Robert Hellenga: “A crafty, mesmerizing writing style, a melange of the mundane and the magical.”

From an obit by Thomas Frisbie in the Chicago Sun-Times headlined “Award-winning Illinois author Robert Hellenga dies at 78”:

Highly regarded novelist, essayist and professor and short story writer Robert Hellenga knew when it was time to gamble as an author. In 2015, he explained how he did that in his novel “The Confessions of Frances Godwin.”

“The biggest risk I took in writing [the book] was introducing God as an active character and allowing him to bully Frances in Latin,” said Mr. Hellenga. . . .

Mr. Hellenga’s first novel, “The Sixteen Pleasures,” was rejected 39 times before Soho Press published it in 1994. The book earned wide praise. . . .

His other novels were “Snakewoman of Little Egypt,” which Kirkus Reviews and the Washington Post rated among the best fiction books of 2010; “Blues Lessons,” a finalist for a Midland Authors book award in 2002; “Philosophy Made Simple” (2006); “Fall of a Sparrow” (2007), which the Los Angeles Times listed among the best fiction of 1998; “The Italian Lover” (2007), and “Love, Death, & Rare Books” (2020).

He also wrote a 2016 novella combined with a collection of short stories titled “The Truth About Death and Other Stories.”. . .

Booklist wrote that “[A]ll of Hellenga’s novels revel in the details of their protagonists’ occupations.” A Chicago Sun-Times book review said Mr. Hellenga had “a crafty, mesmerizing style, a melange of the mundane and the magical.”. . .

Mr. Hellenga, the George Appleton Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Knox College, was born in Milwaukee. . . .He graduated with honors from the University of Michigan, where he married Virginia Hellenga, and did graduate work at the Queen’s University of Belfast, the University of North Carolina and Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D.

In 1982 and 1983 he, his wife and three daughters spent 13 months in Florence, Italy, where he directed the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Florence programs. Italy became a recurring setting in his books.