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I Sailed with Magellan
Stuart Dybek
Farrar Straus & Giroux
307 pages
ISBN number: 0374174075
Reviewer: Nathan Leslie
Dybek the stylist is an odd bird, and difficult to pigeonhole at that. A Dybek story is on the one hand working-class, regional, and gritty, and on the other, improvisational, digressive, and tinged with enchantment. Much has been made of Dybek the Chicagoan, crafting tales in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson, early Hemingway, and Saul Bellow. Some have also noted the influence of Kafka, Singer, and Babel on his work. Yet, Dybek is that rarity among contemporary American prose writers these days-- a writer who rolls the dice and wins, a writer who isn’t afraid to allow his fixations to dominate, even when the work itself, at times, risks redundancy.
On the surface I Sailed with Magellan, Dybek’s new collection of interlaced stories--revolving around the childhood of Perry Katzek--seems to be cut from the same cloth as his previous collections (The Coast of Chicago and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods). Like its predecessors, I Sailed with Magellan is set amongst the working-class Poles, Latinos, and Czechs of the Southwest side of The Windy City; as in his earlier books, I Sailed with Magellan concentrates on the sometimes nostalgic (but never schmaltzy) experience of childhood (including “Live from Dreamsville," which originally appeared in The Pedestal Magazine as “I Sailed with Magellan"). In addition, all three books exhibit Dybek’s passion for transmuting the stuff of family legend into fiction-- Dybek says his allegiance is to the mind's eye, but seemingly much of the book is also anchored in personal experience.
In part because Dybek eclectically refines and develops his earlier techniques, I Sailed with Magellan soars to new altitudes. For instance, Dybek has often composed his poetry and prose to music-- especially to jazz and Eastern European classical scores. In The Coast of Chicago’s “Chopin in Winter," Dybek’s prose nearly aped the wending cadence of Chopin’s waltzes themselves. In I Sailed with Magellan, Dybek makes the next logical step, employing poetic repetition and sprawling passages of trance-inducing imagism almost beyond the confines of the written page. In I Sailed with Magellan the prose itself literally seems to sing. Shades of Molly Bloom, here is the culminating passage of Dybek’s sensual story “We Didn’t":
"But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did."
Speaking of pigeonholing, little mention is usually made of the joie de vivre inherent in Dybek’s prose. Dybek seems to take the Flannery O’Connor dictum quite seriously-- that the real “meaning" of a story is not the theme, but rather the lived experience it offers to the reader. For instance, in I Sailed with Magellan Dybek’s heavy use of both improbability and humor carries the day. In some of Dybek’s earlier fiction, such as his astonishing story “A Confluence of Doors"--where the unnamed narrator comes across an atoll of doors bobbing in the middle of the ocean--the reader can feast on the truly marvelous, and miraculous. Here Dybek is often content to detail a more tethered but still at-times fantastic (or at least implausible) version of reality: a hit man who has a strange series of encounters with a litany of ghost-like ex-girlfriends; a boy with bluish skin whose memory sparks a series of events among those who keep it alive; and an impromptu parade through the Southside ghettos. Dybek’s prose is always animated.
What’s more, in I Sailed with Magellan Dybek often treats his readers to stories about oddball characters who are often overlooked by the society around them. For instance, two stories feature young Perry Katzek’s fiercely independent uncle Lefty, who in “Song," among other things teaches Perry to be an amateur bar musician; the other, “A Minor Mood," one of the most delicate stories in the collection, explores the tender relationship between Lefty and his grandmother. Then there is the tangential story “Breasts," a Jerzy Kosinski-influenced piece involving the abovementioned local thug. Though in some ways these stories don’t bear directly upon the primary strain of the book--Perry’s story--they certainly provide a colorful backdrop.
Still, I Sailed with Magellan is a book of interconnected stories. Does Dybek pull off the linkage? For the most part, yes. Since the majority of the stories revolve around Perry’s growing awareness--and to a lesser extent Perry’s brother Mick--I Sailed with Magellan offers a cumulative photo-album effect. Dybek offers the reader glimpses into Perry’s development without calling obvious attention to the growth. Hardly spelling the end of the novel, Dybek’s scatter-shot technique simply allows the reader to reference what he/she already knows of the conventions of the Bildungsroman, and piece together the gaps between each story. This is where Dybek’s jazzy improvisation enters into the scene: I Sailed with Magellan hands the reader a fictional collage, a riff on the form of a novel.
As a novel-in-stories, I Sailed with Magellan is especially compelling in that, since the reader acts as the “connector" of information, the individual stories unite in unexpected ways. For instance, the sequence of stories at the heart of the book--“Blue Boy," “Orchids," “Lunch at the Loyola Arms," and “We Didn’t"--show Perry’s growing and bittersweet romantic/sexual consciousness. Yet, this is a reductive statement, since, like the Beats before him, Dybek’s prose sprawls most readily into dreamy sensualism, wending late-night fraternizing, poetry, and off-kilter humor. Yes, “Orchids" focuses on Perry’s doomed relationship with Laurel (it all falls apart when Perry takes her to “Shit River" after prom), but it also revolves around Perry’s friend Stosh’s attempt to make it big selling what he believes are orchids growing in an obscure part of Chicago (they turn out to be irises, much to Stosh’s dismay).
As a result of Dybek’s memory excursions, the patience of some readers might be tested from time to time: when these stories are not unwinding into reminiscence, they instruct, almost essay-like at times. At times such digressions can become tiresome, but rarely. In “Blue Boy" Dybek writes:
"There was no shortage of parades in Little Village. Most ethnic groups had one, and that must have figured in Sharky’s thinking. St. Patrick’s brought out the politicians, and St. Joseph’s was also know locally as St. Polack Day since people wore red, the background color for the white eagle on the Polish flag. I never understood what was particularly Polish about St. Joseph, but I bought a pair of fluorescent red socks especially for the occasion."
In an interview with James Plath, Dybek recounts how, in his view of writing, digressions ultimately expand or extend the reach and depth of narrative flow so the story’s dimensions cast a wider net. In this way, each story within I Sailed with Magellan is actually more than the sum of its parts-- each story is an experience. For my money this is Stuart Dybek’s most accomplished work of fiction to date, the one that lingers most when it counts-- months later when the volume rests on the bookshelf.
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