Little Altar Boy

John Guzlowski is probably best known to Polish American readers as a poet, one whose work has been particularly informed by the World War II trauma of his parents, slave laborers under the Nazis. His Echoes of Tattered Tongues (2016) is a classic of modern Polish American literature, and a window into the experience of displaced persons.Guzlowski brought the bleakness and brutality of that history to his 2018 crime novel, Suitcase Charlie, set in the Chicago he knows so well. In Little Altar Boy, his latest venture into detective fiction, family trauma—literal and metaphoric—again weaves an uneasy, circuitous, and because this is a crime novel after all, blood-stained thread.Little Altar Boy follows Guzlowski's signature detective team, Marvin Bondarowicz—hard boiled and quick on the draw, and Hank Purcell—the family man who has seen too much to sleep easy. Both men carry the scars and share the emotional landscape of their experiences on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, reinforced by twenty years of the sordid brutality they encounter on their beat, the streets of Chicago's near north side. Chicago is, in fact, very much a character in this novel: a cold, fickle beauty hiding an accumulation of ugliness.They understand the anguish of Sister Mary Philomena, a character seen earlier in Suitcase Charlie, who looks to the pair for help after witnessing what she takes to be the sexual abuse of an altar boy by a parish priest. She tells them, “There's something terrible happening here. I saw it today for the first time, and it stopped me like a death” (p. 8). And when the good sister actually does turn up murdered, the detective team heads not just into another homicide case, personal this time, but into dark territory from which there can be no return to innocence. What the good sister has seen can't be unseen, though it will be covered over like the dirt hidden by each fresh layer of snow in a Chicago winter.Even as Marvin and Hank work to unravel this case that has shocked the neighborhood, Hank is dealing with his own family drama, the disappearance of his nineteen-year-old daughter. It is 1967, and Margaret, a college freshman, has fallen in with the proverbial “wrong crowd.” She is smoking pot and maybe doing things more dangerous, and has gone missing, perhaps freely or perhaps against her will. Her rebellion and involvement in the youth culture of the era may have started out normally enough, as Hank and his wife have tried to reason out, but as Hank tracks down her dubious companions the web of crime and violence with which she is connected leads further and further from the good girl he and Hazel used to know. And as with poor Tommy Sawa, the doomed altar boy of the title, and the selfless Sister Mary Philomena, there is no going back. “Maybe it was the war,” thinks Hank. “Maybe the war opened the door to some kind of evil, and we haven't figured out a way to close that door again” (p. 91).The search for Sister Mary Philomena's murderer, the unraveling of the sordid circumstances that led to her death and the sad fate of Tommy, and to a lesser extent the concurrent search for the missing Margaret, becomes a tale of the betrayal of innocence, of evaded obligation and neglected opportunity, of entrenched, interwoven, and self-serving systems of power. And it is a failure, most of all, of those whose responsibility it is to love, to nurture, to protect those less powerful and more trusting, like the golden retriever left in a drug-dealer's care, whose crucifixion is perhaps the most disturbing scene of the entire novel (in this reviewer's opinion, anyway). “Why was there always some asshole ready to kill a kid or rape him or just beat him stupid in return for his love and goodness?” (p. 214), Hank wonders. And what can be done to reveal and undo the conspiracy of silence that protects not the innocent victim, but the perpetrator? In the end, Hank and Marvin are also ensnared by the temptation to enact their own ad hoc justice, enabled by their badges and ultimately protected by interwoven institutional networks of complicity.Finally, there are no definitive, satisfying answers to the who and the what and the why that it is Hank and Marvin's job to establish, to bring forward in order to make the world safe again. Few are left with clean hands. Not the fathers who brutalize their vulnerable sons. Not the “Fathers” whose job is “to tell the people how to stop doing things that aren't right in the eyes of God,” who are supposed to mentor, to console, and to take our confessions when we fall short (p. 12). Not even the witnesses like Sister Mary Philomena, who naively hope to keep their world intact just a little longer. Not Hank, whose hands still show “the palms of his youth” while his knuckles are scarred by his own acts of brutality (p. 286). And certainly not the intertwined institutions—the church, law enforcement, the courts—whose systems of justice and morality are compromised and complicit.Just as Guzlowski's poetry invokes his family's lived experience, so the Author's Note appended to this novel recounts the author's and the public's growing understanding of a legacy of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, including its history in the parish of Guzlowski's own youth. Rarely facing real consequences for their crimes, as we have now become aware, offending clergy have simply been transferred to new parishes, where they find new victims. This, Guzlowski makes clear, is a sin of commission and of omission, leaving a fear that “never goes away” (p. 319).Likewise, the identical Prologue and Epilogue, bookends to the narrative, create a poignant scene of the shared anguish of generations of victims and victimizers, of self-hatred, of guilt misplaced or deserved, and of the need for an unattainable absolution.Guzlowski's Little Altar Boy takes us on this walk through dark, sad, streets, with the occasional shared cup of coffee over the kitchen table and the stability of one loving person in our corner providing just enough hope to keep us going. Because, as Hank knows, that is the job, and tomorrow is another work day.