[In the following review, Kakutani compares Dybek's The Coast of Chicago with Sherwood Anderson's Winsburg, Ohio, stating that while it lacks a central hero and "authorial perspective to put the characters' dilemmas in context with the larger world," the collection does possess an "emotional forcefulness."]

The narrator of one of Stuart Dybek's elegiac new stories goes to the Art Institute of Chicago and stands before Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks," that famous painting of a corner diner, done in somber tones of black and blue and brown. He stands there, closes his eyes, and thinks to himself: "It was night in Hopper's painting: the diner illuminated the dark city corner with a stark light it didn't seem capable of throwing on its own. Three customers sat at the counter as if waiting, not for something to begin, but rather to end, and I knew how effortless it would be to open my eyes and find myself waiting there, too."

Hopper's painting captures perfectly the mood of Mr. Dybek's stories—the solitary lives of his characters, the lyrical desolation of their city neighborhood, the feeling of longing and regret that encircles their hopes and dreams. As in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, most of the stories take place at night or twilight, that hour when the cheerful routines of day give way to more subterranean emotions, when the mundane facts of life take on a hallucinatory magic. The reader is introduced to a group of insomniacs who haunt the local diner, a pair of speed freaks who ride the deserted subways after midnight, a gang of teen-age boys who tour the darkened city of Chicago in a red convertible.

Like the characters in Winesburg, these people tend to be outsiders—loners, eccentrics, misfits, visionaries, who are tied to one another only by a shared sense of yearning and loss. An alcoholic butcher named Antek, who's so drunk that he has chopped off bits of his own fingers, gets himself locked in a freezer and nearly dies. A young girl, known as the local saint, drowns in the nearby park's lagoon; her father freezes her body in a chunk of ice. A fanatical altar boy named Pancho, who believes in saints and miracles and ghosts, goes crazy and winds up in jail; rumors later circulate that he has disappeared—he's hung himself in his jail cell, he's been packed off to the psycho ward in Kankakee, he's made a deal and gotten out.

In one of the most affecting stories in this volume, a beautiful, musically patterned tale called "Chopin in Winter," Mr. Dybek creates a lovely portrait of three lonely people who are briefly brought together by Chopin's music; their lives intersect for a moment, then shift and move away forever.

A young woman named Marcy, who plays the waltzes and nocturnes on her piano, is living at home with her mother; she's pregnant with the baby of a man she won't name, and her impassioned playing becomes a kind of lament for her own lost youth. An old man, Dzia-Dzia, who listens to her music from a downstairs apartment, is a visitor in town; he's spent his life on the road, moving from country to country, city to city, and he hears in the music some distant reminder of the life he abandoned in Poland so many years ago. His young nephew, who narrates the story, also listens to the music; he's developed a schoolboy crush on Marcy, and he hears strange melodies in the music she plays, faint intimations of the grown-up mysteries that lie waiting in the world beyond.

By the end of the story, Marcy has left home to have her baby alone; Dzia-Dzia has also disappeared—he's set off for yet another unknown destination; and the young narrator stands poised on the brink of adolescence, ready for new adventures of his own. "It took time for the music to fade," he recalls, "I kept catching wisps of it in the air shaft, behind walls and ceilings, under bathwater." When it finally does disappear, it leaves behind a silence. "Not an ordinary silence of absence and emptiness, but a pure silence beyond daydream and memory, as intense as the music it replaced, which, like music, had the power to change whoever listened."

There is a lyricism to Mr. Dybek's writing, an eagerness to read metaphors and hidden meanings in the stuff of ordinary life. Although some of the slighter sketches in this volume take this impulse to an extreme—resulting in abstract and willfully poetic passages that read like self-conscious creative-writing class exercises—the more expansive stories ground this lyricism and the author's surrealistic flights of fancy in gritty, finely observed descriptions of character and place. Mr. Dybek lets us hear the hip, knowing dialogue of teen-agers who have grown up on Chicago's South Side; and he shows us the rhythms of life here, in the lower-middle-class neighborhoods populated by immigrants from Mexico and Poland.

It's a grimy, dilapidated neighborhood that has just been designated as an Official Blight Area by the city government. Old buildings are being torn down for an urban renewal program; old streets are being torn up for an expressway. "Blight was just something that happened, like acne or old age," says one character. "Maybe declaring it official mattered in that mystical world of property values, but it wasn't a radical step, like condemning buildings or labeling a place a slum. Slums were on the other side of the viaduct."

"Blight, in fact, could be considered a kind of official recognition, a grudging admission that among blocks of factories, railroad tracks, truck docks, industrial dumps, scrapyards, expressways, and the drainage canal, people had managed to wedge in their everyday lives."

In the end, The Coast of Chicago doesn't have the cumulative, mythic power of Winesburg, Ohio: there is no central hero like Anderson's George Willard to tie the stories together, no authorial perspective to put the characters' dilemmas in context with the larger world. Individual stories like "Blight," "Hot Ice" and "Chopin in Winter," however, possess an emotional forcefulness: they introduce us to characters who want to take up permanent residence in our minds, and in doing so, they persuasively conjure up a fictional world that is both ordinary and amazing.