City of the Broad Shoulders, City of the Yearning Heart : THE COAST OF CHICAGO <i> by Stuart Dybek (Alfred A. Knopf: $17.95; 192 pp.; 0-394-57449-4) </i>

Ten years ago, Stuart Dybek published a collection of Chicago-set stories, “Childhood and Other Neighborhoods,” receiving for that achievement the 1981 PEN Hemingway Award. Now he comes forth with another story volume, again set in Chicago, and again about childhood and coming-of-age. The book sags and maunders now and then, but at its best (which is a lot of the time, from its quietly ironic and theme-hookingly perfect title on through a last paragraph that plucks at the heart-string of time itself), this is fiction that’s moving and real and often brilliantly ambitious.

Dybek’s Chicago--or much of it--is the Chicago of the poor, the rough and the run-down that will remind many readers (as his earlier book did, too) of the legacy left to Dybek by Nelson Algren. In the story “Blight” (“During those years between Korea and Vietnam, when rock and roll was being perfected, our neighborhood was proclaimed an Official Blight Area”), Dybek spins out sidewalk-and-back-alley tales about adolescent boys such as Pepper Rosado, Deejo DeCampo and the troubled Ziggy Zilinsky, who somehow fears that the year when the White Sox win the pennant will also be the year the world ends by nuclear apocalypse--and who disappears at the end, on his way to become a Trappist monk.

The story itself is a longish one, lanky and string-like in shape. If the anecdotal adventures of these bad-neighborhood boys (music, love, street-tough emergings of unlettered but poetic yearnings) seem familiar and faintly like literary reruns, the atmosphere of the place they live in doesn’t.

A more substantial point of entry into Dybek’s work is revealed almost accidentally--for example in his narrator’s comment that “among blocks of factories, railroad tracks, truck docks, industrial dumps, scrapyards, expressways, and the drainage canal, people had managed to wedge in their everyday lives.”

It’s with this instinctive movement to a position just under the surface, and with the turning of his back on the demands of a conventional narrative pulled along by one stalwartly outward event after another, that Dybek’s particular genius begins to find its voice and its subtle, wordlessly whispering wings.

“Chopin in Winter,” for example, is a touching and poetic weaving together of themes that will emerge in one way and another throughout much of the book. Here the old world meets the new, in a dingy apartment building operated by its landlady, Mrs. Kubiac, whose daughter went East to study piano, then came home again, pregnant, to play boogie-woogie and Chopin through the winter before disappearing once again to give birth to her black baby (to be named Tatum Kubiac, after the great jazz pianist, Art Tatum). These events are witnessed--and heard--by a schoolboy narrator whose father died in World War II, whose mother works diligently on correspondence courses in bookkeeping, and whose Gypsy-like and ne’er-do-well grandfather, Dzia-Dzia, has drifted back that winter to soak his ailing feet in buckets of steaming water on the kitchen’s linoleum floor before, himself, setting off once again.

“Most of what I knew of Dzia-Dzia’s past had mainly to do with the history of his feet,” says the boy, explaining that his wandering grandfather’s feet “had been frozen when as a young man he walked most of the way from Krakow to Gdansk in the dead of winter escaping service in the Prussian army.” Steam rises up and clouds the homely kitchen windows; the boy labors at his schoolwork; snow whirls on desolate city rooftops outdoors, and the sounds of Chopin, evening after evening, come from the apartment upstairs, as “Across from me, Dzia-Dzia, his hair, eyebrows, and ear tufts wild and white, swayed in his chair, with his eyes closed and a look of rapture on his face as his fingers pummeled the tabletop.”

It’s with symbols such as these that Dybek is at his very best, finding within them, somehow, vein after vein of reverberant and moving richness. In “Nighthawks,” named for the famous Edward Hopper painting of a late-night diner, he creates a long and wonderful tapestry of collage and image and myth (including Orpheus) that tells, at its center, the story of the young lovers, Choco and Nina: how Choco went AWOL to be with Nina; how they went up onto a summertime rooftop and “took angel dust, which made the moon seem near enough to step onto from the roof”; how young girls afterward, “on moonlit nights . . . would see a fantasma, Nina, her hair flying and blouse billowing open, falling past their windows . . so slowly that it seemed as if it might take forever for her to hit the street.”

In this ode to the lonely and the sleepless and the grieving, Dybek strikes out coins of gold again and again in a piece that itself takes on the half-dreamed fullness and life of a Chagall painting. A counterman at the diner works nights, then goes home to his lonely and bare room in the suffocating heat of the day “to lie listening to children yelling as if they’ve re-created light . . while the drone of a ball game is gradually replaced by the buzz of a f1y. . . .”

The spirit of the worn-down but promise-studded city breathes through Dybek’s often magical prose, as does the wider world from which its poor and oppressed and hopeful have come to dwell on this inland coast. A grandmother tunes in the “yellow plastic radio on her kitchen table,” trying to get the polka station but sometimes missing it “by half a notch” so she gets “the Greek station instead, or the Spanish, or the Ukrainian.” Explains Dybek’s narrator, evoking all of the book’s immigrant life with a perfect and unpretentious lightness of touch: “In Chicago, where we lived, all the incompatible states of Europe were pressed together down at the staticky right end of the dial.”

Interspersed between and among the longer pieces here are numerous short ones, some less than a page in length; in general, although not always, these reveal many fewer of Dybek’s strengths, showing less certainty either of choice or of material in a collection that, whatever its high merits, is not always smoothly shaped or uniformly hewn. Dybek should be known, however, by his strengths and not his weaknesses, and his book, overall, is that rare thing: real fiction, otherwise known as beauty and uncompromising loveliness raised up out of life as it is.