Chicago is the city associated with two consequential parts of Robert Mallory’s past: his mother’s fatal fall and his reported suicide attempt. Though the novel’s principal action unfolds in Los Angeles, Chicago enters through recollections and disclosures, linking Robert’s history to later events while leaving the nature of those connections uncertain.

Family History and the Fall

Robert’s mother died in a Chicago townhouse in the spring of 1980 after falling from a landing. The narrator later recalls this detail after Abigail Mallory explains how Robert’s mother died. It becomes significant when Terry Schaffer is injured in a fall at a party: the similarity prompts the narrator to imagine that Robert may have pushed Terry, though he recognizes that this theory is tenuous and cannot be proved.

The comparison is an interpretive link, not confirmation that the two falls had the same cause. Chicago supplies the earlier family tragedy against which the narrator reads the later incident, intensifying his suspicions about Robert without resolving them.

Robert’s Reported Suicide Attempt

Abigail also tells the narrator that Robert tried to kill himself in his bedroom in Chicago less than a year before a later evening when the narrator drives him to a party. The disclosure complicates the narrator’s view of Robert: the boy beside him appears difficult to reconcile with someone who had recently attempted suicide.

The account places Chicago in Robert’s recent history as well as his family past. It is presented through what Abigail has told the narrator, rather than through a scene of the attempt itself, and the book provides no further details about its circumstances or aftermath.

A Distant City in the Narrative

Chicago remains a place recalled at a distance, brought into the Los Angeles narrative through the deaths and crises associated with Robert. Its two appearances in this history—a mother’s fatal fall and Robert’s reported attempt to take his own life—give the city a particular weight without making it the setting of an extended episode.

The narrator’s use of the earlier fall also shows how memory shapes his account: a family event disclosed by Abigail becomes a possible pattern through which he interprets Terry’s accident. The connection fuels suspicion, but the narrative preserves the distinction between an unsettling resemblance and an established fact.