About this title: Art Bechstein steps out of the library into the summer of his graduation year. Not yet ready for respectability, he falls in with the exotic, charming Arthur Lecomte, and ricochets between a homosexual relationship and an intense affair with a strange and beautiful girl called Phlox. Before long, the world of his new friends and the underworld ...
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: William Morrow & Co
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780688076320ISBN:0688076327
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket may have chips and close tears. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Good. read more
Description: Fair. Dust Cover Missing. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
"I'm a latecomer to Chabon, and have been reading his work in roughly newest-to-oldest order. So I was surprised to find that this work is almost as good as his recent work. There's nothing particularly complex in either its structure, tone, or point of view, but it is remarkably assured for a writer in his earlier twenties. And I hadn't known that Chabon had been (essentially) bisexual during this period of his life, so that too was a surprise. He deals with that aspect of the novel in a mature and convincing manner, much to the surprise perhaps of both gay and straight readers who may have doubted that real bisexuals exist."
"I put this on the "history" shelf as well as the literature shelf; maybe not a good idea. Probably incorrect. But I chose to do so because this book is a perfect snapshot of a specific place and time.
It's also poetry, but I didn't go so far as to put it on that shelf. Almost too disingenuous even for me.
This is a great book. The first half is perfect. Just wonderful. The language, the characters, the pacing; there really isn't much story for the first part of the book. It's just a guy in his mid twenties and his weird friends in their mid twenties doing things people in their mid twenties traditionally do. Oh, his dad is a mob guy and there's this impossible character off to one side, but essentially it's a perfect snapshot of people just being.... people. This book has some of the best phrases I have ever read: one of the characters describes his girlfriend as vast and patchwork as Africa. Awesome. It's that sort of thing all the way through. But it manages to totally lack pretension or artiness, if that makes sense. Good stuff.
The book does not get five stars, though, because the second half irritated me. It happens.
"I went to add this book and couldn't remember the title, in spite of having just finished it this month. That's a good approximation of my experience with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh--pretty forgettable. It's one of those moody books set in a roughly indiscriminate time period (it's clear from the text that it's supposed to be some point between 1980 and 1990, but the way it's written it could easily be 1920...or 50...or 72) that's primarily concerned with characterization and not really interested in action or plot. And that's fine--who doesn't love a good character study?--but not really interesting in this case. The characters are slightly quirky but lack substance, and eventually you figure out that the main concern of the story is the protagonist's confused sexuality (which culminates with a haphazard homosexual relationship that doesn't really change anything about him, or his life, or anyone else's life...including the reader's). The end is an absolute anticlimax, but considering that the book is mostly flat this is neither surprising nor inappropriate. A book like this almost NEEDS an anticlimax, in fact--to suddenly drop some action in at the end would be totally incongruous and probably give the sedated reader a heart attack as a result.
I had a lame writing instructor once who only ever said one useful thing: to make a story, something has to be at stake, some choice has to be made, and there's has to be a resulting change from it. In Pittsburgh, the choices are ambiguous (like the protag's sexuality, I guess...) and once made fail to change anything--at least, anything that counts. But if you're the kind of person who likes pointless, flowy novels that don't really go anywhere (or just like Chabon's style) then this might be all you. Unfortunately, it was not my bag."
"I wish I had read this book when I was in my early twenties rather than on the cusp of my (gasp) thirties. At that point, I am certain it would have been a **five star** novel, and easily would have catapulted to the top of a select group of novels whose stories and language managed to perfectly capture that particular blend of angst and abandon that characterized my life at that point. Of course, I'm not so old now as to not recognize how brilliantly this novel does depict the magic of collegiate summers, where lifetimes of experience can be consolidated into weeks and revelations seem to be a daily occurrence. In fact, being a few years beyond a time where life was somehow fueled by sex and drugs, I can recognize that a large part of this novel's brilliance is its ability to play off the tropes that typify the lives of so many 20-somethings, and yet somehow make such hackneyed experiences unique and special and wonderful such that reading about them allows you to believe that even if your life was somehow, someplace just like the lives of Chabon's characters, your experience of that time was still essential and singular."
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