When your pal’s book gets tapped as the Chicago Public Library’s “One Book One Chicago” selection — the same citywide book club that featured the work of Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison and other famous authors everybody has actually heard of — there’s that one question you just gotta ask.
So, I called up Thomas Dyja, the Northwest Side native son who wrote “The Third Coast: When Chicago Built The American Dream,” mustered up all my South Side subtlety and asked, “This is gonna bring in a boatload of cash, right?”
Dyja didn’t shy away from my sucker-punch query. He chuckled a bit, and responded with the kind of politeness and sharp wit you might expect from a kid who grew up in Chicago’s “very Catholic” Belmont Cragin neighborhood in the 1960s.
“Am I getting rich? No. Would I like to? Yes,” Dyja said, acting as his own straight man before delivering a punch line answer the prying question deserved. “So, tell people to buy a lot more copies.”
He’s kidding, of course. But he shouldn’t be. The guy wrote a book worthy of your hard-earned dough.
"The Third Coast" gets to the heart of how mid-20th century Chicago influenced some of America’s most important cultural advances, from McDonald’s cheeseburgers to nudie pictures, Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers to Second City improv comedy and more.
If you, like me, tend to be prejudiced against books about Chicago written by people now living in New York, I understand.
But please forgive Dyja’s questionable decision to emigrate from Fullerton and Central to Manhattan, of all places, because in his heart the guy’s a Chicagoan, troo-and-troo.
For that, "The Third Coast," a rollicking nonfiction narrative that weaves together a series of our city’s defining moments and the antics of its most influential characters that quietly shaped American culture, doesn’t indulge in the provincial boosterism — the kind of shameless promotion some might say is in this column — that outsiders argue has plagued books about Chicago written by locals and natives for generations.
Dyja says his move to New York City — which he blames on his first writing teachers at Gordon Tech High School, the late Bill Hennessy and the late Bob Perrin, who organized field trips to high school yearbook conventions at Columbia University — gave him the guts to look at a piece of our beloved city’s history with a loving, yet critical, eye praised by critics.
“I once was an almost rabid Chicago chauvinist. I even wrote a paper about how condescending Dick Cavett was when he interviewed Studs Terkel,” Dyja said.
But after attending Columbia University, scoring a gig in the publishing business, marrying his wife, book agent Suzanne Gluck, and writing three novels while raising a family in New York City, Dyja gained a new perspective on home.
“I wanted to use the fact that I didn’t live in Chicago but still consider myself a Chicagoan to look at Chicago from a different perspective with love and indemnification and asking tough questions to bring the perspective of an outsider and an insider, toggling back and forth as well as I could to try to get the full picture,” Dyja said.
While taking that hard, close look at his hometown, Dyja says he saw more than a series of interconnecting cultural touchstones that shaped modern America.
“If you’re going to lay me down on the couch and give me a box of Kleenex, in a certain way, I found my father’s Chicago. He died when he was 51,” Dyja said.
“I was getting to know the Chicago he grew up with that I got a little taste of it. I showed up in 1962. It’s the Chicago that I feel I missed in a way. … In a lot of ways the book was so personally connected to me.”
That really hit home one night after Dyja’s wife and kids went to bed as he scanned the Tribune archives hunting for details about the weather and what movies hit the theaters the weekend French writer Simone de Beauvoir began her love affair with Nelson Algren.
“I saw my dad’s face. He had a role in the play 'Brother Orchid' at Weber High School. I’m not a big weeper, but it really hit me,” he said. “I’m not a ghost hunter, but I really felt some connection.”
That’s the stuff that makes the selection of "The Third Coast" as the Chicago Public Library’s most recent must-read book even more special for Dyja.
“It’s bizarrely personal for me because as a kid my mom would haul me off to the Portage-Cragin branch and I’d walk down the aisle looking at every shelf book by book,” he said.
“Having the Chicago Public Library select me for this honor is just remarkable. It’s extremely cool, really meaningful. The word thrilling doesn’t seem to answer the call.”
On Nov. 4 at 6 p.m., Dyja is set to talk about One Book, One Chicago selection "The Third Coast" at Harold Washington Library.
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