The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon

I wanted to read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh the minute I finished Michael Chabon's recent nonfiction collection, Maps and Legends. My usual taste in debut novels runs averse to post-graduation coming-of-age tales, but I found Chabon's to be entertaining without the usual trite-ness of the genre. It definitely helped that the copy the library held for me was one of HarperPerennial's much-adored Olive editions:

The story, involving the Pittsburgh Jewish mafia, a mysterious Cloud Factory, and party scenes that echo The Great Gatsby so vividly that I was unsurprised to learn that Chabon had read F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel immediately before writing his own, runs a bit into the territory of the fantastical. Art, the protagonist, is dealing with such powerful issues--his bisexuality, his relationship with his mobster father, the death of his mother--in such a haphazard way that the novel never risks entry into the gooey, mushy arena of the typical coming-of-age story. Essentially a good book about summer, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh might be the perfect book to round out my past four months of reading.

I'm starting The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories before returning to Skidmore, and I hope to get farther into it than I did when I began it in April. Until then...

The Immoralist, Andre Gide

I picked up The Immoralist a few years ago at the Brown Elephant and have been looking forward to reading it for a while. It was published in France in 1902, and was extremely controversial for what the back of my Penguin classic edition deems its "frank defense of homosexuality." A short novel, The Immoralist is narrated by its protagonist in the form of a monologue to the narrator's friends. I expected it to be much more thrilling that it turned out to be, but I suppose that is the fault of the time at which it was published. Still, it didn't engage me; it felt dry and monotonous. I should have known that if Gide published it and went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1947, it wasn't going to be any Queer as Folk. One can always hope...

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

Sometimes a magical thing will happen to me: I'll pick up a book and read the first few pages and suddenly, somehow, find myself finishing it within hours. This happened with "Fun Home," a graphic novel described by the author/illustrator as a "family tragicomic." A general explication of the lesbian Bechdel's relationship with her closeted father, the novel proved to be a deep, feelinged probing of the heretofore exhausted subject of father-daughter relationships--something I couldn't have expected from a graphic novel. It's a quick read, but one that will stick in your head for days or weeks afterward. An excerpt is below: