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For insight into what it was like to live in Chicago around 1925, read Carl Sandburg. But if you want to know about Chicago in our times — a feel for the real life of the neighborhoods — read these short stories by Stuart Dybek.

source: Amazon.com

Perhaps that's not the only way to introduce Dybek's writing, however. His stories are far more than mere travelogues, calculatedly set in a great city as if he hoped to ride those Big Shoulders to a best seller. There is plenty of beautiful description, deft characterization, and ringing dialogue of the sort any literature could boast of, no matter its locale. You might read these fourteen stories without paying much attention to what city they're set in.

But that would be hard for me, at least. It's not just Dybek's title for the collection, which makes Chicago the headliner, or that his book was the sixth "One Book, One Chicago" selection of the Chicago Public Library, in the spring of 2004, chosen for citywide readings and discussions. It's not just that the first story is named after a street I know well, and that the last story ends with a scene on an El train line I've ridden hundreds of times. It's Dybek's whole presentation of life in Chicago, the experience of Chicago, that rings so true.

My point can partly be summed up by observing that the Loop — the metropolis's stunning skyscraper district, of which Chicagoans are understandably proud — enters into this collection only tangentially at one or two points. The downtown lakefront, the museums, the skyscrapers, the Magnificent Mile are so...magnificent, that it's easy for visitors to equate them with the city itself. But in my experience, most Chicagoans' life is really a neighborhood life often lived with fewer trips to the Loop than suburbanites', a life with signficant landmarks and central institutions no less meaningful (though admittedly less spectactular) than the Loop's. Dybek tells stories from this Chicago.

Three of the load-bearing pillars of this collection are the long short stories, "Blight," "Nighthawks," and "Hot Ice." Not incidentally, I believe, each features detailed observations about specific locations in the city, places as small as a street corner, an El platform, or a derelict park. Dybek's gifts of description and his skillful plotting help demonstrate how the "One Chicago" is so great because it's made up of so many smaller, meaningful places nested within it.

There's plenty of other subject matter than Chicago that makes an impact here, too. (I've been listening to Chopin waltzes afresh after reading "Chopin in Winter.") But it's Dybek's view of the city — a view out the back window, down the alley, and out onto the dark street, wet with rain — that's so compelling for me as a reader trying to look out my own window with some measure of wisdom, compassion, and hope.

Considered in this review: Stuart Dybek, The Coast of Chicago (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Picador, 2003).

first published Jan 23, 2005