In Norwich author Peter Orner’s new novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, the titular character is Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet, an aspiring stage and screen actress, shoplifter, and devotee of existential philosophy. Her dad is Irv “Kup” Kupcinet, one of the mightiest chatterers of his day, and her mother is Kup’s glamorous wife, Essee. These are historical figures — real people — whom Orner has colorfully placed among his fictional characters in a book that swoops back and forth between now and the boisterous era of tabloids, mobsters, film noir and screwball comedies. Alongside a celebratory satire of mid-20th-century personality culture, Orner succeeds in telling a family story with a nearly insurmountable ache at its center.
What an extravagantly fabulous character Orner has found in Irv Kupcinet. Known as “Chicago’s Town Crier,” a sort of Paul Bunyan of celebrity journalism, he published “Kup’s Column” six days a week from 1943 to 2003 and hosted the syndicated TV talk show “Kup’s Show” from 1959 until 1986. Characteristic of Kup’s vast self-regard is the title of his autobiography: Kup: A Man, an Era, a City (1988). Orner embeds examples of the columnist’s rat-a-tat bulletins as he tracks sightings of fashionable notables of all stripes and shapes:
The book swoops back and forth between now and the boisterous era of tabloids, mobsters, film noir and screwball comedies.
Among the guests at Joan Crawford’s Mental Health Ball at the Conrad Hilton Friday was crooner Vic Damone and Blackhawk Bobby Orr … A little birdie spotted a Dan Quayle. The ex-veep was in town yesterday keynoting the Illinois Bankers annual shindig at the Palmer House … Kermit the Frog, blah, blah … Kim Basinger, blah, blah, blah.
In fact and in the novel, Cookie Kupcinet was found naked and dead on November 30, 1963, just days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and from then to today, some have insisted there must be a link between the two deaths. Cookie may have overdosed, but a broken hyoid bone in her neck convinced the cops and coroner she had been strangled.
To magnify his story, Orner creates a second, made-up family. Lou and Babs Rosenthal are the grandparents of the novel’s narrator, Jed Rosenthal, and Orner makes them the Kupcinets’ closest friends and confidants, until the glamour couple inexplicably jettisons them after Cookie’s death.
A present-day sleuth investigating Cookie’s demise, Jed isn’t a hard-boiled detective but a self-described “swashbuckling” creative writing professor. Aimless in his teaching, he’s anguished over a “trial separation” (a phrase he dreads) from a woman with whom he’s “co-parenting” a young daughter and a hilariously perspicacious cat. Jed nosedives into researching Cookie’s life and death, trying to make sense of the decades-old cold case.
His family thinks his obsession with Cookie is insufferable, but he’s even more consumed by trying to understand why his grandparents Lou and Babs, utterly devoted to Cookie’s parents in their darkest hour, were banished from the Kupcinets’ lives. The result of that never-explained “rift” has been a familial sorrow persisting through three generations.
Orner has published two previous novels, three collections of stories and two of literary essays, as well as edited books of investigative journalism about humanitarian crises in Haiti, Zimbabwe and the U.S. The current chair of Dartmouth College’s English and creative writing department, he holds both an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a law degree from Northeastern University — the latter relevant to his new book, which is crowded with lawyers.
Orner’s episodes slide around in time like an expertly shuffled deck of cards. In tempo and texture, his storytelling style here is as talky and brash as that of Grace Paley, Jimmy Breslin or Nelson Algren. He has barrels of fun with portrayals of Jewish gangsters, who evoke ruffians from the tales of Isaac Babel:
Like Jews everywhere, Chicago Jews like to indulge in our connections to the Mob. Call it a point of ironical pride. We didn’t all used to be orthodontists in Northbrook. You should have seen us back in the day when we were real tough. Warsaw ghetto tough. Don’t-fuck-with-us tough. In Kup’s Chicago, Kup writes, “As a columnist on the nightclub beat, I’m often in a peculiar position of figuratively rubbing elbows with the underworld.”
Peculiar position? Figuratively?
Himself a native of the city, Orner revels in the novel’s Chicago settings. And by interspersing fictional personages with real ones from across an American century, he’s able to populate Jed Rosenthal’s quest with cameo appearances by a panoply of luminaries: Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce, Malcolm X, Lucille Ball, Saul Bellow, Sammy Davis Jr., Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, John and Yoko … even Robert Todd Lincoln, Haile Selassie, Margaret Mead and a pope! Kup knew them all. Orner also inserts period photos and newspaper tear sheets into his text at opportune moments, creating a mosaic of clippings and clues.
At the novel’s climax, the effect is somewhat as if handfuls of narrative have been thrown up in the air to land where they will. We arrive not at crowning illumination but at a pile-up, skidding more than gliding to an ending. The specific relationship on which the book’s “mystery” pivots seems pretty obvious, so the book’s supposedly key revelation has a muted impact.
But this isn’t a book to be read mainly, or merely, for plot. Orner is omnivorous in his appetite for phrases and details from his chosen times and places, hopscotching through a mazelike chronology from Chicago to Hollywood and back again in pursuit of his big shots and nobodies.
In its quietest, least rowdy and starstruck passages, Orner’s portrayal of Jed Rosenthal is about a search for the wellspring of friendships that are outside the spotlight.
From The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter
The original print version of this article was headlined “Gossip, Glamour and Grief | Book review: The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, Peter Orner”
This article appears in The Reading Issue 2025.
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