The El by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Published by Vintage on August 12, 2025

The El takes place in Chicago during the summer of 1979, when VCRs were still a novelty. From the perspectives of young males who are trying to find their place in the world, the story illustrates the role that gangs, like any other social group, play in the evolution of cities and their inhabitants.

According to Wikipedia, the Simon City Royals were founded in Chicago during the 1950s as a greaser gang. In The El, the Royals are a diverse group, its members bound primarily by their gang identity. One or two are doing well in school or getting lucky with girls, but they devote most of their time together to petty crime and nonlethal violence.

Teddy, a Native American known to his friends as Midget, is the novel’s historian and central character. Teddy credits the Royals’ mid-century founder with understanding that the “whole white alliance thing was bunk, that the future was mixed, that their future, our future depended on cross-racial bonds, just like America if it wants to have a future.”

Chapters are narrated by different characters. Teddy’s chapters are the longest, but other characters — Miguel, Mikey, Mikey2, Walter, Henry, Lil Demon, and more — also contribute their perspectives. An occasional outsider — a cop or a transit worker — narrates a scene from his own perspective, but most of the story is told by gang members.

The chapters are not narrated in markedly different voices, but it isn’t surprising that members of the same age and social group would share the same speech patterns and vocabulary. It becomes clear, however, that Teddy is the smart one in the gang, the one who appreciates books and other art forms, who understands government and culture in the abstract. The others are more impulsive, although they might just be better at living in the moment.

The story unfolds over the course of a very long day. The novel’s first half leads to a meeting with members of other gangs (Latin Eagles, Imperial Gangsters) with a view to creating a unified Nation. Mikey is among the skeptics because he believes the “only Folks that got your back is your folks.”

Attending the meeting requires travel through territory controlled by hostile gangs — every station is like an outpost in a foreign war — while the destination has not been well explored by the homeboys. They rehearse stories to tell the police if they are questioned outside of their neighborhood and take note of exit routes if they need to flee from a violent confrontation.

The meeting goes well enough, but it’s followed by a clash at a subway station that leaves a character frying on the third rail, although not for sufficient time to delay the subway. “You’d think a dead kid on the third rail would hold things up, but I guess since it wasn’t a whiteboy they just moved on,” Teddy notes.

A spirit taking the form of a Coyote helps Teddy in the brawl after appearing at other consequential moments in his life. Coyote offers life rules on occasion, but — like the novel’s author — he encourages people “to think deeper about it all. At the end you knew way more than when you started.”

Teddy muses that Coyote might not be real, but understands that Coyote is part of Native American ancestral history and deserves to be part of the story. After all, “stories are truths we tell to keep ourselves sane, but they’re also lies we tell to keep others from losing it, too.” Teddy learned from his grandfather that he has a duty to tell his people’s stories because the stories keep them alive.

The story gains speed as the subway begins to move. The novel gives the impression of multiple lives flashing by in a city where neighborhoods are identified by strict boundaries — lives glimpsed and gone, something new occurring and forgotten in every instant. Clashes in the second half, with other gang members and with the police, combine the excitement of a thriller with the gritty realism of true crime writing.

Teddy’s story is to some extent autobiographical. The story rings with the powerful truths conveyed by lived experience. It presents its theme of racial division from the narrow perspective of a teen who only knows his neighborhood. It is easy to understand Teddy’s hope for a more harmonious future — his hope of gangs united against a common enemy, people who hold wealth and power — given his status as the only Native in his relatively diverse social group.

Toward the end, Teddy skips ahead and visits his future a few years down the road. Gang violence is on another level. “Humbugs and jumping each other in alleys mostly disappeared, drive-bys were the standard, and dealing had moved up to coke with lots of folks starting to hit the pipe.” Occupants of busses and subway cars are now “packed with Big Ten state school assholes who were gentrifying the neighborhoods farther north. They looked sweaty as fuck in their cheapish suits and power blouses with running shoes, uncomfortable in their own pale skins, lives of lame office hookups and hopes for big suburban houses already carved deep in their sad, doughy faces.” Harsh, but an understandable assessment from a person in Teddy’s position.

Future Teddy has served a hitch in the Navy to avoid serving time in prison. He took an entry level job at the Board of Trade, but he wanted more from his life than financial success. His laudable goal was not just to make art, but to live for it. “If we don’t have art, what do we have? What’s the point? To make money for some asshole?” This novel, he reveals, is a contribution to art, and indeed it is. While The El has a limited reach, its snapshot of young men in a particular social mileau at a particular time in American history is an insightful addition to the genre of gang fiction.

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