The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

This is an old (2011!) post dug up from my now offline website because it’s an interesting review of an interesting book that I still remember how it felt to write 14 years later (I’ve been struggling to learn to properly review books for so long!) and also I am too swamped to write something new tonight. Enjoy!

I was quite impressed by Michael Chabon's later books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and especially Wonder Boys—such wild and different novels, original, weird and very funny. So when I found a used copy of his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and found it completely covered in exclamations of delight from various reviewers, I thought I couldn't miss enjoying it. 

I missed. 

Don't get me wrong--there's a reason why The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Cosmopolitan and Playboy wrote blurbable raves about this book--"Astonishing," "remarkable," "extraordinary" and all the rest. It's a linguistically gleeful, almost acrobatic novel, and I took real pleasure in the flights of language throughout. On almost any page you've find something like, "In the big, posh, and stale lobby of the Duquesne Hotel--in a city where some men, like my father, still wear felt hats--one can still get one's hair cut, one's shoes shined, and buy a racing form or a Tootsie Roll." Or how about, "He stood up, inhaled deeply, and cried, 'Ah, the sweet piss odor of cedar!'" There's a real flare for sentences here that goes much deeper than fireworks--the images make sense as long as you care to think about them, and the metaphors are joyous and flamboyant, but true at the core. And oh, what an evocation, a mythologization of Pittsburgh--that's the main thing I loved about this book. Pittsburgh seemed a magical and beloved place--interesting that the narrator was supposed to have lived there only 4 years, because he seemed to have known and loved it forever. And yet some mysteries never get solved, and I loved that about this urban dream, too--cities are just too big to ever know anything about them. 

So what didn't I love? The plot, I guess, and its various machinations. Art Bechstein is graduating from university, about to start working in a bookstore and have one last magical summer before he buckles down to some unknown serious grownup career. While working on his last academic paper, he meets a guy at the library who tries to flirt with him. Art politely turns him down, and they become friends. The new guy, also named Arthur (this worked just fine, much better than you'd think) draws him into an exciting, glamourous world of new friends and various sexual imbroglios, money and power. Well, that's how it's set up and marketed. In truth, it's a profoundly episodic novel, with characters making centre-stage appearances for pages on end, only to never be seen again. This happens in the first clangourous party that Arthur takes Art to--it seemed so intense that it all must mean something, but it was just a set-piece; Chabon could write a good party scene, so he did so. Even this girl, glimpsed on the back lawn of the party after a long search for her: "She stood alone in the dim centre of the huge yard, driving imperceptible balls all across the neighbourhood. As we clunked down the wooden steps to the quiet crunch of grass, I watched her stroke. It was my father's ideal: a slight, philosophical tilt to her neck, her backswing a tacit threat, her rigid, exultant follow-through held for one aristocratic fraction of a second too long." Wow. Doesn't it break your heart to know that this character, Jane, hangs around until the end of the book without doing anything else interesting ever again? In her one other big scene, she makes a salad. 

Virtuosic writing for its own sake annoys me. I can't be called plot-obsessed, but I'd like what's on the page to deepen my understanding of character, setting, mood, something. There is a heavy plot running through the final third of the book, to do with the mafia (I'm not spoiling anything) and another with Arthur's wildly annoying new girlfriend, Phlox (yes, really). I could be in a sensitive mood, but I felt that women didn't fare too well in this novel--Chabon is well-known for his intimate understanding of men, and perhaps in his early days it was at the expense of understanding women. Phlox felt more like a scrap heap of wild outfits, quotations, beauty tricks and tears. A whole novel reading about her, and when she writes in a letter towards the end, "There's only one place in the world where you are supposed to put your penis--inside of me," I couldn't tell if any spark of humour was intended by character, or by author. 

I was truly baffled by how the plot wrapped up at the end of the book, and though I don't know much about the mafia in Pittsburgh, what I could understand struck me as terribly unlikely. Though I realized about midway through the book that the narrator was being constructed as unreliable, I wasn't able to glean anything from that fact other than that the narrator was unreliable. In the great unreliably voiced books (A Prayer for Owen Meaney or Money, or even The Great Gatsby, which inspired this one) the absence of "truth" in the narration allows the readers to solve their own riddles, or create their own truth. But what can we do with the fact that Art never mentions having one friend--even a friendly acquaintance--that he did not meet after page 1 of this book. Are we to suppose that Art the narrator elides these memories as too painful or difficult? Or that Michael the writer couldn't be bothered to write characters who existed prior to page 1? I read the bookclub notes at the back (I have a 2001 edition, after Chabon was famous for Kavalier and Clay) and as an apology for having had wild ambitions for the breadth and amazingness of this novel, Chabon says, "Twenty-two, I was twenty-two!" But somehow he doesn't see that as being inherent in the text itself; I think it is. I think this is a wild brilliant first effort from an author that had not really learned to marshal himself, to be true to his characters and his stories, and not just to his own writing. Later on, he did learn those things. So you should probably read this book--it's got a lot to recommend it--but you should definitely read those later ones.