The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Incredible writing, for sure. A whirlwind and fever-dream of a story about sexual discovery and the confusion of coming-of-age. Chabon's mastery of sentence structure and recognition and ability to impart the surreal moments that shape us is on full display, but Art Bechstein also kinda drove me crazy and was whiny and difficult in ways I never felt about Holden Caulfield. Or, at least, I don't remember feeling about him. He was just caught in the wind and that lack of conviction of anything made me dislike him, maybe unfairly. And the swirling of the storyline was a bit much and a bit repetitive.

I've read a few Chabon novels now, and while I've never really loved any of them there's always something interesting there and the prose itself is very good.

Here, I liked the prose again, but I couldn't get into the characters or story at all. I probably would not have finished it if it were longer. I think it's just not my type of book, it reminded me of something like On The Road.

When you catch yourself in skipping paragraphs because they are just utterly boring and don't do anything to the story and the story itself is just this very thin ribbon that is almost not there then you realize that this book is not for you.

I just didn't like it. It had some good moments and the writing itself was solid but I could not attach to any of the characters and didn't care about them not where they go.

Whenever something interesting happened that might be interesting it was just cut short.

Not recommended.

A pretty good novel, but this doesn't justify the mega-love people my age seem to have for Mr. Chabon. Maybe I started with the wrong book, but he didn't wow me like I was expecting.

I gave it one extra star for making me feel sentimental about Pittsburgh.

Wow. Summertime. Right after graduating from college. Chabon deftly captures the uncertainty, hope, sense of rootlessness, messy love affairs and the rapid alternations between feeling like summer is going to laze on forever, and the sense of urgency about wanting something exciting & earth-shattering to happen RIGHT. NOW. Plus it's sexy. Sometimes desperate, sometimes tender, but really, really sexy. And, perhaps oddly, the ending reminded me a bit of Brideshead Revisited, one of my most favoritest books of all time. So of course I'm sold.