newcritics

A few weeks ago I found a first edition hard-cover of Stuart Dybek’s I Sailed With Magellan in a bin of unwanted books selling for a dollar apiece. A week later, Dybek won the Macarthur Foundation “Genius” award, worth $500,000, and on its heels, the 2007 Rea Award for the Short Story, worth $30,000.

Dybek’s artistic success and commercial obscurity say a lot about the American short story today. Dybek is unquestionably one of America’s best writers, but his stories are quiet, thoughtful, and parochial—three strikes against best-sellerdom.

I wonder if one has to be from Chicago to love Dybek’s stories. His three collections—Childhood and Other Neighborhoods; The Coast of Chicago; and I Sailed With Magellan—are neighborhood tales from the “Slaughterhouse to the Nation” aka the “City of Broad Shoulders,” mostly on the Southwest Side, where German, Polish, Slavic, Mexican, and Black families coexisted uneasily in the 1950s and ‘60s.

But is there anyone who, as a child, didn’t listen open-mouthed to older kids’ urban legends? Consider the opening to “Hot Ice” from The Coast of Chicago:

The saint, a virgin, was uncorrupted. She had been born frozen in a block of ice many years ago.

Her father found her half-naked body floating facedown among water lilies, her blond hair fanning at the marshy edge of the overgrown duck pond people still referred to as the Douglas Park Lagoon.

That’s how Eddie Kapusta had heard it.

And who hasn’t undergone the agonizing horniness of early adolescence? “We Didn’t”, from I Sailed With Magellan, is a story about two teenagers’ summer-long inability to consummate:

We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in darkness. We didn’t in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mound of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn’t in your room or the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you’d slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father’s rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent’s meat market. We didn’t in your mother’s Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs.

Dybek’s stories are universal in their depiction of the sweetness and savagery of youth. He moves easily into the adult world as well, where hard reality has trampled young dreams. His recurrent theme is the passage of time, as seen in the metamorphosing neighborhoods of childhood—both real and imagined.

Dybek’s stories have been compared to James Joyce’s Dubliners. For me, they belong on the same shelf. But unlike the homogeneous world of Joyce’s Dublin, Dybek’s world is the American crazy quilt, the beautiful mosaic, or the mulligan stew that we live in. Award-winner or not, he is a great American writer.