I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN
Stuart Dybek
Picador
Fiction
ISBN: 0312424116

Stuart Dybek's I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN arrives more than a decade after his previous book, a short story collection titled THE COAST OF CHICAGO. While it's neither a blockbuster nor a doorstop tome like Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited MIDDLESEX or Donna Tartt's years-in-the-making THE LITTLE FRIEND, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN is definitely worth the wait, serving as a reintroduction to a writer who captures his old Chicago neighborhood with documentary detail and raconteur flourish.

Despite its billing as a novel, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN is actually a series of short stories that have locales and characters in common. All feature a teenage narrator named Perry and all are set in the Little Village community of Chicago during the early 1960s. Dybek lovingly and often humorously evokes this time and place through telling observations.

Poor families use old bed sheets for curtains and veterans order shots for friends who didn't come back from the war. It's a dangerous, often discouraging neighborhood, and in strong, unfussy prose Dybek describes "the daily round of life where bag ladies combed alleys and the homeless, sleeping in junked cars, were found frozen to death in winter. Laid-off workmen became wife beaters in their newfound spare time; welfare mothers in the projects turned tricks to supplement the family budget; and it seemed that every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars."

Fortunately, Dybek lets his lively characters --- including a junior high writing prodigy named Camille Estrada and a slob hitman named Joe Ditto --- run wild in this setting. Rather than engineering plots and scenes for them, Dybek simply lets them tell their own stories, a rare talent that gives the book a personal, unrehearsed quality. Plus, it makes for some truly weird goings-on. As a coming-of-age story, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN eschews any predictability in favor of a dreamlike flow of events and characters, many of which are supersaturated with local color.

There is, for instance, the Chickenman, who walks around town with a chicken perching on his head and pecking corn off his tongue. And there's Little Village's unofficial child saint, Ralphie Poskozim, who was born with blue skin: "The blue was plainly visible beneath his blue-green eyes, smudges darker than shadows, as if he'd been in a fistfight or gotten into his mother's mascara. Even his lips looked cold."

All of these strange characters are filtered through Perry's perspective, and as the novel progresses, he grows up and his concerns become more adult. Fortunately, as Perry gains more freedom, the stories don't lose their charm or their sense of wonder.

Memory works in flashes, not in fluid narratives, and it allows for exaggeration of facts. In the end these chapters cohere into something larger than a short-story collection, but the book is not like a proper novel. This is certainly not a criticism: the form of I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN may be unclassifiable, but its inventiveness and spirit are undeniable.

   --- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

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