'Windy City' takes affectionate look at multiculturalism in Chicago

The Chicago metropolitan area, with a population of about 9 million people, is now home to more than half a million Mexicans. Another 130,000 residents come from Poland, while 70,000 are originally from India and 60,000 from the Philippines. The metro area also supports significant immigrant populations from Italy, South Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Nigeria, Syria and who knows how many other countries. But as Scott Simon demonstrates in "Windy City," his comic but sneakily affecting novel about Chicago politics, all of these people have one thing in common: When their trash isn't picked up or their streets aren't plowed, they complain to their alderman.

Multiculturalism has hardly gone unnoticed in recent fiction. Rarely, however, has it been depicted with such unabashed affection as in "Windy City."

The plot centers on Sundaran "Sunny" Roopini, an Indian-born alderman from the 48th Ward, who must act as interim mayor when the real mayor is poisoned by a nicotine-laced pizza. No one has any idea who killed the mayor, a charismatic African-American dynamo. But this proves to be a matter of secondary importance. More urgent, at least to the city council's 50 aldermen, is the question of who will succeed him. With representatives of so many constituencies competing for power, the maneuvering threatens to get out of hand, and it's all that Roopini can do to keep City Hall from plunging into civil war.

Scott Simon (host of NPR's "Weekend Edition" and author of the novel "Pretty Birds") is clearly infatuated with Chicago, and the zeal with which he celebrates the city, warts and all, is hard to resist. His take on the city's aldermen, whom he describes as "the comic relief of politics," is particularly amusing. These intrepid eccentrics pursue their traffic lights, community centers and graft opportunities with all the passionate intensity of big-time pols, asserting themselves "desperately and gracelessly, like ducks trying to make love to a football."

"Windy City" is also well-served by Simon's hero. Roopini is an immensely appealing figure -- witty and unfailingly generous in spirit, despite having recently lost his wife. Now the single father of two young daughters, Sunny must steer his family through the shoals of grief even as he's trying to do the same for the traumatized city. And if his occasional flights of rhetorical brilliance owe perhaps a bit too much to television's "The West Wing" -- verbal set pieces too clever and elaborate to be credible as spontaneous speech -- I hasten to point out that the improbable eloquence of a protagonist is one of the easier flaws in a novel to excuse.

Whether one can so readily forgive the implausibility of the book's denouement is another question. In real-world Chicago, the city's warring ethnic and racial factions aren't quite as cooperative as they are in Simon's version. But comic novels often have something of the fairy tale about them. And "Windy City" seems intended mainly as a big, sloppy valentine to 21st-century Chicago. The Second City has taken a lot of abuse in its day, from writers as various as Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde and Dave Barry. It's good to see the old place shamelessly flattered for a change.