Stuart Dybek, I Sailed With Magellan

Among the best moments in Stuart Dybek’s new novel-in-stories are a couple of marvelously unlikely parades through the streets of the Little Village neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.

In one Sid Sovereign, a guy who’s done time in Florida for passing bad checks, a music teacher who hates kids, leads his motley marching band around the block in rehearsal for an upcoming competition. Sid is wearing a child-sized cape, has a cigarette stuck in his mouth, and, half in the bag, he’s not quite able to march a straight line. The band is playing Sid’s own arrangement of “Rock Around the Clock,” complete with parts for glockenspiel and tuba. They all get a little carried away and at the Douglas Park El Station, they leave their own neighborhood and head into unfamiliar, dangerous territory.

Later in the book, Dybek describes the annual procession on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe: a plaster likeness of the Virgin followed by local aldermen and precinct captains carrying roses. This time they are joined by a special guest: the movie star cowboy. Tito Guizar, the Mexican Roy Rogers, on a magnificent white horse.

As the procession approaches St. Roman Church, more and more people join: a legless Korean war veteran pulled on his wheeled board by a brain-damaged motorcycle maniac known locally as “Spaz”; more disabled vets with their hooks and crutches; a wheelchair; the palsied and the gimpy, until finally, “it looks more like a pilgrimage to Lourdes than a parade.”

Dybek’s book itself is a kind of marvelous parade, rooted unforgettably in the streets of a particular neighborhood, its distinctive geography and rituals and characters, full of scruffy energy and dangerous surprises, funny and heartbreaking. 

The central character and narrator of most of the stories is Perry Katzek. We meet his brother, Mick; his parents, known as Moms and Sir; his uncle, Lefty; a memorable collection of pals and girlfriends and local characters like Zip the bartender, who lost an arm in the war and keeps the empty sleeve of his shirt clamped with a plastic clothes pin: “red, blue, yellow, green—he changed the colors the way some guys changed their ties.”

During the course of the book, Perry catches his first glimpses of the sometimes disturbing inner workings of adult relationships (Jano and Kaska next door, his parents downstairs); later he discovers literature and the call of art. “I am living my life like a haiku,” he tells a girlfriend by way of explanation for his monkish apartment, his typing on the floor. “Syllable by syllable.” He falls in love; he loses his father. He grows up.

These stories have been published separately over the past decade—in Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker. Read together, they take on the weight and resonance, the cumulative power of the best novels. We see Mick, for instance, both as a kid, half-believing his brother has a trap door that leads to a clubhouse stocked with candy and soda, and later, as a man, an actor, stopping home on a cross-country bus ride, trying to make himself understood to the gangbangers now lounging on the front steps of the old house. 

Little by little, over time, just like Perry, a reader gets to know Uncle Lefty. As a boy, Perry travelled with him from saloon to saloon, from Deuces Wild to the Pulaski Club, singing for change—Caruso Junior, they called him. 

We learn that Lefty was a Golden Gloves boxer, a self-taught sax player who sometimes annoyed neighbors with drunken rooftop solos, a Korean war vet, a man who loved pawnshops and race tracks, an in-and-out resident of mental hospitals. 

So near the end of the book, at Lefty’s funeral—a church full of incense, bad organ music, a lot of hollow, one-size-fits-all sentiment—we, like Perry, feel the visceral need to flee and find some more appropriate commemoration of the man.

Ultimately, the book is not just about Chicago and the Katzeks. It’s about all of us; about the way that where we’re from is who we are. It’s a tribute to our most human capacity to remember and to make stories.

“Memory is the channel by which the past conducts its powerful energy,” Dybek writes. “It’s how the past continues to love.”

—The Buffalo News