The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

I have been wrestling with writing about this book for a few weeks now. Its daunting to think about having to write about it; I have no confidence that Chabon’s book is something that I can write about. The ideas are deeply textured in a way that talking about them requires careful wording so not to misrepresent the book. Overall, it’s a piece of literature compared to easily digestible pop fluff that I consume daily, which makes it tough to speak on. When you condition yourself to absorb certain things, absorption of other things becomes harder. Ask a former vegetarian about the first few times they ate meat and you’ll hear the same thing. Regardless, part of the point of this writing exercise to see what I can write about, and what I need to improve on, so here goes…

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is the second novel of Michael Chabon’s that I have read. The first was Wonder Boys, which I read a few years back while in Australia. Wonder Boys was a book that I both love and feel indifferent about.  Let me explain; there are moments in that book that were incredible, and gave me almost orgasmic shivers, the writing was so good. Chabon’s wording is beautifully poetic and he is the kind of author that makes anyone who dreams of writing a huge hit to their confidence, as they can never fathom having the talent with words that he has. However, there are also parts in the book, while still featuring numblingly wonderful prose, that just fall flat. His subject matter just becomes unrelatable. This isn’t something that should happen. Even if a reader can’t relate to the actual event, there should be sub context that we can grab onto and find relation to in order to be carried along with the book and not be broken from the author’s spell. This same thing happened to me again in Mysteries, and while it was less so –perhaps to the smaller gap in age and experience- it still crept up more often that I would have wished.

Mysteries gives us a glimpse into the summer of Art Bechstein -the son of a mobster- just after he has completed his undergraduate, who sees his immediate future as wide open. Summer is to be his paradise, allowing him the potential to live the life he only reads of in books. He quickly begins to associate himself with newfound, interesting friends, and meets a girl that he originally thinks is his quintessential woman. The events and pacing of the book is set up to mimic the thematical arc of summer; the bright and infinite possibilities of June as the summer begins to open up, the explosive, oppressive power of July, and the dying flicker of summer receding in August. Chabon himself described the narrative arc as “a story that always began with a comedy of expectation and ended with the tragedy of remorse” (from the book’s appendices).  This principle is something that I expect most people can relate to. Everyone has had a summer where you are at the very pinnacle of high hopes, and as summer progresses it fades, tatters, and as labour day rolls around, you look back to see nothing but shreds of sailcloth, expectations dashed upon the reef, and wasted moments marooned and irretrievably lost. As you can gather, this story is a downhill slide for the character, (yet one spackled with delightful, rewarding moments), and at the best, you hope that he can take something away from the experience.

Watching everything come together, and then slowly dissolve is crucial to the story, however. For me, these stories always hurt just a bit more than I think they are supposed to, but I do understand the appeal in reading such a book. For myself, I enjoyed it as a whole, but leaves me a touch empty overall. There are wonderful moments in it, followed by wonderfully written ones that cause the reader to feel poorly for the characters. These moments are real too, they do not act as obstacles for the protagonist to surmount and move on, but as (grandiose) real life events that have consequences that the protagonist must carry with them for the rest of their lives. This hyper-reality is something that permeates modern literature, and makes it what it is; stories of characters that, even though they lead much more interesting lives, still carry the burdens that we too must carry with us. Reading these books are not the form of escapism that we associate with popular fiction and storytelling aimed at the popcorn eating masses, but yet clearly still exist along that same plane of escapism. It is something that I may not have yet been able to come to terms with entirely.

On a whole, this book is about (arguably) two things. The first is that there are risks to not knowing who you are and thus letting others dictate this for you, as this will remove your ability to direct yourself, and instead you are forced to go down the paths others have set for you. The second is that the people that you let into your life have the ability to change you in wonderfully, horribly, surprising and unexpected ways. Art learns both of these things during the course of the book, the first far too late, and the second is something that is discovered through reflection. However, neither of these can be categorized as wholly good or bad either. The risks that are taken by not defining yourself often lead to you not being happy with yourself, but also open your eyes to things that you would never have discovered. This helps inform who you are just as much, and, as Art did find, the knowledge gained through being whisked along, can in fact help later. The costs may be great, but rewards can exist as well. These overarching themes may not be specifically the intention of the author, however, as I read the through the later portions of the book, having this context in mind gave events much more significance for me.

I am not one to dwell on individual passages of a book, but in this case, I have a dozen or so sticky notes littered through the book, marking sections that I couldn’t stop rereading, or that resonated with me. I will be leaving them in now that I am finished, both as a reference for those days I feel like going over those passages, as well as for that far off day when I read it again and see if I still see the meaning that I did when I first read them, or if I have changed since that first reading. I like doing this sort of thing with excerpts every so often to see if I’ve grown or changed, and to see if I can better understand who I was before; it’s a simple method of introspection that helps put perspective on things for me. Whenever I find a book or movie that connects, I try to keep it on my shelf in an easily accessible place, always there for a quick glance through to ground me, and thus, I expect The Mysteries of Pittsburgh to be there for quite some time.