Textual Teasers: Tantalizing Tid-Bits to Taunt Your Literary Taste

September 23, 2008 by Jena  Send to a Friend

Every week I’ll sample the goods and spit out the juiciest pieces of prose and poetry for you—heavy on flavor, light on fat. This week: the tale of the gangster born gay-curious guy from Pittsburgh.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—Michael Chabon (Perennial, 1989)

“Look at it. You’re an economics major when obviously you should be making movies, or traveling, or reviewing restaurants, or something frivolous.”                        

“Okay.”                                                                                                                      

“You live in Pittsburgh when you should be living in New York or L.A. or Tokyo, or someplace frivolous.”                                                                                          

“Okay.”                                                                                                                    

“You dumped your crazy girlfriend and got yourself another one, who’s also frivolous but who at least wears lipstick and perfume and has a job. Your whole life is just one big ‘Thanks for the check, Dad.’”                                            

“Okay, okay.” For a few seconds I clenched my jaw and shook, wanted to punch his face, break his straight nose, but then I felt confused, and I laughed. “Okay.”      

All at once, I was insanely hungry.

Basic ingredients: A brave and funny first novel full of fluctuations, fatalistic friendships, Freud’s letters to Fliess (ok, that’s not really prevalent, but I couldn’t resist) and foolish females. Art Bechenstein, a confused recent college graduate and the son of an infamous gangster, reigns as both main character and narrator of the story. He tells of the important, sexually-charged, experimental summer after graduation where he met a slew of characters who ripped open his world and changed his perspective on Pittsburgh, parties, sex, parents, and himself forever.

It all begins to simultaneously build up and unravel when Art meets the casually cool Arthur Lecomte at the library. Arthur introduces him to Phlox the sponge-like self-molding drama queen, Jane Bellwether the beautiful blonde athlete involved in a forbidden love with Cleveland, the highly literate degenerate and bad boy extraordinaire. The most rewarding and laugh-out-loud sections of the story almost always involve the incredulous Cleveland who makes his grand entrance (after much ado) by kidnapping the unsuspecting Art from work under the guise of a rival gangster of Art’s father.

While the surface of the story deals mostly with Art, fretting about his sexual preferences–flirting with homosexuality and finding himself in a bisexual love triangle (more like a love pendulum)–the novel also contains darker sub-levels that contextualize the story. Art really only glimpses the fringes of his father’s dirty work until Cleveland (through his own involvement with the underworld of Pittsburgh) forces Art to see the effects of gangster mentality and the politics that come with that life. These previously sub-surface subjects take over the end of the story, in a big way. I became excited by the possibilities for a more serious, impacting culmination, but that’s where Chabon really dropped the ball. The book could have taken off in a surprising and satisfying direction had those sub-levels raised to the surface in a more subtle and meaningful way that actually affected the main character. [Spoiler alert] Instead it turned into an unrealistic gangster/police chase scene which somehow digressed back to sexual confusion and then just drifts off. 

But, despite my structural and focus-based complaints you will, if nothing else, fall in love with Arthur (Art’s platonic and then not-so-platonic male love interest) and Cleveland who so oppositely encompass all that makes a character intrinsicly “cool,” so much so that you’ll want to frame and freeze them at their peak and refuse to allow the writer to dissolve that pretty image.

Next week: A selection of snippets from short stories you should never read before bed.

 Send to a Friend