SOURCE: "Lyrical Loss and Desolation of Misfits in Chicago," in The New York Times Book Review, April 20, 1990, p. C31.

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...