Michael Chabon

Contents

Part 1: A Model World

S Angel: B

Ocean Avenue: C-

A Model World: C

Blumenthal on the Air: A

Smoke: B+

Millionaires: B+

Part 2: The Lost World

The Little Knife: C-

More than Human: B

Admirals: B

The Halloween Party: A

The Lost World: A+

Blumenthal on the Air

    Although all of Chabon’s short stories in A Model World showcase some sort of human drama as the center focus, Blumenthal on the Air for me does the most with the least. Take a fairly intelligent, knowledgeable, artistic, and generally “cool cat” from the United States, stick him together with a butch Iranian woman who may only want to get citizenship from marriage, and then throw them both in the fairly foreign atmosphere of Paris and you have a recipe for all sorts of uncomfortable scenarios. From the very beginning, Brian Blumenthal (the main character of the story)’s personal narration clues us in to the uncertainty of his feelings for Roksana, his Iranian wife. Instead of describing how they interact directly from a third person point of view, Chabon opts to have Brian himself tell us, and through his mixture of reverence and indifference we can tell he’s not quite sure what he thinks of his wife anymore, or whether he was thinking at all to begin with. This uncertainty stays with him, and us, as we follow the two in an ordinary day in their life in France where Brian seems to enjoy a fairly happy and successful career as a disc jockey for a local radio station. Here we get another glimpse into the workings of the man’s mind as he happens to mention one of the perks of the job being that he is often called up by cute single french girls who love music and his jockeying. The stage is well set by the time the pair ends up at a dinner at one of his french friend’s parent’s houses. This is a good time to mention that Roksana doesn’t speak any french at all, something hinted at before but now thrown at us so that we can realize how bad an idea it was for Brian to drag her there at all. There is something eerie and uncomfortable about the way the rest of the story is presented, as Brian seems almost detached from everything going on around him, and particularly detached from his wife, and at the end he is confronted with the question readers may have been asking since page two.

The Little Knife

    The second part of this short story collection is a series of connected narratives starting with The Little Knife. While the previous, unconnected stories were hit and miss for me, these I think held the same level of quality and merely became more enjoyable as the narrative progressed due to familiarity. The Little Knife first introduces us to Nathan Shapiro, an intelligent and curious boy of ten, who serves as the narrator and primary focus. The other primary characters include his mother, his father, and his younger brother Ricky. Taken at face value, the story may seem similar to those from the first section of the book as it showcases a boy coming to grips with the marital strife of his parents while on a routine vacation to the beach, only to gain increases significance once you realize it is the first in a series. While I did not like this one as much as some of the other stories, I think I understand what its purpose was as a writer. The Little Knife’s overall narrative was less important, instead focusing on fleshing out the way young Nathan thinks, what he thinks about, his sensitivity, his relationship with his family, and doing the same to a lesser extent with them as well. While this makes the story a bit more dry and less visceral than some of Chabon’s others, when looked at through the lens of The Lost World stories as a whole, it is a bit easier to come to grips with.

The Lost World

    While The Little Knife is the first of the series and my least favorite, The Lost World is the last and is my favorite by far of all the stories in this collection. By the time you read the story you should be well familiar with Nathan Shapiro, having watched him grow into a young man from ten to sixteen years of age. Whereas The Little Knife was an introduction in which the plot was less relevant and character details were more so, The Lost World is the final chapter that shuts us out of Nathan’s life for good, and so Chabon clearly focuses on the action this time around. Nathan is naked and a little drunk, driving around in a car with three of his friends. It might seem a little strange given what we know of him growing up, but it is clear by the way he continues to narrate that he is still more or less the same Nathan. The final story follows him as he sneaks into the room of a girl who he has known on and off and who his friends say will put out to anyone. Again, something strange for the Nathan we know, but his narration is both endearing to anyone who has been a teenager before and also consistent with his own personality as he mostly fails to get anything done, instead talking to the girl, Chaya, and learning that she is leaving to Jerusalem never to return, ultimately blowing any possibility of a future with her for Nathan. The description of the scenes in this story are Chabon’s best, easily engrossing the reader and playing the scene in the imagination as if it were from a myriad of cheesy romantic comedy movies. The story ultimately ends as Nathan’s heart is broken by a short, heartless letter from Chaya and an equally disappointing sandwich with pickles on it made by his stepfather and one more letter from his father. It is here I came to understand that Nathan’s fate was to be that of his family’s, namely his father’s, before him, and I could not help but feel sorry for the interesting young man I had followed from page to page.

https://www.harpercollins.com/authors/michaelchabon

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/michael-chabon-interview-memories-have-little-relationship-truth/