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I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN

Name: I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN
Author: Stuart Dybek
ISBN: 0-374-17407-5

by Stuart Dybek ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2003

Dybek has become his generation’s Nelson Algren. That’s no small achievement.

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A crowded, episodic novel-in-stories portrays life in a multiethnic midwestern urban enclave pretty much as did Dybek’s memorable story collections (The Coast of Chicago, 1990, etc.).

The scene is Chicago’s fictional “Little Village,” and the focal character (who doesn’t appear in all 11 stories, is Perry Katzek, whom we first encounter in the opening story “Song.” Here, he’s a precocious crooner employed by his Uncle “Lefty” Antic (Korean War vet, self-taught musician, and drunk) to perform at Lefty’s favorite wateringholes, for drinks (bourbon for uncle, root beer for nephew). We also eavesdrop on Perry’s loving rivalry and mischievous collusion with his extroverted younger brother Mick (a day at a nearby beach in “Undertow,” first intimations of adolescent sexuality and premature death in “Blue Boy”). Other tales relate Perry’s efforts to earn a better-late-than-never high-school diploma, while abetting his buddy Stosh’s harebrained scheme to grow and sell “Orchids” (in Chicago, yet); live by himself, become a writer, and plumb the mysteries of womanhood (“Lunch at the Loyola Arms”); and, in a graceful concluding story-coda (“Je Reviens”), pursue a vision of beauty that’s as elusive and deceptive as are most of his other dreams. Uncle Lefty reappears, during his hallucinatory final days, in “A Minor Mood.” And Mick, grown into a professional actor and compulsive vagrant, revisits the old neighborhood where his “ever-fomenting theories that life was essentially about playing roles” were formed, in “Qué Quieres.” Good as these tales are, they’re dwarfed by the aforementioned “Blue Boy,” in which the embryonic writer in Perry responds to early emotional and intellectual challenges; and by the superb novella “Breasts,” a tightly plotted little nightmare depicting the fateful collisions of a mob hit man preoccupied with encountered and remembered images of old girlfriends, a stoical Little Village entrepreneur, and a cross-dressing retired pro wrestler working as a store security cop.

Dybek has become his generation’s Nelson Algren. That’s no small achievement.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-374-17407-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ECSTATIC CAHOOTS
by Stuart Dybek

- BOOK REVIEW
PAPER LANTERN
by Stuart Dybek

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- AWARDS
Mantel, Woodson on Women’s Prize Longlist

- SEEN & HEARD
Reese’s Book Club Reveals April Pick

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.