Wonder Boys (1995) was a broader work in somewhat of the same idiom, again embedding questions about art and purpose in an antic comic narrative with an academic setting. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was a witty and heartfelt bildungsroman about writing, identity, sex, literature, and that peculiarly American brand of undergraduate psychological and spiritual paralysis. It doesn’t cast quite the shadow that Infinite Jest might, but that novel still serves as a kind of defining moment in American literary and popular culture, not to mention a fulcrum in Chabon’s career and style, the earlier section of which he is just now tipping his gaze back to with his latest novel, Moonglow.īefore The Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, his third, Chabon was, for lack of a better label, a literary author. The novel that still looms over Chabon’s career to this day is The Adventures of Kavalier & Klay (2000). But one of those, Infinite Jest, redefined the idea and maybe even the reality of fiction in the ’90s. After all, David Foster Wallace only released two finished novels in his career. Certainly, other writers have created even more sprawling a profile across the reading world with less of an output. It’s hard to believe that Michael Chabon has only published eight novels in the nearly three decades that have passed since 1998’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |