Michael Chabon: in Pittsburgh, Vegas and comics
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In his Paperback Writers column, Richard Rayner looks at the reissued ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,’ Michael Chabon’s debut novel. Set in the city where Chabon was an undergraduate, the story centers around post-college Art Bechstein and his friends and lovers. It has been compared to ‘The Great Gatsby,’ which was an influence, Chabon has explained, ‘in its theme of self-invention and self-exaggeration, and in Fitzgerald’s use of one summer as a structure for the book.’ Rayner writes:
The not-so-secret theme of ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’ is sexual identity. ... The point of the journey is the exploration, and labels need not apply. In the 1980s, Chabon had been paying attention to Prince, and not only Scott and Zelda and Thomas Mann. The breadth was pretty radical. ‘Pittsburgh’ is a very knowing book, sensitive to the various biographical and literary impulses that produced it, and always alert, too, to its own prose, the sentences that seem to dance on the page ...
These days, Chabon is pretty far from Pittsburgh, both in his settings and in person. He will deliver the closing keynote at the Vegas Valley Book Festival in Las Vegas on Saturday. The festival’s theme is comic books and graphic novels, which it began celebrating with a kickoff appearance by the prolific Neil Gaiman, author of ‘The Sandman’ comic series and, most recently, ‘The Graveyard Book.’ ‘It makes me a bit sad that I leave Las Vegas and then Michael [Chabon] arrives, and we miss each other this trip,’ Gaiman blogs. ‘He’s one of the world’s best people to chat to.’
Would he have enjoyed chatting with Salman Rushdie as much? At the New York Public Library’s Literary Lions benefit this week, Rushdie chatted up New York Magazine writer Bennet Marcus; Sir Salman, an honoree, was all about the comics and is even considering penning a graphic novel. ‘I’m a world expert on superhero comics,’ Rushdie said. ‘I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.’
-- Carolyn Kellogg
redit: Carolyn Kellogg
