Like Steven Millhauser, Deborah Eisenberg and Edward P Jones, Stuart Dybek is one of a relatively small group of American writers with considerable domestic reputations who, for reasons I don’t understand, are largely unread in the UK. This is particularly baffling in Dybek’s case given that recent literary trends, especially the permeable boundary between fiction and autobiography and an essayistic approach to storytelling, are areas he has been exploring with great style and skill for decades.
Dybek has described one of art’s primary functions as being “to defy time … to preserve the past not by storing it in a museum but by making it come alive in the present”. His fiction is obsessed with recollection, and the descriptions that persistently recur in it – of the Polish and Latino neighbourhoods of Chicago, the Illinois lake country, tenement apartments and rattling L trains – do so with memory’s uncannily vivid focus, mapping a relatively confined but intensely described territory.
Dybek makes extravagant, Proustian use of the associative nature of memory. In Pet Milk (1986), one of his best known stories, the swirl of evaporated milk in a cup of coffee transports the narrator back to his grandparents’ kitchen with storm clouds outside the window, those clouds blooming in turn in the depths of a glass of crème de cacao at a Czech restaurant where, just out of university, he would meet his girlfriend after work. These eddying memories settle, and the story ends with a specific one: a hot May evening on which the narrator and his girlfriend had sex in the conductor’s compartment of an express L train. He remembers seeing a teenager, on one of the platforms the train sped past, catching a glimpse of them and grinning. “It was as if I were standing on that platform,” he thinks, “with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I’d have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.” The implication, of course, is that the narrator is now more the spectator on the platform than the man inside the train having sex: outside time, separated from his former self by the unbridgeable gap inherent to all acts of memory.
That express train, surging into the city’s northern neighbourhoods, can be seen as an embodiment of memory: it travels out from the centre, which we might think of as the present, into outlying districts: the past. This physical expression of the passage from present to past is also enacted in one of Dybek’s earliest stories, The Palatski Man (1971).
Set in the 1950s, the story describes a brother and sister following a street vendor out of their Polish neighbourhood on Chicago’s Lower West Side – where Dybek grew up, and the setting for most of his fiction. For the children the man who sells palatski (confections made from wafers and honey), like all the other pedlars who pass through the neighbourhood – knife sharpeners, umbrella menders, scrap-metal collectors – is a remnant of old Europe, a place otherwise so alien it might as well exist only in storybooks. The children follow the Palatski Man away from their local streets and over the river, across “a wheat field in the centre of the city” – a brilliantly strange detail that suggests reality is being left behind. Walking through the field the Palatski Man is “half man and half willowy grain … pushing his cart through the field past a scarecrow with straw arms outstretched and huge black crows perched on them”.
The man lives in a pedlars’ camp wedged between “huge heaps of junk, rubbled lots tangled with smashed, rusting cars and bathtubs”. In the distance, seen through chimney smoke, the downtown skyscrapers resemble “a horizon of jagged mountains in the mist”. The children are caught spying on a ritual that might be a Catholic observance – it’s a Sunday – or something more menacing and perhaps occult: it’s hard to say if the story is trafficking in realism filtered through a child’s understanding of the world, or in out-and-out fantasy. (It first appeared in a science fiction and fantasy magazine, alongside work by Roger Zelazny and Gene Wolfe.) In an eerie coda, the Palatski Man stands beneath the girl’s bedroom window at night while she feels “her teeth growing and hair pushing through her skin in the tender parts of her body that had been bare and her breasts swelling like apples from her flat chest and her blood burning”. A story that began in the naturalistically described working-class Chicago streets of Nelson Algren has drawn to a close with the matter-of-fact unnaturalness of a fairytale.
While Dybek is always alive to the strange and sometimes surreal quality of daily life, for the most part his Chicago is more recognisable than the one he describes in The Palatski Man: ethnically defined neighbourhoods, corner bars playing Cubs games on TV and polkas on the jukebox, wastelands, gangs, and church after church after church. “Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub”, Bloom thinks as he fetches his breakfast kidney in Ulysses; churches would pose a similar challenge in Dybek’s Chicago. In Hot Ice (1985), two teenagers make a tour of them: “Without agreeing to it they walked from St Roman’s to St Michael’s, a little wooden Franciscan church in an Italian neighbourhood; and from there to St Casimir’s, a towering, mournful church with twin copper-green towers. Then as if following an invisible trail, they walked north up Twenty-second toward St Anne’s, St Puis’s, St Adalbert’s”.
Hot Ice comes from Dybek’s second collection, The Coast of Chicago (1990), which has frequently been compared to Dubliners (alongside Joyce, Dybek has cited Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty as influences: all writers for whom place is of central importance). You could say the same of his stories from any period, partly because of the vividness with which the city is evoked, and the way the characters and their predicaments are so tightly bound within its streets. But there are more direct allusions, too. In Hot Ice the teenagers’ circuitous journey is reminiscent of Corley and Lenehan’s in Two Gallants, while Je Reviens (1996) is a kind of rewrite of Araby that replaces Joyce’s shabby Dublin bazaar with a famous (now defunct) Chicago department store, Marshall Field’s. Its closing passage also nods to The Dead, with snow falling on “the empty lawns of St Adalbert, erasing a new grave”.
This image, which makes burial simultaneously an act of remembrance and negation, underlines the sense that the preservation of the past is an urgent matter in Dybek’s fiction, one characterised more by anxiety than nostalgia. “It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives”, one of his characters remarks, and if we aren’t careful our pasts can be lost altogether. Dybek explores this idea with great intricacy and playfulness in Paper Lantern (1995), which drops the reader through multiple trapdoors of memory, beginning with a group of scientists of uncertain credentials building a time machine in a “little makeshift lab”. The work is not going well:
Try as we might, our measurements were repeatedly off. In one direction, we’d reached the border at which clairvoyants stand gazing into the future, and in the other we’d gone backward to the zone where the present turns ghostly with memory and yet resists quite becoming the past. We’d been advancing and retreating by smaller and smaller degrees until it had come to seem as if we were measuring the immeasurable.
Every scene in the story insists on the ubiquity of the past in the present. The scientists down tools and go to their favourite restaurant, which everyone in the neighbourhood still calls the Chinese laundry because that’s what it used to be. The menu is vast, because once a dish is listed “it is never deleted, and now the menu is pages and pages long, so long that we’ll never read through it all, never live long enough, perhaps, to sample all the food in just this one tucked-away neighbourhood Chinese restaurant” – one of the Borgesian touches that occasionally find their way into Dybek’s fiction. In fact, what they order is rarely what arrives – “No matter how carefully we ponder our choices we’ll be served instead whatever the cook has made today.” This strikes me as a gloss on Proust’s notion of involuntary memory, an idea Dybek explores more directly when the scientists find their laboratory in flames thanks to a forgotten Bunsen burner. The sight transports the narrator back to the fires he used to set as a child, then to watching a factory burn with a married woman he was sleeping with. He took pictures of her in front of the flames, and later, as they drove away, she told him something about the fire had reminded her of the first time they had sex. The narrator remembers taking naked photographs of her, and that years after their relationship ended she called to ask what he did with them. He lied and said he burned them, but in fact the pictures, another physical embodiment of memory, became “part of a bundle of personal papers in a manila envelope that I moved with me from place to place”. Back in the story’s present they really are burning now, in the laboratory along with the time machine. “Fires get me horny,” a teenager watching the conflagration says to his girlfriend, Dybek unable to resist adding another turn to a story that’s already mazy with them.
The intricate way Paper Lantern hooks one association to the next configures past and present as a spiral, whereby temporally distant memories can stack on top of each other and be experienced almost simultaneously: those trapdoors I mentioned earlier, the narrator bungee jumping through them, first down into the distant past then back up towards the present. Randall Jarrell describes there being two extremes when it comes to stories: “stories in which nothing happens, and stories in which everything is a happening”. Dybek cleaves to the second type, and Paper Lantern is the acme of this style, possessed of a kind of turbocharged allusiveness.
A mirror image to Paper Lantern, If I Vanished (2007) subverts his usual method of past and present combining to unlock one another’s mysteries: gone are the fluent transitions, where one timeframe flows into the next like water tumbling along a streambed, replaced by a series of dead ends and confusing loops. Some time after Ned’s wife, Ceil, unexpectedly walks out on him, he remembers her once asking him, “What if I were to vanish?” She said she heard the question in a film she watched on a plane, a western with Kevin Costner and Annette Bening. Investigation leads Ned to Open Range. The film, he decides, will reveal to him why Ceil left.
He reads some reviews online – “A-minus for Roger Ebert, who praises its defense of the values of a vanishing lifestyle” – and it’s here that his hunt for meaning starts to sabotage him:
That mention of a ‘vanishing lifestyle’ catches Ned’s attention. He wonders if vanishing is a motif in the movie, a theme echoed in the love story between Costner and Bening, prompting her odd question: What if I were to vanish?
From the weight he accords Ebert’s word choice, it’s clear that Ned is beginning to interpret reality as if it’s a highly patterned piece of fiction. He’s become a version of the character in Nabokov’s Signs and Symbols who suffers from “referential mania”, and believes that every cloud, pebble or strip of sunlight represents “in some awful way messages which he must intercept”, or the stoner brother in Dybek’s own Qué Quieres (2003), who “believed reality was coded and that there were wise men who could read its mysterious subtext, wizards who could discern the eternal designs beneath the daily chaos”.
The resonances multiply for Ned, but rather than building towards a resolution they only bewilder. He drives through a blizzard to a local Blockbuster, listening on his car radio to Pictures at an Exhibition, which reminds him of his piano-playing days at college. He steps into the snow to the sound of the eighth movement, Catacombae, “which echoes the spectral world beneath the streets of Paris. Ghosts seem to swirl across the deserted streets of Ned’s city, as well”. When he returns to the car, film in hand, The Great Gate of Kiev is playing:
The yellow Blockbuster sign subtracts itself from the night. Beneath the blurred streetlights, ascending notes and falling flakes create the impression of a gossamer arch spanning Chicago Avenue. Ned slips the Volvo into gear and drives slowly toward the towering gate of snow that retreats before his headlights, impossible to enter, then topples disassembling before the whirling blue of an oncoming squad car. The vision is more imagined than hallucinated.
He stops for coffee at a doughnut shop where the woman behind the counter seems to know him. It feels like another of the slippages Dybek likes engineering between the everyday and the otherworldly: “In the hygienically bright lighting, the trays of frosted donuts look like replicas. He notices a surveillance camera and has a tactile sense of being filmed. It’s as if he’s stepped into a scene of infinitely repeated takes.” But the woman has only mistaken Ned for a taxi driver who usually comes in around this time, a mistake that gives Ned some perspective on his own behaviour: the cashier is falsely perceiving the world, letting reality be shaped by what she wants or expects to see. “Their conversation feels scripted … It was a mistake to stop here. Not only has the spell of what had come to seem like a quest now been broken, but a night that seemed spontaneous now seems manufactured.” Instead of an irruption of the strange, as we get in so many of Dybek’s stories, If I Vanished begins in a heightened reality and moves towards the inconsequentiality of the everyday. Somehow, this journey from strangeness towards normality is just as compelling as his typical reverse trajectory.
At home Ned watches Open Range. Annette Bening never utters the line he’s waiting for, which makes him wonder if Ceil misremembered or invented it. “It’s another thing about her that he’ll never understand,” he thinks. His hunt for an answer appears to have ended in failure, but he’s beginning to realise he didn’t understand the question in the first place – which is its own kind of enlightenment. Asked what he wrote about, Dybek once said the real answer wasn’t Chicago or childhood, but “perception. I think what I’m always looking for is some door in the story that opens on another world. A doorway like that can be a religious experience.”
