The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon has emerged from the hat and will be this month’s reading group choice. It’s a fascinating pick. Even if it weren’t interesting for its own sake, it would be worth reading because it’s the first novel from one of the finest writers of our era. I’m keen to return to the first appearance from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and - doubters be damned – Telegraph Avenue. Was all that dazzling accomplishment on display in his debut, written when he was 23 and still a student at the University of California, Irvine?
If advances are anything to go by, Chabon was certainly a prodigy. He was given $155,000 (that’s circa 1987, so a meaningful sterling calculation would be hard – but it was definitely “a lot”) to publish The Mysteries of Pittsburgh after his professor, David Heiney, sent it to his own agent. This gamble on an unknown writer paid off when the book became a bestseller and Chabon, in turn, a reluctant celebrity — who even found himself turning down an offer to appear in People magazine’s list of 50 Most Beautiful People.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, after this big start, Chabon found it difficult to write a follow-up, churning out more than 1,500 pages of a book he realised was “fucked”, but couldn’t stop himself from writing. That was the bad news. The good news was that he channelled the pain of that experience into the character of Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys, a second novel so good it eclipsed The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
A film was made in 2008, but flopped, and I suspect that the book isn’t much read today. More’s the pity, because the three chapters I’ve just read are dazzling - and the story sounds intriguing. The back cover of my old Sceptre paperback promises a nicely tangled story of an “intense” affair with a beautiful girl and a homosexual relationship with the “exotic, charming Arthur Lecomte”. It also offers a heady evocation of that special last summer that lies between university graduation and entry into the world of work and the serious business of real life. It sounds like an excellent book to read August, in other words. Oh and the first sentence is, like so many of Chabon’s, is pretty glorious:
At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.
With this ringing beginning, there was, predictably enough, some speculation about how far the young writer’s real life fed in to his novel. Perhaps addressing this, my 1988 Sceptre paperback contains the biographical information that Michael Chabon “lives with his wife in Newport Beach, California”. It does not, alas, say anything about whether or not his father was a gangster.
It’s going to be a fascinating few weeks reading. I hope you’ll join me.
And thanks to Sceptre, we have five copies of the novel to give to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive suggestion in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Phill Langhorne with your address (phill.langhorne@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to him, too.
