I’ve been trying to make Wednesday my book review day. So I’m going to transport backward in time and offer a brief comment on Michael Chabon’s “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.”
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this fantastic author, you are missing out. He is a Pulitzer prize winner in fiction for “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and has written numerous other novel, most famously “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Chabon has a knack for using the English language in ways that are funny, insightful, melancholy, and downright funny.
“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” is about the summer wanderings of a young college student whose father is a gangster and whose friends are drunks, screw-ups, and gays. Out of this mishmash of characters, who actually aren’t that removed from reality and who are eerily similar to many characters in the novel of my life, Chabon magnificently portrays the main character (Art Bechstein) as the impressionable, quirky, and relate-able young man who lives inside all of us.
the rev. jimmy abbott 