Michael Chabon: Starting Out

Michael Chabon, one of my favorite contemporary writers, published a rather earnest piece in this week's New York Review of Books recounting the writing of his first (and still most striking) novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I don't like the flossy insights of this excerpt:

I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces and long descriptive passages, and "round" characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill—or rather I didn't want to lose—that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, which was sometimes called "the sense of wonder."

In an essay which adduces Proust, Calvino, Philip Roth, and Donald Barthelme, he's worried about producing a sense of wonder? I wonder.

He's better when he confesses his debt to The Great Gatsby; he wanted to write a novel "about friendship and its impossibility, about self-inventors and dreamers of giant dreams, about complicated women and the men who make them that way." Pittsburgh doesn't succeed at all these levels, but it's a testament to Chabon's ear for gossamer prose that, at least stylistically, his novel is a worthy heir.

I'm most struck by Chabon's confessions of homosexual activity. Of course, any casual reader of his books knows Chabon is at least interested in the complications of same-sex love, but then:

I had drunk a lot, and smoked a lot, and listened to a ton of great music, and talked way too much about all of those activities, and about talking about those activities. I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him.

Coming from a married man with four children, his honesty is remarkable.