SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “… And Dangerous to Know.” Spectator (7 April 1990): 39.

In the following review, Brookner argues that Chicago Loop represents “a clinical tour de force” for its relentlessly dispassionate portrayal of the psychopathic mind.

[In Chicago Loop,] Parker Jagoda is mad, very mad, not in any active stereotypical way, but because he is wearied by the enormous confusions in his life, the greatest of which is his own imperfectly known personality. He is a successful architect, with a nice house, a wife, and a baby son, but what he likes to do is to advertise in the Personal Column of the Chicago Reader for a single white female. He is not sure why he wants this female, but it is not for sex, because sex, for Parker, is one big confusion. His wife, Barbara, is a fashion model and an admirer of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe: she is...