Michael Chabon Takes the High Road

I collect beautiful sentences, and in Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon has given me a bookful of them, a collection so intoxicating that it almost doesn't matter, to a stylist like me, what the story's about.

Luckily, the story's as much fun as the prose. An unlikely pair of "gentlemen"--Amran, an earthy African axe-wielder, and Zelikman, a lonely, high-minded healer--roam the medieval world in search of adventure, wealth, and wrongs to right. They remind me of all the great male duos of literature and film: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, juggling idealism and hard reality; Luke Skywalker and Han Solo one-upping each other with innocence and experience; Butch and Sundance shrugging as they jump off the cliff together. In every chapter the "gentlemen" encounter ambushes, traitors, orphans who need saving, corrupt rulers, savage mercenaries, animals with superhuman powers, torn and bleeding bodies--all the stuff of a Marvel comic book or an Indiana Jones movie. It's no surprise that the boys save the day and get the girls before they ride off into the sunset.

But what is surprising in such a story is the subtlety of characterization, conveyed in short bursts of dialogue. “I don’t save lives,” Zelikman the healer says. “I just prolong their futility.” In one of the few long speeches in the book, Zelikman captures both the melodrama and the nobility of the book when he proclaims: “I am not overly encumbered by principle, as you know. I am a gentleman of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a brigand, a hired blade, a thief, but on this one small principle of economy, damn you, and damn that troublemaking little stripling, and damn every one of those men out there, living men, in full possession, for the most part, of all their limbs and humors, I have to hold firm: if we can only save them one man at a time, then by God we must only kill them one man at a time.”

That long sentence, with its rich vocabulary, skillful repetition, meandering structure, and delayed punchline, is typical of Chabon's writing. I kept wandering away from the plotline to admire the linguistic scenery along the way. In the best passages, and there are many, action, character, emotion, and description intertwine to produce a kind of High-Def prose where the beads of sweat on the faces of the men in the foreground, and the terror drumming in their hearts, are as clear as the invading ships in the distance. Case in point: "He wept silently, after the custom of shamed and angry men, so that when the pursuit party came tumbling, pounding, scrabbling down the trail, past the fold in which he and Hillel [his horse] stood concealed, he could hear the creak and rattle of their leather armor with its scales of horn; and when the Arsiyah returned, just before daybreak, at the very hour when all of creation seemed to fall silent as if fighting off tears, Zelikman could hear the rumbling of the men’s bellies and the grit in their eyelids and the hollowness of failure sounding in their chests."

Chabon pulls out of his bag of tricks two other conventions of old-fashioned storytelling that kept me turning the pages. His chapter titles are elegant and seductive: "On the Seizing of a Low Moment"; "On a Consignment of Flesh" ; and finally, "On Following the Road to One's Destiny, with the Usual Intrusions of Violence and Grace." And in case we're still not having enough fun, sprinkled through the slim book are fifteen pen-and-ink illustrations in the style of the best books I read as a kid in the sixties. They are by Gary Gianni, who, fittingly, draws the never-ending comic strip "Prince Valiant."

So what's a nice Pulitzer Prize-winning author doing in a place like this? In an endearing afterword, Chabon tries to answer that inevitable question. "You catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of the characters in my earlier stories...were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure....Adventures are a logical and reliable result--and have been since the time of Odysseus--of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had; then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. Given a choice, I very much prefer to stay home, where I may safely encounter adventure in the pages of a book, or seek it out, as I have here, in the friendly wilderness of my computer screen."

I'm so thankful that Chabon chose the literary form of adventure and then invited us all along for the ride. And if he gets hooked on the genre (my word, not his; he hates the way books are slotted into discrete categories that carry automatic judgements and misjudgements) and produces the next Lord of the Rings, I'll be first in line at the bookstore.

Octavian Nothing: Really Something

Most adult readers assume that "young adult" fiction consists of smarmy high school romances full of stereotypical teens learning Hallmark life lessons while indulging heavily in sex, booze, drugs, and hip-hop, or whatever's the latest pop-culture flavor-of-the-month. The best YA literature--and I do not use the term loosely--may indeed include such ingredients (just as Shakespeare and Jane Austen did), but it can also transcend the age and cultural limitations of teens to entertain and enlighten readers of any age. M. T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1, which won the National Book Award last year, is such a novel.

Set in the Boston area in the early days of the American Revolution, Octavian tells the story of an African boy who was born a prince and then sold into slavery with his mother. His bondage is an unusual one: he is raised in a College of philosophers and scientists who provide him a classical education and a refined life while scrupulously documenting everything from his intellectual achievements to his feces, all as part of an experiment to determine the relative abilities of different races. Octavian's realization of his ironic dilemma comes amidst a minor smallpox epidemic and a major revolution, one in which he gladly participates even though he knows the freedom he is fighting for will never be his.

Anderson manages to suggest just about every issue of the history of race in America in the experiences of this one boy. The tragic facts he portrays and the terrible questions he raises challenge readers of every age to become newly aware of the horrors of both slavery and war. Octavian is disempowered at every turn, and when he is finally shackled and made to wear an iron mask that prevents him from speaking, we understand in our guts why he must cancel out the emperor's name bestowed on him by his "benefactors" with the surname "Nothing."

And then there is the style. Some writers for teens adopt a simple, pared-down style, or resort to the teenspeak of the day--nothing dates a book faster--or pepper their dialogue with "edgy" invective and sarcasm. I suppose a whole novel will soon be written, if it hasn't been already, in the truncated language of texting. Anderson instead chooses to challenge his young readers by adopting the lofty, lengthy, multi-syllabic, formal, abstract, semicolon-sprinkled and sometimes beautiful language of the eighteenth century Rationalists he castigates. It's intimidating to all but the most erudite reader. It almost lost me, and it will, I regret to say, keep the vast majority of young readers from getting very far into his book--just as the YA marketing will keep adult readers who would love the book from finding it. And while I admire both the work it must have required and the results, I wish he had made a different choice. It's as if he brought into a classroom a young man with a moving, intense, life-changing story to tell, but he dressed him up in a powdered wig and silk hose and expected the kids to take him seriously. A few will listen, but most will be too busy giggling at the foppery to hear the message.

And yet I would love to teach this book to kids who could handle the style. There is so much here to think and talk about: the language itself, the values and practices of the time, the questions felt in the revolutionary hearts of all adolescents, the horrors echoed in our own unsettled day. The reader of any age who can stick with it will be hugely rewarded.