A Must-Read

At least if you

1. Love Michael Chabon (like I do – his braggy wife notwithstanding)
2. Have an interest in the art and craft of writing …

Here Chabon writes about his process writing his first novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He was 22 years old when it was published, mkay? To great acclaim.

His essay gave me goosebumps. This is one of those examples of reading a specific thing at just the right time.

Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a marvelous book. I loved it when I first read it – which was in 1992. I had just moved to Chicago, I was single for the first time in 3 years, I had my own apartment, I got a cat, I started running, I discovered Tori Amos, I met window-boy and it was the “beginning of a beautiful friendship”, I went on dates, I played pool, I got cast in a production of Golden Boy, I temped in random offices, I listened to “Love Shack” by the B-52s and ran 5 or 6 miles a day … and I read Mysteries of Pittsburgh. For me – the memories of 1992 come bundled up like that. I listen to Little Earthquakes and I remember the sickly-sweet smell of roach-poison in the hallways of my first apartment building. I hear “Love Shack”, and I remember the way window-boy’s clothes always smelled so fresh and clean. Mysteries of Pittsburgh brings that summer of 1992 right up before my eyes – which of course, is very fitting – because the book takes place during a very potent summer.

Hard to believe he was 21 years old when he wrote it.

I’m a huge HUGE Michael Chabon fan. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay … I tear up just thinking about that book. One of those rare books that I truly did not want to end.

Anyway, I’m all pumped up from reading this comi-tragic tale of how he sat down and wrote his first novel. I especially love the part about how he read two novels which basically gave him permission to begin: The Great Gatsby and Goodbye, Columbus:

The Great Gatsby had been the favorite novel of one of those aforementioned friends whom I had decided that, for reasons of emotional grandeur and self-poignance, I was doomed never to meet up with again in this vale of tears. At his urging I had read it a couple of years earlier, without incident or effect. Now I had the sudden intuition that if I read it again, right now, this minute, something important might result: it might change my life. Or maybe there would be something in it that I could steal.

I lay on the bed, opened its cracked paper covers?it was an old Scribner trade paperback, the edition whose cover looked as though it might have been one of old Ralph’s wood shop projects?and this time The Great Gatsby read me. The mythographic cast of my mind in that era, the ideas of friendship and self-invention and problematic women, the sense, invoked so thrillingly in the book’s closing paragraphs, that the small, at times tawdry love-sex-and-violence story of a few people could rehearse the entire history of the United States of America from its founding vision to the Black Sox scandal?The Great Gatsby did what every necessary piece of fiction does as you pass through that fruitful phase of your writing life: made me want to do something just like it.

I began to detect the germ of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh as I finished Fitzgerald’s masterpiece: I would write a novel about friendship and its im-possibility, about self-inventors and dreamers of giant dreams, about complicated women and the men who make them that way. I put it back in its place on the shelf and as I did so I noticed its immediate neighbor: an old Meridian Books paperback edition of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, the one with the lipstick-print-and-curly-script cover art by Paul Bacon, a master of American jacket illustration who would, in a few years, design a memorable cover for the book I was urging out of myself that day. I had never read Goodbye, Columbus, and as I got back into bed with it I remarked, in its lyric and conversational style, its evocation of an eastern summer, its consciously hyperbolic presentation of the mythic Brenda Patimkin and her family of healthy, dumb, fruit-eating Jews, and its drawing of large American conclusions from small socioerotic situations, how influenced Roth had clearly been by his own youthful reading of the Fitzgerald novel. That gave me encouragement; it made me feel as if I were preparing to sail to Cathay along a route that had already proven passable and profitable for others.

Gorgeous. Need to print this one out to keep!