Customer Reviews

Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In each of these nine stories, Chabon--particularly noted for his stylistic accomplishments--manages to flesh out a variety of characters in only a few pages, and sometimes in a few words. His sentences frequently seem to reach perfection, each word fitting precisely with a satisfying snap like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle, without the disappointing sting of over-cleverness.

As I read each wholly original story, I couldn't help but respond frequently with a knowing smile and the warm realization of recognition. I've smelled that smell and heard that sound ("There was a stink of chlorine from the waterfall in the atrium where the chimes of the elevators echoed all night with a sound like a dental instrument hitting a cold tile floor"). I've seen that place, even though I've never been there ("Plunkettsburg was at first glance unprepossessing--a low, rusting little city, with tarnished onion domes and huddled houses, drab as an armful of dead leaves strewn along the ground"). I've felt that feeling ("The next day I lay in bed, aching, sore, and suffering from that peculiar brand of spiritual depression born largely of suppressed fear"). And I most assuredly know that person ("Oriole was a big, broad-backed woman, ample and plain and quadrangular as the state of Iowa itself. Hugging her, Eddie felt comforted, as by the charitable gaze of a cow"). Each page proffers several such stylistic gems, which serve to draw you into the story without putting you off with their brilliance.

Chabon has the ability to hook our heart by ripping the skin off some of the more devastating aspects of contemporary dysfunctional life--divorce, rape, alcoholism, mental illness--while giving us permission, even encouraging us, to laugh at the absurd behavior of these human beings who remind us so much of ourselves. These stories are bitingly funny because we know them, we've been there, or we've imagined them ourselves. They are fresh and original, and yet they resonate with familiarity.

Perhaps you had to have been a boy once to fully appreciate the haunting title story. Poignant and powerful, it prodded many of my own boyhood memories, stirring up emotional coals that still smolder in this 44-year-old body. "Werewolves in Their Youth" captures at once the magical imagination of youth--playing super-hero, android, or werewolf--and the harrowing, confusing reality that insists on breaking in when those childish fantasies go too far. It reads like a mature, modern Ray Bradbury, yet with a more satisfying and non-artificial ending. In fact, the endings of all these tales transmit a note of surprise, but without disingenuousness.

Here are ordinary people in ordinary situations--a graduation party, a bris, a night at a ramshackle island bar--who are revealed as twisted and awry because of their inner fear, violent anger, or confusion. Yet these are stories that repeatedly strike a chord because, after all, there's a little of the werewolf in each of us.

This is the better of Chabon's two short story collections. There isn't a lot of thematic variation here - all of these stories except for the very last one are about the muddles and unpredictabilities attendant upon married life, and reading them quickly one after the other can be a bit of a downer for this reason. But Chabon has an incredible gift with language, and although a lot of his characters are losers or muddleheaded or the victims of terrible decisions, his prose makes the world around them seem so rich and pregnant with possibilities that it's difficult to find any of the yarns here too depressing. The only time he misfires is in one story that's set entirely in a neighborhood bar - Chabon clearly doesn't frequent such places, and his attempt to catch the atmosphere in one is condescending and a little cliched.

The last story, "In The Black Mill," was a special treat for me. I'm a big fan of gothic horror and this is a wonderful pastiche of M.R. James with maybe a touch of Poe. One hopes that the author never gets so soaked up in Northeastern literary culture that he begins to think that this sort of genre exercise is beneath his dignity.

Michael Chabon is mostly known for his novels (Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), but I think his short stories are little gems. The opening sentence of the title story alone is wonderful. His writing sparkles with characters, settings, detail, and vivid turns of phrase. The final story, a Gothic tale written in the style of an author-character in The Wonder Boys, was perfectly done. A perfect book to keep in the car or briefcase for reading while you wait--but you may not be able to stop reading when it's time to go!

I have to admit that the cover of this collection put me off a bit. I'm not usually attracted to Werewolves. But when I realized that the Werewolf in the title story wasn't a supernatural creature, but a child who felt like I did way back when -- isolated,friendless, lonely -- I couldn't help but buy the book. And I was overwhelmed, frankly. Chabon's snapshots of life's moments -- sometimes redemptive, often painful -- touched me in a way most contemporary fiction doesn't. There's a bit of Yates here, some Cheever, Alice Munro, even Lovecraft. And there is something entirely Chabon about it. I couldn't help but laugh at the "reviewers" whose main complaint was that they had to use a dictionary every once in a while. What a great pleasure that was for me -- to discover a word or two that I'd never read before. Isn't that the beauty of the English language? That it contains these mysteries and gifts of little used but fabulous words? How lucky we are to have a writer able to send us tripping through the Oxford English Dictionary while keeping us absolutely grounded in the contemporary American experience.

One way I judge the strength of a story is to ask myself whether it would ever be anthologized and maybe studied in future literature classes. I don't think any of these stories will ever be anthologized in a collection of say, "Best Short Stories of the End of the 20th Century." What's good about these stories is Chabon's gift of observation. It's been a couple of weeks since I read this book, and I still think of some of the images it contains. He's very good at picking out the salient detail and describing it in a way that gives it a resonance beyond mere description. Here's a boy with a box of laboratory supplies belonging to his banished father: "I knelt down and wrapped my arms around the carton and lowered my face into it and inhaled a clean, rubbery smell like that of a new Band Aid." Here's a six-foot-eight athlete- turned- tycoon in a business suit: "He wore silver aviator eyeglasses and a custom-tailored suit, metallic gray, so large and oddly proportioned that it was nearly unrecognizable as an article of human clothing and appeared rather to have been designed to straiten an obstreperous circus elephant or to keep the dust off some big, delicate piece of medical imaging technology." I think that's good stuff. I just wish I had been able to become involved in the stories, or maybe have identified with one of the characters once in a while. Most of the characters are people who are unconnected to their surroundings. Parents have failed their children, children have failed their parents, ex-spouses want they-don't-know-what from each other. The book is populated almost exclusively by people who are resigned to failure. As a result, there's a certain smug undertone to all the stories that I found off-putting. I did not find any of the stories very emotionally involving. My basic reaction to each story was a smirk. Considering Chabon's legions of fans, surely his reputation does not rest on his short stories. One of these days I'll give one of his novels a try.

If books had body temperature this collection would have been ice cold. Little warm bodies of children and adults are pitched against the inhumane chill of everyday life. No matter the age, characters in the book are often profoundly lonely and find themselves palpating the way out of the woods on a deeply foggy morning/afternoon/evening of their lives. Kids turning into werewolves, under the watchful and indifferent eye of adults - parents stupefied by their dysfunctional lives, schools simplemindedly punitive - cry out for help in their awkward ways and find that they have only each other to turn to. Couples, young and old, struggling through their marriages and divorces, the lucky ones finding consolation in realizing that there are no recipes for working it out (as in "House Hunting"). Adult-age people deeply confused about having or raising children ("Wolfman's Child" and "Green's Book"). Young people blaming their misfortunes on the adults in their lives and watching themselves become one of them ("The Harris Fetko Story"). Or sheer chill of being utterly alone ("Mrs. Box").

Our lives rarely come prepackaged with instructions for use, but more often with some sort of uncertainty. The main appeal of Michael Chabon the short story writer is his linguistic mastery of picturing this uncertainty and our incoherent attempts at resolving it. This artistry is akin to the skill of a master fine artist who beautifully depicts what he sees without passing judgement. Many of these stories do not offer any resolution, and even do not reach a climax. They are elegant sketches of other people's lives. Rich, precise and densely packed language makes you slow down and savor the book sentence by sentence, instead of gulping it. The characters are very much alive and colorful. Moving.

I'll take an uneven, fearless collection of stories anyday over a homogeneous, sparkling parcel of prose. Chabon's effort is certainly in the former category, and after the first two stories I felt the way I do whenever I encounter someone truly great--I'm [mad] that I'm not him. Some have charged the writing here is forced and too "literary," but there is a rolling charm that type of style often produces. The subject matter is emotionally charged, and the sometimes jarring storytelling elevates these stories beyond melodrama and into the realm of insight.

After sampling the self-indulgent, immature (but often entertaining) offerings of other young Americans (Eggars, Sedaris, Foster Wallace) recently, Chabon's mostly successful attempts to wrap his voice around more adult themes is rewarding.

Sure, you might need a dictionary, but grab a pencil, too--there are scores of headshaking insights and descriptions to note in this ambitious collection.

After a while you wonder if anyone has a marraige, or pregnancy, that works. These stories, however, are simply outstanding. Chabon's prose uses the English language perfectly, recognizing that every word has its own true meaning, and using those words to paint uncannily vivid pictures. His characters are also true to life, reflecting how unstable and unpredictable we all can be, and he details the relationships betweeen these characters with great accuracy and understanding.

In addition, we are treated to a short story by "August Van Zorn," the Wonder Boys' author who first united Crabtree and Tripp. I don't know if this will become a regular pseudonym for Mr. Chabon, but if it does, so much the better. Not every story hits the mark, but it's only one or two, and they don't miss by much. Now it's just a matter of waiting for his next book.

I don't usually enjoy short stories, so it was with some trepidation that I purchased this book. It wildly exceeded my expectations. What a writer this man is. I thought the comment in the Washington Post about Chabon being the "Star of American Letters" might have been over the top, and then I read these stories. He is, in every way, a star. Luminous. Brilliant.

Not much to say here. If you like Lovecraftian tales, "The Black Mill" is well worth checking out. It's the one story that stands out like a sore thumb in this collection, but it's justified by a preface explaining that it's a story written by a minor but important character from "The Wonder Boys."

It's a pretty neat concept, the idea of exploring a genre voice by letting one of your characters do the writing. I'm a sucker for such things, and this was no disappointment. Creepy story that builds the tension in a believable manner. The only disappointing part was the very end. There's a narrative device at play there that will either give you the chills or make you roll your eyes in a "hey, no fair!" fashion. I experienced a little of each.

As for the other stories --

What other reviewers are saying is right on target. Lots of failed marriages. "Son of the Wolfman" is good, but I've never been a very big fan of short fiction with an omniscient narrator. In this story we get inside the heads of at least two characters, and I don't think it was really necessary to be in both -- especially since the 2nd character was somewhat minor (she's the midwife of the aforementioned rape victim). Time is of the essence in a short story, and given that fact, I have a personal preference for being in only one person's head. But maybe that's just me.

On the whole, this collection is very readable. I go against the grain, though, and cast a vote in favor of more gothic horror from Mr. Chabon in the future. "The Black Mill" is a real romp.