On August 9 at 7 p.m., Chicago-based fiction writer Joe Meno will be reading from his latest novel, Office Girl, at Subterranean Books (6275 Delmar).
The author of five novels, Meno is the first to admit that his latest is anything but action-packed.
“It’s this really small, intimate book,” he says. “No one shoots anyone. It’s literally two people riding their bikes in the snow.”
That quiet intimacy was exactly what Meno, 38, was going for when he wrote Office Girl. Set in 1999, the novel centers on two 20-somethings named Odile and Jack.
“They meet at this kind of depressing office job, and decide to start their own art movement and it lasts about three weeks,” Meno says. “They’re two young people trying to answer questions about their lives and about art. It’s a love story, it’s a-coming-of-age story, and it’s an exploration of what it means to be a young artist.”
The idea for the story stemmed from Meno’s own experiences in art school. As an undergraduate film student, he stumbled across a fiction-writing class by accident.
“I found I could do everything I wanted to do it film without worrying about actors or cameramen,” he says. “Everything I write is very cinematic.”
In addition to exploring the meaning and creation of art in Office Girl, Meno was intrigued by setting a novel at the close of the 20th century.
“The other impetus for it was that I feel grateful, in this strange way, to have come of age in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says. “It feels like I was growing up in this very prosperous, progressive era, and because of that, I was able to focus on these questions about art. Young people now in their 20s don’t have that.”
Meno published his first novel, Tender as Hellfire, in 1999 at age 25. Since then, he has published four more novels and two short story collections, dabbling in nonfiction and play-writing along the way. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Great Lakes Book Award. Additionally, he teaches fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago.
“Everything that I write starts as a short story,” he says of his tendency to bounce from one genre to another. “Then if those characters seem interesting, I’ll write them in a stage play just to see the structure—to get the characters to interact with each other without hiding behind a lot of language.”
If the characters still show promise, Meno says, he will use them in a novel. For example, Office Girl began as a short story before progressing to a play and finally, a full-length book.
In many ways, Meno sees his most recent novel as a fundamental departure from his earlier ones and many others being published today.
“I’ve noticed in the past 15 years or so, there’s this impulse in the novel—especially in American—to add complex and historical details,” he says. “Books became more about information than about characters and their relationships to each other, so I just wanted to make a book that was a smaller gesture.
Stepping back from the tendency to create an expansive, complicated story in same vein as his last novel, The Great Perhaps, Meno instead approached Office Girl with a fresh perspective.
“Part of the experiment was, can you make a book just about two people?” he says. “What can you do in a book? One answer is that you can have this huge cast of characters and issues of complexity. Well, you can also use a novel to focus on these very small events that are too quiet for a film. A book is kind of the only place you can be alone and be quiet.”
Further setting Office Girl apart are the featured drawings by Cody Hudson, an artist whom Meno calls “a Chicago legend,” and photographs by Todd Baxter, also of Chicago.
A former music journalist, Meno’s writing style has always been influenced by his favorite bands at any given time.
“The relationship between music and writing has always been interesting to me. Not the specific lyrics, but the mood or tone,” he says. “I started off in high school with these really loud, awful heavy metal and punk. Now, I’m way more interested in dynamics and restraint.”
Although writing fiction is his first love, Meno still has a soft spot for music. During his upcoming visit to St. Louis, there is one thing he is looking forward to more than reading at Subterranean Books—specifically, visiting Vintage Vinyl a few blocks down.
“I could spend hours in there,” he says. “Secretly, I’m coming to St. Louis just to go to your record store.”
