The only thing I dislike
more in Michael Chabon’s career than his recent output may be his early output,
because his short Story collection, A Model World, may be the least impressive
book, standing behind only the dreck that he came onto the scene with, The
Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It falls into doing something I really cannot stand
when it comes to short stories: nothing ever happens. A few emotions are
uncovered, and certain desires and wants come to the surface in these stories,
but no real action take place. I’m not really judging those kinds of stories on
their literary merit, authors like Raymond Carver are masters of the form, and
his stories have very little action. It really comes down to preference, and I
just prefer my stories to have a kind of weirder bent to them. It is a small
enough form to experiment with, so I like it when a story loses its marbles a
bit. My favorite short story writers; Dan Chaon, Haruki Murakami, Flannery O’
Conner and Joe R. Lansdale, all write stories that walk that line between
insanity and brilliance very well. But having said that, I still feel that
Chabon’s first collection is not a very good one. They all have interesting
settings, especially the last one, which involves a group of kids who appear to
be breaking into a house to proposition a foreign girl for sex. But I found it
easy to lose the motivation of each character, probably because none of them
were very well drawn-out, and what motivations they had, if any at all, were
not really clear, or got in the way of what Chabon really wanted to express in
the short form. I can’t be too made at this collection. It is from a very early
period in the life of a literary superstar, and I’m glad to say that
Wonderboys, Chabon’s best book, was right around the corner.
Rating: 3/5
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