Chabon’s Latest “Mysteries”

A girl I was trying very hard to get to like me once casually mentioned her favorite book, Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh — which, of course, meant that I immediately packed myself over to the closest public library and began scavenging through it like a madman.

Of any book to be read under these circumstances, Mysteries is probably among the worst — a bizarre coming-of-age tale about a boy named Art Bechstein, the son of Jewish mobsters. It starts reading like an old-school American novel like Herman Wouk’s The City Boy and concludes more along the lines of, uh — a really bizarre old-school pulp porno.

Keep in mind that this is Chabon when he was an undergraduate in college; trying to be a haute auteur and not yet at the point where he could ‘fess up to his X-Men addiction. He had yet to be hailed, for better or worse, as the Jewish Author of the Generation (although, in a just world, his reputation would be solidified by the admirable Khazar novel The Gentlemen of the Road than, well, Yiddish policemen), and so what follows is just a smattering of experimentation, sexually as well as narratively, in the life of young Mr. Bechstein over one summer.

Discover More

Yiddish Policemen

Michael Chabon’s new novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won’t be published until May 1, but the Forward has jumped the ...

The End of an Era

I tend to get nostalgic around Rosh Hashanah, and in my JPost column this usually results in a September piece ...

Yiddish 2.0

It’s weird and somewhat scary to realize that you can put a cap on the number of Yiddish books ever ...