Childhood and Other Neighborhoods
Kaplan, Howard
In brief CHILDHOOD and OTHER NEIGHBORHOODS, by Stuart Dybek, Viking, $9.95, 201 pp. You can tell the romantic writer by his choice of characters: he's a sucker for outsiders and underground...
...HOWARD KAPLAN 23 May 1980: 319...
...A tough bunch to get to know well in real life, even for writers...
...The best story here (never mind the book's title) is not about childhood...
...So when Dybek filters their stories through a child's point of view, as he tends to do, the strategy smacks of convenience more than anything else: a child doesn't have to pretend to understand what he sees...
...The story puts us in a funny position, which is that we end up feeling more for one of The System's own than for all the really sad cases who pass through these pages...
...In these eleven Chicago stories Stuart Dybek writes about pushcart peddlers ("The Palatski Man"), an amateur ornithologist holed up in a condemned building ("Blood Soup"), sots, pederasts, paranoid DPs...
...More memoir than fiction, "Charity" records the author's psychological hard times as a social worker on Chicago's South Side...
...It's like an excuse to flesh out scanty material...
...The main issue is this: how does a white do-gooder manage day after day to run a gauntlet of black panhandlers and still keep the faith...
...When Dybek tells a story "straight," as in the one about a crone who disposes of the neighborhood's excess kittens by drowning them in her washer, he doesn't have much to say: "The Cat Woman" is the shortest piece in the book...
...You can tell the romantic writer by his choice of characters: he's a sucker for outsiders and underground men...
...Over and over we wind up with the little tyke's sense of wonder and no more...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 10
