Michael Chabon Critical Essay | Critical Review by David Montrose

Critical Review by David Montrose

SOURCE: “Another Last Summer,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 1991, p. 20.

In the following review of A Model World, Montrose finds Chabon's short fiction well composed but unexceptional.

Over recent years, certain hypesters in American publishing have managed to pass off a potential to achieve great things some day as great things already achieved. The result has been a string of young writers whose books possessed, the PR went, serious literary merit as well as impressive sales.

Michael Chabon's novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) was the unlikeliest bestseller of the bunch. The hype-assisted successes of Less Than Zero, Slaves of New York and Bright Lights, Big City were not unexpected, given that fictional guides to new lifestyles have been popular, and overpraised, at least since F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise supposedly anatomized the Jazz Age. Chabon's book, however, lacked that brand of currency, harking back...
(read more)