Cannonball - Book 13

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

I would have been really bummed if I ended up disliking this book.  For one thing, I want to love Michael Chabon as much as everyone says I should love Michael Chabon.  Also, I think that The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a really great title, and it is always sad when something doesn't live up to the goodness of it's title.  Thankfully, I did really like this book, so it turns out I had nothing to worry about.  It's not a perfect book, but some of it is so great that I am willing to overlook a lot of other flaws.

There is a love triangle and new friendships and a lot of drinking and a lot of description of Pittsburgh in the summertime.  Those things I liked.  The things I didn't like include this awful woman named Phlox who the main character is dating even though she has no redeeming qualities whatsoever** and a secondary story involving the mafia, which felt kind of forced in an otherwise pretty straightforward coming of age story.  The mafia thing ties in with a rocky-relationship-between-father-and-son thing and I kind of lost patience with both.

Chabon's writing is so good, though, that even the parts of the book I didn't like were engrossing.  This book was published when he was twenty-five years old.  No one should be able to write this well when they are twenty-five years old.  It's unfair. 



Page count: 297
Up next: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald



*I suppose it helps that it was ridiculously warm in Ottawa for most of this week and I was feeling pretty summery to begin with.  I was thinking the other day about how I never used to spend much time thinking about the seasons, and now I am kind of obsessed with them.  I feel like I am a different person in the summer than I am in the winter, and different again in spring, and again in the fall.  It all used to run together, but now I find their seperate-ness kind of comforting.
**Phlox!  I know.  The fact that I hate her is not really a flaw in Chabon's writing, but I feel like the fact that I hate her so much is worth noting.  I can't really tell if I am supposed to hate her or not, but I do.