SOURCE: Gladsky, Thomas S. Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature, pp. 256-62. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Gladsky examines Dybek's thematic use of fading cultural identity and lost places, both physical and emotional, and the effect of this rootlessness on young Chicagoans.

American Selves—ethnic Perspectives

The Mysterious Presence of the Lost: Stuart Dybek

Stuart Dybek's fiction immediately invites comparison to Nelson Algren's stories about “outsiders and underground men,” as Howard Kaplan describes Dybek's characters (319). A winner of the Nelson Algren Award, Dybek—like Algren—is essentially a realist-naturalist with a touch of fantasy and a commitment to the proletariat—“an interest in class,” as Dybek phrases it (TLS, 25 November 1989). More to the point, Dybek also writes about Chicago's Poles, although his characters, urban guerrillas of a sort, are worlds apart from the semiliterate, brutish, and hapless victims in Never...