THE PLAN OF CHICAGO

Voices from all over the map of the city’s neighborhoods combine for a chorus that is singularly Chicago’s.

This debut story collection lifts its title from a 1909 manifesto co-authored by urban designer Daniel H. Burnham, which also provides the epigram invoking the city’s motto: “Urbs in Horto—a city set in a garden.” More than a century later, that garden is no Eden. There are way more cracks than flowers: cracks in the foundation; psychological cracks in the narrators and characters, whose vernacular provides the style of these stories. Cracks in their relationships, their marriages, their families. Yet there is also great resilience, through the survival skills necessary in a city that plays rough. In “Enumerator,” the opening and longest story, Margaret Cieslak-Jablonski, a Polish immigrant, loses her American husband and gains a job as a census taker. She lives on a block so undistinguished that it isn’t considered part of any of the northwest neighborhoods around it: “No one wanted to claim that swath of poor transients, weedy lots, and industrial waste.” Her temp job has her tracking and counting those who are ever farther off the grid. And she’s very good at it, learning the stories of those who had otherwise evaded scrutiny and gaining entry where she isn’t legally permitted. “Out of Egypt” follows, with a teenage boy named Izzy Bramaciu apparently unconscious in the hospital, from a car accident arranged by his scamming father for insurance fraud. Then “Chez Whatever,” where very white Lincoln Park finds a Black girl increasingly frustrated and resentful in a Valentine’s Day blizzard, following a fight with her more privileged white girlfriend. “Dibs” explores the Chicago tradition of saving winter parking places amid the gentrification of a frequently changing Humboldt Park. The progression of the stories connects neighborhoods, with protagonists in one story becoming bit players in another.

With deep empathy and granular detail, these stories take the measure of a city on the make.