Werewolves in Their Youth (Michael Chabon) *** boring modern fancy lit
These stories are not for me. Chabon paints sad little miniatures of futile, fearful little people. The fat 11-year-old whose family falls apart, the man who despises his wife for marrying a man "whose touch left her vagina as dry as a fist," the husband who got displaced by a rapist's sperm. Each character is such a small and suffocating person in a tiny glass world that I'm amazed the font itself didn't shrink as I read. If I had a chord to be touched, I would say these are wonderfully apt portraits of American despair, but instead I think, "Why am I reading about these losers?" Get a divorce! Get a job! A graduate degree will always baptize you.
I read, uninterested in the characters, for incongruous bits of Chabon observation that do not fit in these stale little worlds. He writes in passing of people working on the cathedrals of their bad decisions, though none of the characters could phrase such thoughts. It puts even more impossible distance between reader and subject, but it's also like biting into real blueberries in a store-bought muffin.
From "Green's Book":...people who tattooed themselves, particularly the young men and women one saw doing it today, were practicing a kind of desperate act of self-assertion through legerdemain, holding a candle to a phrase written in invisible ink, raising letters and lines where before there had only been the blankest sheet of paper. Don't throw me away, they were saying. I bear a hidden message.
I read, uninterested in the characters, for incongruous bits of Chabon observation that do not fit in these stale little worlds. He writes in passing of people working on the cathedrals of their bad decisions, though none of the characters could phrase such thoughts. It puts even more impossible distance between reader and subject, but it's also like biting into real blueberries in a store-bought muffin.
From "Green's Book":...people who tattooed themselves, particularly the young men and women one saw doing it today, were practicing a kind of desperate act of self-assertion through legerdemain, holding a candle to a phrase written in invisible ink, raising letters and lines where before there had only been the blankest sheet of paper. Don't throw me away, they were saying. I bear a hidden message.