Still it is a city Chabon describes with an accurate and loving attention to detail, having spent his undergraduate years, as has his narrator, Art Bechstein, in the University of that city. Perhaps it was Pittsburgh, not exactly a setting to attract a reader’s attention with its exotic or romantic connotations. Reading it again with the power of hindsight, one wonders why. Though it earned much praise from reviewers, Mysteries, like so many first novels ended up in overstock bins with piles of remainders (which by the way is where I chanced upon it).
So since Michael Chabon’s latest has garnered him one of the above, a word or two about his 1988 opus, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, may well be instructive. When a novelist wins a prestigious literary prize like the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner, it is interesting to glance back at his first novel–first novels, even those praised, so regularly ignored by the public at large–to discover the signs of greatness to be that perhaps one might have missed on first reading.
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