Dreamscapes Stuart Dybek’s memory plays BY JONATHAN DIXON
	I Sailed with Magellan By Stuart Dybek. Farrar Straus Giroux, 320 pages, $24.

In one of the later stories in Stuart Dybek’s third collection, "Qué Quieres" ("What Do You Want"), Perry Katzek and his brother Mick stand smoking a joint outside Tompkins Square Park in New York City. The lights glimmer behind them, some kids play basketball nearby, and the moment is soundtracked by the voodoo rhythms of three drummers chanting the name of santería deities. Mick rambles some santería folklore as they smoke and Perry says, "Maybe it was the sens, but, after a few hits, my brother’s litany began to seem interconnected in a web of chant with the congaceros at its center. Car horns and sirens and shouts in the dark were part of it, too. . . . The rumble of traffic, the scuffle of gym shoes . . . were a counterpoint to the drumbeat. It struck me then that such connections were the way Mick had come to perceive the world. He 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. . . . " Just before, Mick had turned to Perry in the midst of an argument about the veracity of certain childhood events to ask, "You don’t think dreaming is a kind of remembering? And if it is, then why wouldn’t memory be a kind of dream?"

Memories, dreams, and their interconnectedness have loomed large over the entirety of Dybek’s work (there have been two other collections published over the past 17 years). Almost all the memories are of the same place: a hardscrabble Chicago neighborhood filled with blue-collar Poles, all of them enduring private desperations and pursuing desperate ecstasies. Dybek’s writing limns the spots where memory and dream overlap to create a blurry, vaguely surreal topography that’s ugly and beautiful by turns.

Perry’s is the voice we hear for almost the entirety of the new collection, and his stories stretch from childhood to the onset of adulthood, starting at the tail end of the ’50s and moving through to the late ’60s. Told chronologically, they’re an act of ordering for Perry, a way to make sense of events that may or may not stick in his head for any good reason, and an attempt to connect the memories that lose their context as the neighborhood’s ethnicity changes, the country undergoes the convulsions of Vietnam, and Perry himself gets caught in the undertow. But success is elusive: the timelines get a little skewed, certain details are forgotten, and his subconscious energetically fills in the hazy parts with ghostly fillips.

What makes the stories so compelling, however, is precisely Perry’s failure to capture everything. The tone is woeful, and the telling digresses all over the place, falling through a sensual tapestry of colors, scents, and sounds that follow an almost free association of things and places recalled. Dybek has such a gift for choosing the right image — the flowers smeared across a rusty screen door in "Orchids," the bloody feet of a woman in "Breasts," the marching band in "Song" — that I’m willing to follow him pretty much anywhere his mind turns.

The latter two stories are among the book’s best. "Song" is an elegy both for Perry’s war-damaged uncle Lefty, a one-time musician given over to drink and insanity, and for his own musical ambitions. "Breasts" is a triptych of intertwined tales involving a one-armed bar owner, a wanna-be gangster, and a retired Mexican wrestler that maps the landscape of three men’s private hells. The characters in both stories are beset by phantoms and bad dreams that shudder through them long after they’ve awakened. "Breasts" is also a marvel of construction, building pitch-perfect tension throughout its 66 pages, with foreshadows and echoes of imagery and color paying off in the finale.

Magellan has its missteps. The title character of "Blue Boy" is a neighborhood kid afflicted with a vague congenital ailment, and he passes away at the start of the tale. Dybek explores the ripples the death sends through the neighborhood and the boy’s classmates before assessing his own reactions and feelings. And that’s where the narrative bottoms out completely in favor of interminable exposition about what the Blue Boy symbolizes. It’s the sort of amateur maneuver that any writing class, like the ones Dybek teaches at Western Michigan University, would savage in a workshop.

Moments like these wouldn’t be so grating if not for the deft, evocative writing throughout the rest of the book. The good parts make you wish Dybek published more often than he does.