Word: chabon
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...MICHAEL CHABON'S NEW NOVEL is a Raymond Chandler-- style pulp mystery set in a bizarro alternate universe where (as supposedly really almost happened) Alaska, not Israel, was designated as the Jewish homeland. Your hero is Meyer Landsman, a drunk and divorced detective working the case of a murdered drug-addicted Hasidic chess prodigy. As premises go, this one is half-baked, hard-boiled and frozen solid all at the same time...
...Chabon's prose is so awesome, it's a crime not to quote it. "Look at Landsman," he writes, "one shirttail hanging out, snow-dusted porkpie knocked to the left, coat hooked to a thumb over his shoulder. Hanging on to a sky-blue cafeteria ticket as if it's the strap keeping him on his feet." There's hardly a mot here that's not juste. Likewise, a cartoon dog evokes "the obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy...
...what if-just for argument's sake-you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world-Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them- and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list...
...Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. Look at Michael Chabon's. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer's writer.) He follows that up with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. (Hm. Does he really think it's better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first...
...think about such things, anyway--think of as the young American novelists. And even by the notoriously elastic standards of the literary world--the only place on earth where you can still be a wunderkind at the age of 30--42 is not especially youthful. Wallace, Franzen, Lethem and Chabon may be great writers, but one thing they are not is young writers...