On the Stairs

Two boys pass each other on the staircase of Grant’s Private Academy in 1873, and in 1916 they pass again on the marble stairs of a bank, their positions reversed. Johnny McComas starts with nothing but method and nerve and rises to the presidency of the Mid-Continent National Bank. Raymond Prince starts with money, taste and a hundred half-finished enthusiasms, and goes steadily down. Fuller never names the city, though the Loop and a fire that had swept the town mark it as Chicago. He hands the telling to a classmate who watched both men for forty years and talks straight at the reader, waving off the romantic turns a reader expects. Fuller called the result less a novel than a sketch for one. What is left is a dry reckoning of what ambition costs and what it actually buys.