Book review: “The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories” by Barry Pearce

One of the many fascinating things about a city like Chicago is how the lives of millions of strangers are, unknowingly, intertwined.  Barry Pearce gets at this in a savvy and sophisticated way in his crackerjack new work of fiction The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories.

As the title suggests, the book’s nine stories form something of a biography of Chicago. Each is told with verve and a passion for detail; each has the mysterious ambiguity of human life and can stand alone. Indeed, one of the stories, “Chez Whatever,” was the grand prize winner of the 2019 Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune. Seven of the other eight have appeared in a variety of literary journals.

Appearing together in The Plan of Chicago, the stories gain greater weight and import because, like the lives of Chicagoans, they become subtly linked.

These linkages aren’t at first evident. In fact, Pearce engages in a bit of authorial misdirection by identifying eight of the stories with a particular Chicago neighborhood. For instance, the geographical locator for “Chez Whatever” is South Shore, and the one for “Chief O’Neill’s” is Chrysler Village, an area of the Clearing neighborhood west of Midway Airport.

Even so, most of “Chez Whatever,” particularly the most important action, takes place in Lincoln Park. The story opens as the young woman will later tell it as an almost mythic tale: “A Black girl walks through Lincoln Park in a blizzard.” It was February 14, 1990, and the young college student was trying to get to her North Shore-born lesbian lover’s apartment for Valentine’s Day. South Shore and her mother’s home is where the woman is coming from and where she ends up going back to.

“Chief O’Neill’s” is about a fictional Southwest Side bar — not to be confused with the actual Chief O’Neill’s on the North Side — where Tommy O’Sullivan, a partner in a small new painting business, likes to drink. Much of the story, though, takes place around the metropolitan area where Tommy is doing business, such as in West Town, the Loop, Homewood and Kane County. It also touches on the relocations his parents made in the midst of racial change from Roseland to Marquette Park before ending up west of Midway.

 

Moving in and around Chicago

Like the Black woman and Tommy O’Sullivan, the characters in all nine of Pearce’s stories are moving in and around Chicago and the suburbs. One is a census enumerator sent hither and yon to get questionnaires completed. Another is a boy trying to get out of his mother’s East Side apartment to live in regal luxury with his father in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Schorsch Village.  A third is a cabdriver from Somalia who provides one definition of the Plan of Chicago:

He struggled his first year here, berated and cursed as he groped for addresses. In time, he absorbed Chicago’s plan, the tidy grid with street numbers that fixed your location relative to State and Madison. He did not love this world but had grown comfortable in it, could now find blocks that even natives couldn’t….Knowledge of this city was his only skill.

Another definition of the Plan of Chicago comes from what’s commonly known as the Burnham Plan, an ambitious, visionary blueprint for improving Chicago, written by Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett and published by the Commercial Club in 1909 as Plan of Chicago.

As an epigraph for his Plan of Chicago, Pearce quotes from the Burnham-Bennett document about how the young city chose for itself the motto of Urbs in Horto, a city set in a garden:

Such indeed it then was, with the opalescent waters of the lake at its front, and on its three sides the boundless prairie carpeted with waving grass bedecked with brilliant wildflowers.

 

A boundless garden of people

Chicago is no longer that tiny hamlet amid nature’s wonders. Now, as Pearce depicts it, the city of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is a boundless garden of people, each like a brilliant wildflower, unique and startlingly alive.

Tommy O’Sullivan is the only character to play a major role in two of Pearce’s stories.  In “Clearing,” Chuck Gwozdek, a depressed office-worker, is mired in his basement apartment in a neighborhood he calls East Ravenswood (but seems to actually be Uptown, which is the locator Pearce attaches). A call from Tony, a friend from the old neighborhood, Clearing, sends Chuck on an errand of mercy to try to help out his old friend Tommy who’s been down on his luck for a long time.

Yet, as Pearce’s book unfolds, the attentive reader will begin to notice that there are a lot more linkages than are immediately apparent.

 

Linkages

For instance, Tommy’s former boss and later nemesis is named Jablonski. That echoes the name of the main character in the book’s first story “Enumerator,” Margaret Cieslak-Jablonski.  She’s a Pole who met her Chicago-born husband Jason in Gdansk where he’d been sent by his hard-ass father to be toughened up on his uncle’s farm. It’s not certain that Jason’s father is Tommy’s ex-boss, but he likely is.

Thirty-nine-year-old Cynthia is the central character in “Swing Time,” a story in which she and her longtime live-in, marriage-averse boyfriend John attend the weekly swing music dance at the Green Dolphin Street and seem just to bump into a stripper they’d met when she was at work at the Grin ‘n Bare It club.

That evening takes an odd turn and so does Cynthia’s relationship with John, and, in the final story in the book “Lost and Found,” she’s on her own and is a regular visitor to the lavish Gold Coast apartment of her aunt Candace.

 

Les Contraires

Candace, who is in her seventies and widowed, keeps busy with bridge and volunteer work and walks each week to nearby restaurants, such as Les Contraires on Halsted (French for opposites). That happens to be the place where Hector Chavez, the main character in “Dibs,” is working as a waiter when a gentrifier in his Humboldt Park neighborhood tries to tempt him to switch to another restaurant. On a night when Hector is thinking about that temptation, he finds himself serving “a couple on an early date, too in love with the possibilities to see even obvious flaws.”

The reader can’t be certain, but that couple is probably Paul and Iona from the story “Creatures of a Day” who had their first date at Les Contraires. Initially, Paul was a bit over-awed but found himself put at ease when he realized the waiter, who’d seemed French, was actually Mexican. There was one curious incident that night:

As he mentioned Northwestern, a homeless woman—young and Black in a ragged man’s coat—leaned against the window next to their table. They ignored her. She pressed her hands against the glass to stare down at their meals.

But, wait—the reader witnessed that scene just a few pages earlier in the story “Chez Whatever,” when the young Black woman is trying to walk to her lover’s apartment:

On Halsted, she leaned against the glass front of Chez whatever, the French place on the ground floor, and gulped cold air. A couple seated in the window froze but carefully avoided looking her way. She pressed her palms against the smooth surface and licked her lips, leering at their meals.

 

Not just stories

There are many short story collections that have strong, vital and compelling pieces.  All nine of the stories in Pearce’s book deal sensitively and surprisingly with interesting characters in interesting settings.

Yet, what sets The Plan of Chicago apart is that these aren’t just stories. As all the linkages above indicate, these stories are scenes that are taking place in and around the same city. They are self-contained. But, still, each story overlaps with the scenes and stories of other people.

The people in these stories live lives that, for the most part, unknowingly, are intertwined. These stories provide a unique, grass-roots biography of Chicago, as it is and as it’s lived.

Just think of riding a Brown Line train with forty other people, spending twenty minutes or whatever together, and, then, the doors open, and each person goes on their own way into their own story. But, for those twenty minutes, their lives and yours were intertwined.

That’s the Chicago that we live in. And that’s the Chicago that Barry Pearce has written about so dazzlingly.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

11.10.25

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 11.14.25.