harvey compulsively watches the Weather Channel, picking up communications directed at him and thinking that his name has been changed to Local Forecast. Meanwhile, unknown to these three characters, a young man named Rolando steals a car in California and heads steadily east towards an unexpected rendezvous with the other players. Rolando simmers under the effects of a lifetime of abuse and the combustible rage that steeps just under the surface. Weather serves as an overarching metaphor for the characters' lives, from Uncle Harvey's obsession with the Weather Channel to Rolando's inexorable advance across the country like a violent weather system gathering momentum and ferocity. The novel "moves with precision from the first paragraph to the last" in chapters structured like short stories, observed Rebecca Sturm Kelm in Library Journal. "Thompson is a writer of extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity, and she galvanizes you with each of these portraits" of her characters, remarked Vince Passaro in O, The Oprah Magazine. Kelm concluded that the book is "a novel to savor."

In City Boy, Thompson "dissects the breakup of a marriage in cool, convincing detail," commented a Publishers Weekly critic. Young married couple Jack Orlovich and Chloe Chase have just moved to Chicago. Jack has given up his teaching job in California so that Chloe can move to the city for her banking job. As the beautiful Chloe begins her trek up the corporate ladder, Jack unsuccessfully tries to ignite a career as a writer. Confounding his plans is upstairs neighbor Rich Brezak, a belligerent and surly young man who indulges in drugs, files a never-ending string of women in and out of his apartment, and plays his Reggae music much too loudly. Jack butts heads with Brezak over the music, but he secretly finds the man's youthful, uninhibited, no-pretense lifestyle attractive. As her professional life drags on, Chloe becomes less enchanted with her husband and develops a drinking problem. Their marriage begins to crumble, and Chloe suspects that Jack is cheating. They both struggle under the emotional weight of deciding whether or not to start a family, and with Jack's realization that he loves his wife too much, but does not really like her as a person. Though Library Journal reviewer Starr E. Smith found the characters to be shallow, "the author's assured and stylish prose brings them and their mostly self-created predicaments to convincing life." A Kirkus Reviews critic called the novel an "overfamiliar tale, redeemed considerably by solid writing and sobering empathy." The Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that the work is a "neatly crafted novel."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 1999, Michele Leber, review of Who Do You Love, p. 1671.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2003, review of City Boy, p. 1339.

Library Journal, October 15, 2001, Rebecca Sturm Kelm, review of Wide Blue Yonder, p. 110; January, 2004, Starr E. Smith, review of City Boy, p. 161.

Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1982, Caroline Thompson, review of My Wisdom, p. 27.

New Republic, March 15, 1980, Dorothy Wickenden, review of The Gasoline Wars, p. 35.

Newsweek, June 14, 1999, Jeff Giles, review of Heartsick, p. 74.

New York Times Book Review, July 27, 1980, David Evanier, review of The Gasoline Wars, p. 18; July 25, 1999, Katherine Dieckmann, "Cobra Snake for a Necktie: Stories about Love and Other Eccentricities," review of Who Do You Love, p. 14.

O, The Oprah Magazine, January, 2002, Vince Passaro, "Storms of Life: Jean Thompson's Satisfying Wide Blue Yonder Confronts the Unsettled Atmosphere of Family Relations," p. 101.

Publishers Weekly, April 19, 1999, review of Who Do You Love, p. 58; January 7, 2002, review of Wide Blue Yonder, p. 48; December 22, 2003, review of City Boy, p. 34.

Washington Post Book World, March 30, 1980, Terence Winch, "Short Stops on the Reading Railroad," review of The Gasoline Wars, p. 14.

Writer, February, 2002, Max Ruback, "Entanglements of the Heart: Jean Thompson's Stories Begin with a Basic Question: Why Is Happiness So Elusive?," interview with Jean Thompson, p. 39.