Getting to the meat of the story

When author John McNally reminisces about the Chicago of his childhood, a particular lesson in beef-joint etiquette immediately pops to mind.

"A customer was getting up in arms about his french fries not being ready," McNally recalls fondly. "The owner lost his patience and told him to get the fuck out. The tide had turned against this poor guy. Everyone in the place got pleasure over seeing this guy leave. It was an instant communal experience at someone else's expense."

It's a story and sentiment echoed by Hank Boyd, the eighth-grade narrator of McNally's hilarious and heartbreaking novel, The Book of Ralph. In line with his dad at Duke's Drive-In, Hank recalls how everybody got a kick out of a large man who ordered six bags of sandwiches. "Must have an appetite, that guy," someone said. Others chuckled and made comments, and Hank explains, "This was how conversation unraveled in Chicago: One minute you'd be standing in line with a few dozen people you didn't know; the next, everyone would be laughing and talking."

When Hank steps over the line with an off-color joke about the man's weight, he learns that strangers can turn on you just as quickly.

These are the small life lessons that populate Ralph, a smart and gritty coming-of-age story mostly set in 1978 and told through Hank's earnest, innocent, but far from naive perspective. McNally, who now splits his time between L.A. and his teaching job at North Carolina's Wake Forest University, is back in town this week to promote the paperback release of the book. One of his signings will be at Duke's, perhaps the first event to mix literature and au jus.

"Duke's has been great," McNally says. "They've had a sign for the book up, and I get more e-mails as a result of the sign than from anything else."

Hank lives in Southwest Chicago and does pretty well in school, but because his parents are largely preoccupied with keeping food on the table and screaming at one another, he is usually free to wander around his neighborhood unsupervised. The titular Ralph, also in eighth grade, has been held back twice and is thus two years older (and a foot taller) than everybody else. Scrubby patches of facial hair have even appeared on his upper lip.

The incorruptible but amiable Hank gains Ralph's trust and friendship, and the two spend more time together, cooking up ways to make a buck and wisecracking to everyone in earshot—which is typically no one but themselves.

"When I was a kid, I watched old-time comedies like Abbott and Costello and used to listen to their radio show," McNally says. His knack for comic timing pays off in some brilliant banter between Hank and Ralph. "They're like a comedy duo. Giving them the cadence of a vaudeville team keeps them away from precociousness."

The two also bring a charming gravity to even their most ridiculous schemes. At one point in the story, Ralph types up a list of deeds he'll perform for his fellow classmates if the prices are right: "Punching, $2; Both eyes blacked, 4; Nose and jaw broke, 10," etc.

While McNally is quick to dispel the idea he's making any socioeconomic statement by placing Hank and Ralph in a poorer part of the city, he's the first to admit that the Chicago area, specifically Burbank (where McNally grew up), is integral to the novel.

"I don't think these kids could have come from any other place," he says. "Almost every parent I knew was a construction worker or some kind of blue-collar worker." In this light, Ralph and Hank's money-making adventures emerge as more desperate than the time-wasting diversions they might first appear to be. In fact, many of the ostensibly funny scenes in the novel—Hank's dad decorates the house with found objects for Christmas—point to the huge differences in income that lie between very narrow swaths of the city.

Writing from Hank's point of view, McNally says, "was a way to be nostalgic without being sentimental" about where he was raised, and provided a way to return to a place he once called home. A lot has changed in Chicago since '78, but Duke's still serves up sandwiches, and McNally likes to think Chicago remains the kind of town where a handful of strangers can share a laugh—even if it's at someone else's expense.

McNally will sign copies of his book at Duke's at 11am on Saturday 28. See listings.