So, I loved this book, and kind of wanted it to be my life, the way certain people I could name but won't feel about The Sun Also Rises. I was about fifty pages in, tops, before I found myself casting the movie in my head. (I deliberately avoided looking at the cast list until after I finished reading the book; thank god I did, I would have liked the book, I estimate, about 46% less had I know while reading it that Mena Suvari plays Phlox. Appalling.) Or, to be honest, imagining myself as the lead character in the movie of the book. Or, to be even more honest, imagining myself as the lead character in the real-life version of the book. I haven't done this since, I don't think, and funnily enough, Fortress of Solitude. (Not coicidentally, another book that takes place appealingly in a culturally signified past; I think it helps, if you're going to try to place yourself in a story, it helps to be able to place the story in a time and place that already seems and looks like part of history, as opposed to the uncertainly defined present.) Yeah, I know there are a hell of a lot of other things literature can do, but this was the first of the things that literature can do that literature did to me, and I'm glad to be reminded of how it feels.

And you know what? Chabon knows exactly what he's doing. It's so obviously semi-autobiographical, embellished and romanticized (crime! great food! copius sex! adventures!), but essentially a not-quite-as-young-as-he-once-was man's marvel at his youth, and sadness at its passing. (I'm fairly certain I could have figured this out even if I had read an essay to that effect once.) Chabon makes it clear, I think, exactly how aware he is of all this, with passages about "the will to bigness," and the narrator's closing admission about his tendency to exaggerate.

So The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a book about how art can make life bigger and better than it is.

I should also mention that one of the reasons it pulls this off is because there's a memorable image, quotable bit of dialogue, fresh observation, or hilariously perfect and original turn of phrase on pretty much every page of the thing.