[image]
Michael Chabon looking remarkably like how I envisioned his protagonist looking in The Mysteries of Pittsburg.
“When I remember that dizzy s
[image]
Michael Chabon looking remarkably like how I envisioned his protagonist looking in The Mysteries of Pittsburg.
“When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”
There are moments in time that are demarcation lines in our lives. They might involve deaths, loves, the culmination of clarity, or in the case of Art Bechstein, a summer of chaos. He has issues. In fact, his issues are so large that other issues are building hotels, spas, and skyscrapers on his original issues. He has the mysterious death of his mother lingering like a ghost over everything he does. When feeling pressured at all, he bursts into tears in front of his gangster father. He has just graduated from college and is starting the summer, the last summer of discovery, before he has to decide what he will do with the rest of his life. I would reassure him that there will be many more moments like this as middle age descends upon him like a hammer and a series of midlife crises buffer him about like chaff swirling in the back of a grain truck. We’ve all been there...shit...I graduated...now what?
The prospects are rarely clear cut for most of us, except for those few who have been focused on a career path since the age of seven. I must admit, as difficult as these decisions are, Art has a few more things bothering him as well that I haven’t mentioned yet.
I don’t like the fact that he calls himself Art. It diminishes him even further. Of course, one of his best friends is also Arthur, Arthur Lecomte, and he is way too suave, well dressed, cultured, and charming to be called anything but Arthur. Art isn’t really sure why Arthur likes him, but he suspects that it may be because he wants to seduce him. When the path forward is so uncertain, what a great time to question one’s sexual orientation as well? Art has wrestled with it before, in high school when he was experiencing a long drought of female disinterest. Once girls started paying attention to him again, he put all those homosexual thoughts on a backburner, but now that he is hanging around with Arthur, he is starting to wonder about his sexuality once more. Is it because he wants to be more like Arthur?
He has a girlfriend named Phlox Lombardi. ”Everything about her that was like a B-girl or a gun moll, a courtesan in a bad novel, or an actrice in a French art movie about alienation and ennui; her overdone endearments and makeup; all that was in questionable taste and might have embarrassed me or made me snicker, I had come to accept entirely, to look for and even to encourage. She delighted me as did bouffant hairdos and Elvis Presley art. When she came out of her bedroom dressed in a nylon kimono and huge slippers of turquoise fur, I was almost dizzy with appreciation, and the gaudy plastic Twister mat at my feet seemed to be the very matrix, the printed plan, of everything I liked about her.”
He is right in thinking that Arthur and Phlox are way cooler than he is and should be questioning why they like to hang out with him. As he navigates his feelings for both of them, I start to feel like Art is responding more to the desires of others rather than to his own feelings. He loves both of them. He isn’t wrong about that, but he dangles both of them as if by some miracle they could all be together. A triangle of love and lust that will not require Art to choose. The problem, of course, is Arthur and Phlox are insisting that he must pick. Frankly, I think both Arthur and Phlox, once they experience Art’s dithering, should have both dropped him like a hot potato. Art is worried about this. Both are well aware that Art needs them, and maybe that is why they allow him to play with their emotions as he tries to figure out his own muddled desires.
The problem is, once he chooses one, he loses the other.
Art and Arthur have a mutual friend named Cleveland. He is a force of nature, who takes too many drugs, drinks too much, and rides his motorcycle like a blazing comet while under the influence. He wants to ”eat the entire world.” He is flailing at the world like an inebriated and crazed Don Quixote, and of course, the windmills will win. He has visions of being a gangster and insists that Art introduce him to his father. The faster Cleveland tries to ascend, the closer he gets to the sun, and we know what happened to Icarus.
This is certainly a coming of age story. When it first came out, many compared it to Catcher in the Rye, which is something publishers routinely do for any coming of age story that has some literary merit. The comparison has been used so much that readers practically roll their eyes when they see yet another reference to J. D. Salinger’s masterpiece. Although Art Bechstein is no Holden Caulfield, there is a legitimate search for the truth going on in this novel. This book does capture the peculiarities of the ‘80s and the emergence of the modern age when more people felt comfortable talking about their sexual orientation with more complete honesty. If you had told me back then we would still be grappling with homosexual issues in 2020, I would have thought you were crazy.
In this first novel, Michael Chabon is already showing the great promise of the amazing writer he was going to become. I thought it was interesting, reading an interview with him, that he mentioned that he felt like a failure. Here is a celebrated novelist, who has won numerous awards for his writing, who still feels the lash of any criticism. I’m glad that he continues to muscle through those misdoubts that have been sown in his mind by critics who have obviously failed to understand just how good a writer he is.
This is an excellent first novel that any writer would be proud to call their own.
FYI a movie was made based on the book in 2008 which was directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber and starred Jon Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sienna Miller, Nick Nolte. I haven’t seen the movie, but hope to see it sometime this month.
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