From Laghman to Bucktown: Discontent & Disillusionment

J.G.P. MacAdam reviews The Chicago East India Company, a collection of short stories by U.S. Army veteran Christopher Lyke.

The Chicago East India Company, a collection of short stories penned by U.S. Army veteran Christopher Lyke, is a grab-bag of rare but hardy bulbs. Read these stories, embed them into your cerebral garden bed, or plop them in a glass of water on the windowsill, and be amazed at how in their own good time they bloom.

Readers of all stripes will find common cause with the (often) unnamed narrators and protagonists of Lyke’s collection. Readers will recognize sights and sounds, such as Western and Armitage in Chicago, or the street banter of New Orleans, or the azure beaches of Belize. The Cuyahoga River winding through Cleveland takes on an idyllic tinge as the narrator waxes nostalgic for the simpler times of childhood—“before anything bad had been done.”

Within this collection, Afghanistan is depicted as a place steeped in bloody history, defined by the “time and calamity that traversed these mountains: the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Sassanids; the Hephthalites, the Khwarazmians, the Mongols, the Mughals, and the Brits and their damned Martini-Henrys.”

Readers will recognize their own grandfathers: veterans of prior wars with faded tattoos and memories they never spoke of. They’ll recognize evenings on the porch sipping a bit of sweet alcohol, regarding their children’s galloping down the sidewalks on Halloween amid the slow but sure gentrification of their neighborhood. They’ll recognize the deflation of the American Dream, of discovering your chosen career is a sham or that your intentions aren’t nearly so noble as you thought. They’ll recognize inequality, the decks stacked against whole populations of people for no better reason than being born of this race or that class; raised in this neighborhood or that nation.

Lyke’s story collection became something of a minor obsession for this reviewer, following as it does in the well-worn boot-treads of such classics as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, as well as resonating with the writing of other Global War on Terror-veterans such as Jerad W. Alexander, author of Volunteers: Growing Up in the Forever War, and David P. Ervin, Editor-in-Chief of Military Experience & the Arts. While reading, I caught myself assuming the narrator of each story to be Lyke himself. Even when the vignettes neither name nor identify a particular protagonist, there is, I thought, always Lyke there—the writer, ever-observing. But I was wrong. The wily reader in my mind reinserts themselves, reminds me: these are stories, this is fiction.

And the writer of fiction knows this, too: at some point you, the author, the actual person writing the story, stops and the story itself takes over.