Always on the lookout for Milwaukee-related things, I acted quickly when I heard author Patrick Somerville's debut novel "The Cradle" was set in Brew City.
What I discovered is that that's not entirely true. In fact, it's not true at all. Somerville, who is currently the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University, set the book in St Helens, a fictional suburb of Milwaukee.
However, while I was a little disappointed that the book -- published in hardcover by Little Brown & Co. -- wasn't packed to the brim with references to familiar places, Somerville's interweaving of two stories in this slim and rather unusual road novel is very satisfying.
And because he manages to somehow pack a pretty epic family story in such a concentrated punch of a book, "The Cradle" is the kind of novel you can read in a single sitting on a rainy spring Sunday.
I asked Somerville -- who is also the author of "Trouble," a story collection published in 2006 -- why he chose to set the novel in Milwaukee -- well, near Milwaukee -- instead of in more familiar territory.
"I grew up in Green Bay and went to school in Madison, but I've had family and friends in Milwaukee for 15 years and have visited and stayed many, many times," says Somerville.
"(‘The Cradle') starts out in a made-up town somewhere to the west of Milwaukee, and Matt drives through Milwaukee when he's first heading north, but he spends the majority of the book driving around the Midwest, and the other storyline is set in Chicago."
Indeed, even if the book was set in Brew City, the main character spends so much time on the road trying to procure a specific, memory-laden cradle that his pregnant wife wants to have for their child, that there wouldn't be much opportunity to name drop city sights.
"I put Matt and his family where I did because I knew he'd be crisscrossing to Minnesota and Indiana, and I wanted him to have to pass his house and have the choice of heading home each time he went by," Somerville says. "And for reasons that come up later in the book, he needed to be close to Chicago, but not in it."
In his search for this cradle that means so much to his wife Marissa, Matt uncovers details of the life Marissa's mother has led in the years since she left her family behind and what seems like a lot of mucking about for a piece of furniture rapidly becomes something life-altering.
As a reader I found it unusual that Somerville focused so little on place. Perhaps his ability to gnarl a story down to its bones explains how he creates such a powerful story in a novel that just tickles 200 pages.
"There are moments in the book when the landscape matters quite a lot," he says, "and other moments when it doesn't; for example, there's a part right after (Matt) gets north of Milwaukee when he looks out at the farmland for quite some time.
"Since Matt is so unwilling, at the beginning of the novel, to examine much about himself directly, he uses what he sees -- his neighbor's house, the light at a rest stop, an old broken-down factory in Minnesota -- as a way of being kind of indirectly introspective. It was only those moments that I spent a good amount of time describing the physical world."
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
