VINCENT FRANCONE: a voice to reckon with #review #memoir

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Review for LIKE A DOG:

Vincent’s colorful escapades in Chicago’s workplace offer the reader witty, dark humor that provides the perfect balance of genuine suspense and Gen-X satire. The book starts out in the Southwest Suburbs with Vincent toiling in dead-end mail sorting job that provides several memorable moments and characters that keep the pages turning. The middle part of the book finds Vincent moving to the North Side and encountering a serious of hilarious encounters with eccentric roommates and questionable residences. Vincent’s time at the storied Aspidstra Book store is where the book really takes off. The various employees and patrons of the book store felt both familiar and timeless. The final portion of the book finds Vincent traversing the world of academia. Rich storytelling combined with razor sharp dialogue painted against the backdrop of 1990's Chicago make this an excellent read, and more importantly, Vincent, a voice to reckon with.

LIKE A DOG:

 

Vincent Francone’s “Like a Dog,” as in “Work like a dog,” is a great read. A working class guy who comes up on the South Side of Chicago and moves north in a quest a better life, Francone takes us on a dazzling tour of minimum wage America over the last couple of decades. He’s has done it all; “I’ve tried telemarketing, copy writing, editing; I managed a courier center, I conducted background checks on potential healthcare employees, and worked in a stock room. . . .” And that’s before he goes to university and winds up, like so many other academics today, as a part-time instructor in a string of economically stressed public colleges. Francone’s descriptions of boring and soul-destroying work, the places where it’s done, and the people who do it are beautifully written, wildl entertaining, deeply poignant, and mysteriously inspiring. This is what it’s like to be alive in these times, “Like a Dog” insists, this is the battlefield of everyday life. These are your adversaries: mindless repetitive work, bored and boring co-workers, feckless bosses, plus your own inclination to work as little as possible, spend every penny you earn right away, and escape from bad job to bad job, without ever climbing any ladder that might lead to better paid if equally meaningless work. Best of all, this post-industrial odyssey down mean streets and corridors to mean offices and classrooms, dingy apartments, and dead end bars is full of gritty life. Francone is a gifted story- teller with a great, street smart voice. His protagonists and characters are brilliantly drawn.. And in their bafflement and self-destructive resistance to the work regieme that claims them they press back in an utterly realistic way against our recession-bred equation of employment, almost any employment, with salvation. Studs Terkel would have loved this book--John McClure, Phd

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.