Thursday, January 22, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Windy City confidential

By John Ziebell

After a lengthy hiatus, Stuart Dybek has published a new book of fiction that was well worth the wait. I Sailed with Magellan is touted as a novel, which is a somewhat misleading description for a series of powerful and evocative stories about transformation in many different forms--the coming of age of narrator Perry Katzek, the fading away of tradition in immigrant communities, the discoveries and disillusionments of love, and the demographic shifts that eradicated what was once the working-class melting pot of Chicago's South Side.

Besides winning the PEN/Malamud Prize, a Whiting Award, several O. Henrys and a Pushcart Prize, Dybek's short fiction has been published everywhere that matters. The author is often compared to Nelson Algren, a less interesting and less lyrical writer, probably because his fiction also treats Chicago as a literary character. But Dybek's poignant studies depend less on naturalistic representation than on the power of memory, or perhaps more accurately, memento mori, the remembrances of loss and missed opportunity and inescapable change that define who we are and give our lives meaning.

Most of these pieces have been published before, and while they don't follow a single narrative arc, they do have coherence, sharing geography and characters and the kind of thematic echoes that connected the seemingly incongruent elements of novels by people like Dickens and Tolstoy. While the book opens and closes with stories about Perry's Uncle Lefty, it's not the plot that stays with us--there isn't one, in novelistic terms--but the elements that mark quality short fiction: the meticulous use of language, understated development of character, brilliant fragments of description that detail the small defeats and victories and random surprises of daily life.

Even with a vaguely chronological arrangement, the works are less than chapters but more than individual stories. It's safe to say that "Breasts" is built around a gang killing, for example, and "Orchids" deals with the darkly humorous debacles of a truly unlucky teen caught between high school and life, but the pieces have more scope than that, as well as a rebellious muscularity, as if constantly tensing and testing the boundaries that contain them. Some common motifs do build over time until scenes like Lefty's funeral or an immigrant woman's home being bulldozed in the name of progress draw significant narrative weight from the pages preceding them; the image of a Slavic girl pulling a pickle from a street vendor's jar not only illustrates the power of memory but serves as a masterpiece of everyday erotica, carrying the charged baggage of a narrator reflecting on an age when all desire competed equally for his attention.

Chicago is always present, and though it's a Chicago that no longer exists, Dybek doesn't overplay the nostalgia factor. While ignorance made the old city mean and uncertainty made it brutal, it was somehow a fairer place where people shared, if nothing else, the will to rise above mere survival. Still, in a tough, blue-collar neighborhood where the gangsters wear steel-toed safety shoes like everyone on the factory lines, anonymity is a shield of choice. There's something compelling in that ambiguity--the mysteries we maintain as individuals, usually more about the realities that we choose to conceal than fictions we create--and the power that it gives to momentary, elusive flashes of truth that resonate in Dybek's work like the bells of old South Side parish churches ringing on cold winter air.
I Sailed with Magellan

Stuart Dybek

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

308 pages