Jason Pettus's Reviews > An Off-White Christmas

To make my biases known right away, Don Evans is a good friend of mine, and is also the man who very nicely asked me this year to join the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, so there's not really any way to see my write-up of his latest book as somehow an objective and disinterested critical review. I wanted to bring it to your attention anyway, though, because I just finished it myself and really loved it, and wanted to make sure it found more of its natural audience here this holiday season.

A series of stories about families of all types as they each enter the holidays, the tales here range from the sentimental to the bleak, strongly reflecting Evans' natural love for our city's strong history of gritty social realism. My personally favorite story of the collection, for example, "Tiny Flakes of Bone," is an ur-example of this, as two former school chums celebrate Christmas with a sybaritic gambling binge in Las Vegas, their hazy 48 straight hours at the casino slowly revealing the fractures that initially drove the two apart, and how one has been able in middle-age to shed himself of his addictive demons, the other lost in a permanent wallowing in them.

To one degree or another, all the stories in An Off-White Christmas share this intense character-building quality, although certainly many of them have much happier endings; each of them, though, are surprisingly deep dives into the dynamics that make up a family (whether biological or otherwise), Evans cleverly using Christmas as a gimmick off which to hang a whole series of diverse tales with diverse tones. I would've really enjoyed the book whether or not I was already friends with him, and I'd like to strongly encourage you to pick up a copy yourself as soon as you have the chance.