Book Review: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

By Bethany Olson

Arthur, a recent college graduate who has just ended a strange dating relationship, starts out a lazy Pittsburgh summer with little idea of purpose or knowledge of self. He stops into the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library without realizing that that decision would catapult him through an unusual and enlightening series of events.

Arthur meets Art in the library, a young man of whom he “hadn’t a doubt that he was gay,” and with whom Arthur was “keen to avoid, as they say, a misunderstanding” of sexual interest. Despite his reservations, Arthur agrees to have a beer with Art on Forbes Avenue. Shortly thereafter, Arthur meets Phlox in the library, a girl who had admired him from behind the metal bars of her small work area. “She was unquestionably beautiful, and yet there was something odd, wrong, about her looks, her clothing: something a little too, from her too blue eyes in their too direct stare to the too red stockings she wore.”

Arthur estimates his own identity by his interactions with others; throughout, he alternates between friendship with both Art and Phlox to being sexual lovers with one or the other of the two (Arthur no longer knows if he is straight or gay.) And ever-hidden is Arthur’s secret, “the nature of my father’s work,” which “I came to associate… with shame.” Arthur did not realize his father was in mob work until his thirteenth birthday: “I never afterward had the slightest desire to tell [my father’s] secret to any of my friends; indeed, I ardently concealed it.”

If only Art did not need his father’s money; if only Art did not desire his father’s never-given approval. If only a third friend, Cleveland, had not exploded into Arthur’s life; Cleveland’s interest in mob business and his knowledge of Arthur’s father threatens to join the two worlds Arthur so desperately tries to separate. Some time after realizing that Cleveland would “breach the barrier that stood between my family and my life, and scale the wall that I was,” Arthur says, “I saw that I’d been mistaken when I thought of myself as a Wall, because a wall stands between, and holds apart, two places, two worlds, whereas, if anything, I was nothing but a portal, ever widening…. And a wall says no; a portal doesn’t do anything.”

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon is a coming-of-age story with elements of self-understanding and making one’s way in the world, without the influence of others. Its quirky subthemes and genius passages are too many to list here. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was Chabon’s premiere novel that launched his fame (first published in 1988); his The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is an unusual, inviting, thoughtful read with layers of meaning infused not only throughout the plot, but evident in every word and metaphor. It is exciting for a Pittsburgh native to read about places and streets that are so familiar (I live around the block from Arthur’s fictional home). But regardless of where a reader lives, Chabon crafts both setting and characters’ complicated emotions with startling intensity, promising a meaningful read for all adult readers.