ABAW: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

I have some catching up to do.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, William Morrow & Co. via Harper & Row Perennial Fiction, 1988 (personal copy)

Art Bechstein sets out to have a summer of dissolution in Pittsburgh following his college graduation. He doesn’t want to think about what career he’ll begin when the summer ends, or about his gangster father, or his recent ex, Claire, or his dead mother, and he certainly doesn’t want to think about himself.

So of course, everything that happens over the summer comes back to questions of Art’s identity and his relationship with his family and the family business.

The friends and lovers Art finds that summer - chiefly Arthur, Phlox, and Cleveland - reflect back to Art a portion of his character, even as he feels like he is bending and morphing himself around his feelings for them.

The attention to language, the subtle foreshadowing, the way Chabon manages to take the wasted summer of a bunch of college kids and make it into something epic and tragic, all add up to a satisfying and lyrical novel.

Favorite lines:

“I never understand how people can be perfectly frank all over the sidewalk like that in public.”

“[Cleveland] would breach the barrier that stood between my family and my life, and scale the wall that I was.”

“They have vultures everywhere they have food chains.”