Sometimes one walks into a bookshop and a book catches one's eye. You have never heard of the author, you flip through a few pages and are hooked. Then you take it home and devour it over your weekly commute and before long you suspect you will be living with a few more of the author's books. Something much like this happened to me when I picked up Michael Chabon's collection of short stories, A Model World, a few weeks ago.
It turns out the man is something of a literary superstar and one half of a - ahem - model writing couple.
A Model World is an early book of Chabon's. The stories in the first section, A Model World, are disparate. Section 2, A Lost World, follows Nathan Shapiro through the aftermath of his parents' divorce. Chabon's stories are loose, shambolic and yet perfectly structured. Through them course many elements of pop culture and literary nods. And here's the thing, the stories themselves do not always engage or ring true. Even in the straightforward chronicle of A Lost World, at some point you disengage with the characters even though Chabon is so very good at creating the world of childhood and adolescence in the midst of changes it does not fully understand. Yet you are utterly charmed. It is a collection where the persona of the author looms larger than anything the stories might have to say (and inspite of the aforesaid disengagement they do have plenty to say though never in a sledgehammer way). Chabon's joy in writing, the beauty of his language (I haven't read anything in a long time where you want to copy out the sentences), the suggestion that many of the enthusiasms, interests and wistfulness in the stories (and these are many) are all his is effortlessly communicated to the reader so that you care less about the story Chabon chooses to tell than the way he tells it.
Books are expensive, unfortunately it is not always possible to maintain a book harem of an author you like. Still, I might invest in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
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