Word: chabon
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...MICHAEL Chabon, whose short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, is following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and J.D. Salinger with this novel. Like Kerouac, Chabon seeks to explore the outskirts of human discontent and disillusionment. Like Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye, he writes about a certain time--in Bechstein's case, a summer--charged with uncertainty and doubt...
Although this is his first novel, Chabon manages to convey his hero's journey in prose void of fatuousness or sentimentality. It is not fair to compare him, as his publisher has, to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Chabon's words do not have a jazzy tone; they sing in a disjointed melody, a music chopped into bits of drama and contemplation. Besides, being the next F. Scott Fitzgerald today often means finding your book in the bargain bins tomorrow...
...Chabon is one in a long line of young novelists to examine the strange bric-a-brac of our day. Unlike Jay McInerney--whose debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was a dirge devoid of rebirth, and set in the heart of the New World jungle, New York City--Chabon retains a Midwestern sensibility and even-mindedness. Chabon's prose can be as funny as McInerney's, but its message is more cheerful...
...Steel Town, stands in stubborn contrast to dissolute New York. New York can swallow you whole; Pittsburgh merely chews you a little before spitting you back on the plate. In Pittsburgh, there is still a dream of a greater life--thus the recurring image of the Cloud Factory in Chabon's novel. In New York, there are the lights, which blind you, and the bigness in which you lose yourself...
Like the young John Updike, Chabon treats sexuality as a problem that confuses and subsumes other issues. But in Chabon's novel the problems of homosexuality--to say nothing of sexuality--are placed in the larger context of the struggle for an identity of which sexual identity is only a part...