Gentlemen of the Road

Ask yourself whether you like this sort of writing:
“The Wend, sightless and mute, knew the proper smells and bodily utterances of this man and the circular echoes of the apartment so well that on reaching it he could hear the books that had been moved from their right places, and his sapient nostrils at once discerned the intrusive brackish smell of river water and a faint ribbon of some rank attar in the air.”
If you like this sort of thing, you'll find yourself right at home with Gentlemen of the Road.

Michael Chabon's new novel, Gentlemen of the Road, from which the above excerpt is taken, comes hard on the heels of his stunning literary bestseller, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. In fact, in an interview given in May of 2007, before Gentlemen of the Road came out in hardback, Chabon characterizes his newer novel as a sort of therapy from the self-imposed stylistic discipline which informed the earlier Chandleresque stylings of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. “I really kept my language tight in The Yiddish Policemen's Union.... but when I turned to Gentlemen of the Road... I just found these paragraph long sentences pouring out of me. The language that Gentlemen of the Road is written in is really dense, lush, purple somewhat overwritten but fun I hope.” Well, maybe, if you like that sort of thing.

It's fair to say that Chabon has earned the right to attempt any style of writing he wants to. But it's also fair to say that Gentlemen of the Road would probably not have seen the light of day had it been written by an unknown author. It's also fair to say that I would not have finished the book had I not already read The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The first book makes the second book possible in so many ways, but it doesn't make it good.

I devoured The Yiddish Policemen's Union, delighting in the sheer inventiveness of the plot, the fully realized yet fully imagined setting, and (most importantly) the brilliant style of writing. After I finished the book I sought out other reviews and remember reading one reviewer who churlishly pointed out that she didn't really like detective stories in the first place, but as as detective stories go, The Yiddish Policemen's Union was pretty good. And I couldn't help thinking that she'd missed the point completely. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, Chabon plays with the supehero comic genre and succeeds. In The Final Solution, it's the Sherlock Holmes style of detective story that works. So why is it that Chabon succeeds in one genre-stretching novel and doesn't in the next? I think it's a not a matter of the genre itself, but the actual writing style.

Gentlemen of the Road is a swashbuckling episodic adventure story, crafted in a style which pays homage to, but does not surpass the many such stories on which is is based. It's not that the genre is, ipso facto, limited, but the style of writing is. There's nothing inherently pretty or clever in sentences like the one quoted above, or this one, again, typical of the whole book:
" For half a day the captain of the archers - a javshigar in the Army of the Khazar with fifteen years of service to the candelabrum flag - had suffered, shifting from foot to foot, pulling now at his mustache, now at the fingers of his glove, as the warrior king to whom he had sworn loyalty by oaths so ancient and binding they resisted even the power of the autumnal Disavowal haggled and pleaded for the safety of the house of Buljan with a barbarous swaggering Rus butcher whom the vicissitudes of the plunderous life had left only half a face." ( I read this back to myself after typing it, by the way, and still I can't quite tell if I got it right. I think I did.)

In its attempt to encapsulate all exposition within a narrative and stylistic straitjacket, Gentlemen of the Road violates the basic "show, don't tell" dictum of storytelling. The narration is intrusive, ham fisted, over long, and downright silly. The limitations of this style of writing - not the genre itself - make it bad. So, did Chabon think this would be as fun to read as it apparently was for him to write? Apparently so. And yet, the writing fails miserably, because it is neither fish nor fowl, neither one thing nor the other, neither serious nor camp. The style does not transcend its limited model. If there is an in-joke that I'm missing here, it's buried pretty deeply. Sure, there are little subtleties and modern references, but I think Chabon is writing mostly out of genuine love for the Boys' Own adventure stories of his youth, and insofar as he imitates the writing style of that genre without attempting to rise above it he seriously hamstrings his efforts - in a way that never happened with The Yiddish Policemen's Union. In Gentlemen of the Road I am reading an author who seems to be having great fun, and, who knows, may think he is expanding the possibilities of literature, as he has done in the past. But this just doesn't work.