The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 297pp. Php75, Booksale bin.

A week ago, I stopped by the mall at the last minute to get some supplies I needed for a beach trip. I planned to take one of the books in my stack at home. But I couldn't stop myself to take a look at the local Booksale to see if there's anything interesting. I ended up buying several things: a paperback edition of Generation X with a neon pink cover, a teach yourself French the BBC way book, Shiloh and other stories, and Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I got all of them for less than 200, so it didn't really cost me much.

2006 is turning out to be a Chabon year for me. I've read both of his short story collections already--Werewolves In Their Youth and A Model World and other stories. In 1988, when the novel was published, Michael Chabon--last name pronounced as he says, "Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Jovi"--was 24, already had his MFA, people called him "the young man with the golden pen," and he was being compared to both Salinger and Fitzgerald--especially Fitzgerald. Now I heart The Great Gatsby, so I really had to read this book.

As far as I'm concerned, the comparison to Fitzgerald and Gatsby stems from several things: both novels had narrators who were young men just out of college, trying to figure things out. They move in the glittering world of the young and the rich. There are references to mobsters: Art Bechstein's father Joe the Egg is a primary mover of a family in Pittsburgh; in Gatsby, Nick Carraway meets that guy with the human molar cufflinks who was willing to get him some "connegtions." But the thing is, Art Bechstein doesn't exactly relish his wise guy pedigree. His father even wants him to stay as far away from the family as possible.

But on the summer after graduation, Art finds himself inside the library, makes eye contact with a young man, also named Arthur reading a Spanish potboiler, and before he knew it, he was partying with Pittsburgh's finest young things. What makes this book somehow different from all those summer of youth novels is that Art gets involved not just with Arthur, but with a reformed punk girl named Phlox but formerly known as Mau Mau, and has this really weird connection with Arthur's best friend Cleveland Arning, who really knew how to have a good time. How Art and Cleveland met is something to look forward to.

There's also the Cloud Factory, the Lost Neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a motorcycle versus police vehicles chase, a helicopter, betrayals, gayness! Mischief! Mayhem! Name it, and the novel probably has it. I have to agree that it's really not bad for a debuting author, and at age twenty-four, too. I didn't really read much while I was out of town. But when I did get back to Manila and flipped through it, hoping to just have a peek, I ended up reading it and finished it in a little over a day.

What I didn't like about it was that Art Bechstein was perhaps a little too emo for me. He cries all the frigging time. He cries after he has sex, while he was having sex, when he broke up with his lover/s, or told them that he loved them both. All the frigging time. I know he was supposed to be a sensitive guy and all, and that he lost his mom early, but geeze, it was just too much.

Then there's the matter that if your lead character is somehow sexually ambiguous, and you have a hefty number of gay characters, the general readership might assume that the author must be.When the novel first came out in 1988, and after Chabon's other two novels came out, that was the prevailing belief. That he must be gay. I mean, yeah, summer of self-discovery and all. That's when the general readership found out he was married. To a woman. And with four kids. What shock, right? Then when The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was reissued, Chabon wrote in the introduction that he never really protested the assumption that he was gay because it opened a loyal readership for him. And then that he did have some same-sex relations. Oh, surprise, surprise.

So here's the last paragraph of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh:

"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."

It somehow reminds me of Fitzgerald's "boats against the current" ending for Gatsby, don't you think? Whether Chabon is channeling Fitzgerald, or he's gay or not, I don't really care what he is. I enjoyed the book a lot.