Chicago: August 28, 1968

Marilyn Levy’s extraordinary novel Chicago: August 28, 1968 relates what a dozen ordinary Americans experience on a single day during the Democratic National Convention and the riots outside in Grant Park. Viewed through the eyes of Levy’s varied characters—among them a teenager, a cop, an artist, a psychiatrist just back from Vietnam, a black activist, and a dying woman—Chicago: August 28, 1968 explores the consciousness of people thrown together during this crisis. The novel goes beyond politics, however, and sheds light on the complex relationships between human beings and on the consequences of their interactions—of the effects that parents have on children, of words said and unsaid, of emotions restrained or allowed to explode, of corrosive secrets. The book reveals a kaleidoscopic image of how people of many different backgrounds and ideologies survived a traumatic event that continues to reverberate even today. Marilyn Levy’s Chicago: August 28, 1968 is a novel about the recent past, but it’s also a mirror that shows us a disturbing image of our own time.