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Werewolves in Their Youth
The author of Wonder Boys returns with a powerful and wonderfully written collection of stories. Caught at moments of change, Chabon's men and women, children and husbands and wives, all face small but momentous decisions. They are caught in events that will crystallize and define their lives forever, and with each, Michael Chabon brings his unique vision and uncanny understanding of our deepest mysteries and our greatest fears.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 19, 1999
369 people are currently reading
3770 people want to read
About the author
Michael Chabon
143 books8,873 followersMichael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 24. He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.
His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch", concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989.
Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, he has written in increasingly diverse styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 24. He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.
His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch", concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989.
Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, he has written in increasingly diverse styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
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January 8, 2020
Michael Chabon is to writing as fluffy is to bunnies who murder chinchillas, skin them, and wrap themselves in the deceased chinchillas’ pelts. But, this collection of failing or broken relationships and damaged menfolk is not my favorite. That’s in part because it’s about as much fun as being Vin Diesel’s barber, but it’s also because the stories don’t vibrate with Chabon’s usual stylistic verve or leave you with much of a sense of hope for the characters.
What saves it is the concluding tale, “In the Black Mill,” which is pitched as having been written by August Van Zorn, a character from the wonderful Wonder Boys. It’s a delightful slice of Lovecraftian pulp that made me want an entire book of Van Zorn stories. Chabon’s gift for genre fiction is immense, even if it sometimes feels a little bit like watching LeBron James get hyper competitive as he dominates a game of tiddly winks.
Worth a read for Chabon completists; others should seek out the soaring Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the achingly yearning Mysteries of Pittsburgh, or the twisting Moonglow.
What saves it is the concluding tale, “In the Black Mill,” which is pitched as having been written by August Van Zorn, a character from the wonderful Wonder Boys. It’s a delightful slice of Lovecraftian pulp that made me want an entire book of Van Zorn stories. Chabon’s gift for genre fiction is immense, even if it sometimes feels a little bit like watching LeBron James get hyper competitive as he dominates a game of tiddly winks.
Worth a read for Chabon completists; others should seek out the soaring Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the achingly yearning Mysteries of Pittsburgh, or the twisting Moonglow.
July 19, 2013
Michael Chabon escribió estos cuentos en sus primeros años como escritor. "Chico prodigioso" a temprana edad, la revista New Yorker publicaba sus relatos a mediados de los ochenta, cuando Chabon era un veinteañero. La mayoría de los cuentos que componen este volumen son maravillosos. Con una aparente simplicidad, Chabon escribe sobre matrimonios que se desintegran, y cómo es de difícil el paso de la juventud a la madurez. Mezclando sabiamente el humor, la ironía y el drama, Chabon nos ofrece nueve cuentos que bien podrían haberse convertido en novelas, pero que son perfectos y se valen por sí mismos. Aquí van los nueve cuentos con mi valoración:
- JÓVENES HOMBRES LOBO (*****), en el que dos chicos, amigos que comparten el ser unos parias en su colegio, ven como su mundo se desintegra, el de Timothy por creerse un "hombre lobo" y el de Paul por la separación de sus padres. Una obra maestra.
- CACERÍA DE CASAS (*****), en el que Daniel y Christy, un joven matrimonio, acude con el señor Hogue a visitar una casa para su posible compra, y los problemas de la pareja salen a relucir, al igual que las sorpresas y equívocos. Simplemente genial.
- HIJO DEL HOMBRE LOBO (*****), en el que Cara ha sido violada por el Violador del Embalse y queda embarazada, con el consecuente trauma tanto para ella como para Richard, su marido. Ternura y compasión en un cuento redondo.
- EL LIBRO DE GREEN (**), en el que Green y su hija Jocelyn, acuden a la fiesta de graduación del hijo de una antigua amiga, para la que trabajó en su juventud como canguro de su otra hija, Ruby, a la que esperaba no volver a ver. El cuento que menos me ha gustado.
- LA SEÑORA BOX (****), en el que Eddie, que tiene graves problemas económicos, decide hacer una visita sorpresa a la abuela de su ex mujer y nada sale como esperaba. Un buen cuento.
- ZAPATILLAS DE CLAVOS (*****), en el que Kohn, con su propia tragedia familiar, decide echar una mano a un chaval que vive en la misma isla, inadaptado socialmente. Una miniatura perfecta, otra obra maestra.
- LA HISTORIA DE HARRIS FETKO (****), en el que Harris, jugador de fútbol americano, es invitado por su padre, entrenador, a la circuncisión de su hermanastro. También hay sitio para el humor.
- ESA ERA YO (***), en el que una pareja visita una taberna buscando el pasarlo bien e intentar encontrar una salida a su situación. Buen cuento.
- EN LA NEGRA FUNDICIÓN (*****), en el que Chabon nos hace un guiño contándonos una historia de misterio y terror, al más puro estilo Poe, escrita por August van Zorn, el autor fetiche de Grady Tripp, el protagonista de 'Chicos prodigiosos'. Otra maravilla.
Como colofón, decir simplemente que hubiese querido que los cuentos siguiesen y siguiesen infinitamente. Da gusto leer cuentos, y libros, si son así.
- JÓVENES HOMBRES LOBO (*****), en el que dos chicos, amigos que comparten el ser unos parias en su colegio, ven como su mundo se desintegra, el de Timothy por creerse un "hombre lobo" y el de Paul por la separación de sus padres. Una obra maestra.
- CACERÍA DE CASAS (*****), en el que Daniel y Christy, un joven matrimonio, acude con el señor Hogue a visitar una casa para su posible compra, y los problemas de la pareja salen a relucir, al igual que las sorpresas y equívocos. Simplemente genial.
- HIJO DEL HOMBRE LOBO (*****), en el que Cara ha sido violada por el Violador del Embalse y queda embarazada, con el consecuente trauma tanto para ella como para Richard, su marido. Ternura y compasión en un cuento redondo.
- EL LIBRO DE GREEN (**), en el que Green y su hija Jocelyn, acuden a la fiesta de graduación del hijo de una antigua amiga, para la que trabajó en su juventud como canguro de su otra hija, Ruby, a la que esperaba no volver a ver. El cuento que menos me ha gustado.
- LA SEÑORA BOX (****), en el que Eddie, que tiene graves problemas económicos, decide hacer una visita sorpresa a la abuela de su ex mujer y nada sale como esperaba. Un buen cuento.
- ZAPATILLAS DE CLAVOS (*****), en el que Kohn, con su propia tragedia familiar, decide echar una mano a un chaval que vive en la misma isla, inadaptado socialmente. Una miniatura perfecta, otra obra maestra.
- LA HISTORIA DE HARRIS FETKO (****), en el que Harris, jugador de fútbol americano, es invitado por su padre, entrenador, a la circuncisión de su hermanastro. También hay sitio para el humor.
- ESA ERA YO (***), en el que una pareja visita una taberna buscando el pasarlo bien e intentar encontrar una salida a su situación. Buen cuento.
- EN LA NEGRA FUNDICIÓN (*****), en el que Chabon nos hace un guiño contándonos una historia de misterio y terror, al más puro estilo Poe, escrita por August van Zorn, el autor fetiche de Grady Tripp, el protagonista de 'Chicos prodigiosos'. Otra maravilla.
Como colofón, decir simplemente que hubiese querido que los cuentos siguiesen y siguiesen infinitamente. Da gusto leer cuentos, y libros, si son así.
October 18, 2016
A paired look at Rohinton Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag and Michael Chabon Werewolves in Their Youth.
I chanced upon these back to back, both short story collections, both by writers in their working youth – Mistry’s first book and an early one for Chabon. Both as much as anything nostalgic, bittersweet recollections of childhood, the middle class childhoods of their own existences.
Chabon: laugh out loud funny – you know…so that it gets almost irritating for those who are suffering through your pleasure. They start sounding snarky when they say they must read it too. The guy’s brilliant, this collection is splendid.
Mistry: the blurb says ‘extremely funny’. But the only good thing about the shit of his world – and I mean that literally, the shit on the street, the upstairs lavatory that leaks onto your head as you sit on the toilet, the filth, the water supply turned off at 6am because the city is without again, the monsoonal water running down the inside of your house – the good thing about it is that this is all happening to middle class educated people, the same ones who, had they lived in Chabon’s childhood, would have been clean and without want. This life he writes of is the relatively privileged existence one can have in India, that’s what I mean by ‘good’. I mean, there is a worse life. I couldn’t imagine anything less hilarious. I could not imagine anything, if it comes to that, less ‘compassionate’ – another promise of the blurb. I don’t know that Mistry is ever the victim of that sentiment, but certainly not in this book.
rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
I chanced upon these back to back, both short story collections, both by writers in their working youth – Mistry’s first book and an early one for Chabon. Both as much as anything nostalgic, bittersweet recollections of childhood, the middle class childhoods of their own existences.
Chabon: laugh out loud funny – you know…so that it gets almost irritating for those who are suffering through your pleasure. They start sounding snarky when they say they must read it too. The guy’s brilliant, this collection is splendid.
Mistry: the blurb says ‘extremely funny’. But the only good thing about the shit of his world – and I mean that literally, the shit on the street, the upstairs lavatory that leaks onto your head as you sit on the toilet, the filth, the water supply turned off at 6am because the city is without again, the monsoonal water running down the inside of your house – the good thing about it is that this is all happening to middle class educated people, the same ones who, had they lived in Chabon’s childhood, would have been clean and without want. This life he writes of is the relatively privileged existence one can have in India, that’s what I mean by ‘good’. I mean, there is a worse life. I couldn’t imagine anything less hilarious. I could not imagine anything, if it comes to that, less ‘compassionate’ – another promise of the blurb. I don’t know that Mistry is ever the victim of that sentiment, but certainly not in this book.
rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
October 3, 2014
These days I come to short story collections cautiously.
I don’t blame the stories. It’s my own fault.
Six years ago, as I was working on my Ph.D., my advisor and I decided that in order to make myself more marketable to Departments of English in various schools I should specialize in something literature-based. This was an intimidating thought. My undergrad degree was in English Education, my Master’s degree was in Language, Literacy, and Composition, and even though I had ten years of teaching high school English under my belt, I didn’t feel I had anything worth saying. The three times I attempted graduate classes in literature were unqualified failures. The first (Literature of the Persecuted in Central America) and second (Irish Literature) ended in the class being canceled and my withdrawal, respectively. I managed to hang with the third (20th Century Literature) for the duration of a semester, if you consider “hanging with” to involve saying as little as possible and trying desperately to blend into the wallpaper. I sat in that class and listened to the true English graduate students offer their informed opinions on the texts we were reading and wondered what the hell I was doing, trying to pass myself off as one of them. I enjoyed what we were reading, but I clearly didn’t have the chops to engage in the kind of discussions they were having.
So the thought of specializing in a field of literature – to the point where I would write one of my qualifying exams on that field and then, horror of horrors, speak intelligently about it in job interviews – filled me with a vague sense of panic. In talking to my infinitely patient advisor, we came to the conclusion that I could specialize in the American short story. It’s ground less well-traveled than, say, Shakespeare (which increased the chance that I could actually make a contribution to the field), and the acknowledged masters of the form aren’t so numerous that their work would be insurmountable.
But still.
Even choosing only six authors on which to focus meant I would still read over a hundred short stories. In the space of two months I read the complete short fiction of Poe, Hemingway, Cheever, O’Connor, Carver, and Faulkner. I also read selected works from more contemporary authors like Boyle, Hempel, and Saunders, and scrounged up what little theory I could find on the short story as a genre. I was already a fan of Carver and Boyle, and many of Poe’s stories were branded on my memory from a very early age, but, six years on, I remember very little of the rest of it. The usual suspects stand out, of course – Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well Lighted Place”; O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge”; Cheever’s “The Swimmer”; Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” – but my only substantial memory of that time is of poring through story after story in my advisor’s office, pausing only to jot down brief impressions of each upon completion, ostensibly so I would never forget them.
That worked out well.
Fast forward to 2014, and I find myself (perhaps understandably) reticent to read short story collections. In the times I’ve tried, I reach the end, flip back to the table of contents, and discover that I can’t attach a single plot to any of the titles. My attention span for short stories was ruined in 2008. It’s akin to someone who gets roaring, blackout drunk one night and can never drink that type of alcohol again.
I have a six-year-long short story hangover.
It’s good news, then, that the first short story collection in the 21st Century Bookshelf Deprivation Project is by Michael Chabon, one of my favorite authors, and a man who writes sentences so indelible that I can’t help but remember the stories from which they came. Werewolves in Their Youth is comprised of nine stories, many of which hinge on the tenuous threads that bind family members together. A few of my favorites:
“Werewolves in Their Youth.” Childhood friendships are odd. Frequently born of geography as much as by shared interest, it’s worth wondering how many of those early relationships would have happened without the benefit of being next-door neighbors. In my experience – and the experience of 4th grader Paul – friends are just as often enemies, and the line separating the two is blurry at best. I fought with my next-door neighbor as frequently as we played, and as soon as we entered high school we ceased talking altogether. In this story, Paul – an elementary school oddball who spends his recess time in isolation, playing with ants – realizes that his next-door neighbor Timothy, the class outcast who he thinks is his enemy, is actually his only friend. It’s a bittersweet look at the nature of friendship and how trauma (in this case, Paul’s parents’ divorce) can strengthen our bond with others.
“Son of the Wolfman.” For better or worse, one of my main goals in life is to avoid conflict. I do what I need to do to get along, even as it gnaws at my gut. Like Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan, I don’t get angry; I grow a tumor. So it was with growing discomfort that I realized the degree to which I related to the character of Richard in this story. But first, Cara. Victim of a serial rapist, Cara is at first horrified to learn that she’s been impregnated by her attacker, even though she and Richard have tried for twelve years to have a child of their own. She eventually decides to carry the rapist’s baby to term. Richard, however, doesn’t act as we would expect. As their marriage crumbles around him, he maintains his equanimity, avoiding conflict and maintaining the position that whatever Cara wants is fine, regardless of the personal cost to him. It’s a story that challenges traditional gender roles, and it made me wonder at what point conflict avoidance does more harm than good.
“Green’s Book.” The squirmiest story of the bunch. In this one, Marty, father to four-year-old Jocelyn, is at a neighborhood party where he encounters Ruby, a girl in her early 20s who he – there’s no polite way to put it – nearly molested when he was thirteen and she was four. The residual guilt of this encounter, brought to the fore by Ruby’s presence at the party and her subsequent flirtation with him, has affected the way he interacts with his daughter, to the point where he’s reluctant even to bathe her. “Green’s Book” raises all kinds of problematic issues about the power of the past to influence our relationships in the present, and to what degree we remain responsible for actions in our early years.
The remainder of the stories are as good as we would expect from Chabon, profound and very, very funny, with a knack for crafting lines that cut right to the heart of the matter. Take this one, from “Mrs. Box,” on the demise of the protagonist’s marriage:
There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs.
The entertaining capper is the final story in the collection, “In the Black Mill.” Supposedly written by August Van Zorn (an author discovered by Grady Tripp, who is himself the protagonist of Chabon’s Wonder Boys), this story is pure genre pulp, a Lovecraftian horror story about an archeology grad student exploring the likelihood that the members of an ancient Native American tribe were actually cannibals. It’s an anomaly in a collection that otherwise deals with the profundity of minutiae, but it’s such a fun finale that it would be churlish to complain. I love every single one of Chabon’s novels, but his short fiction is so good that I’ll be more willing in the future to overlook my resistance to the genre.
I don’t blame the stories. It’s my own fault.
Six years ago, as I was working on my Ph.D., my advisor and I decided that in order to make myself more marketable to Departments of English in various schools I should specialize in something literature-based. This was an intimidating thought. My undergrad degree was in English Education, my Master’s degree was in Language, Literacy, and Composition, and even though I had ten years of teaching high school English under my belt, I didn’t feel I had anything worth saying. The three times I attempted graduate classes in literature were unqualified failures. The first (Literature of the Persecuted in Central America) and second (Irish Literature) ended in the class being canceled and my withdrawal, respectively. I managed to hang with the third (20th Century Literature) for the duration of a semester, if you consider “hanging with” to involve saying as little as possible and trying desperately to blend into the wallpaper. I sat in that class and listened to the true English graduate students offer their informed opinions on the texts we were reading and wondered what the hell I was doing, trying to pass myself off as one of them. I enjoyed what we were reading, but I clearly didn’t have the chops to engage in the kind of discussions they were having.
So the thought of specializing in a field of literature – to the point where I would write one of my qualifying exams on that field and then, horror of horrors, speak intelligently about it in job interviews – filled me with a vague sense of panic. In talking to my infinitely patient advisor, we came to the conclusion that I could specialize in the American short story. It’s ground less well-traveled than, say, Shakespeare (which increased the chance that I could actually make a contribution to the field), and the acknowledged masters of the form aren’t so numerous that their work would be insurmountable.
But still.
Even choosing only six authors on which to focus meant I would still read over a hundred short stories. In the space of two months I read the complete short fiction of Poe, Hemingway, Cheever, O’Connor, Carver, and Faulkner. I also read selected works from more contemporary authors like Boyle, Hempel, and Saunders, and scrounged up what little theory I could find on the short story as a genre. I was already a fan of Carver and Boyle, and many of Poe’s stories were branded on my memory from a very early age, but, six years on, I remember very little of the rest of it. The usual suspects stand out, of course – Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well Lighted Place”; O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge”; Cheever’s “The Swimmer”; Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” – but my only substantial memory of that time is of poring through story after story in my advisor’s office, pausing only to jot down brief impressions of each upon completion, ostensibly so I would never forget them.
That worked out well.
Fast forward to 2014, and I find myself (perhaps understandably) reticent to read short story collections. In the times I’ve tried, I reach the end, flip back to the table of contents, and discover that I can’t attach a single plot to any of the titles. My attention span for short stories was ruined in 2008. It’s akin to someone who gets roaring, blackout drunk one night and can never drink that type of alcohol again.
I have a six-year-long short story hangover.
It’s good news, then, that the first short story collection in the 21st Century Bookshelf Deprivation Project is by Michael Chabon, one of my favorite authors, and a man who writes sentences so indelible that I can’t help but remember the stories from which they came. Werewolves in Their Youth is comprised of nine stories, many of which hinge on the tenuous threads that bind family members together. A few of my favorites:
“Werewolves in Their Youth.” Childhood friendships are odd. Frequently born of geography as much as by shared interest, it’s worth wondering how many of those early relationships would have happened without the benefit of being next-door neighbors. In my experience – and the experience of 4th grader Paul – friends are just as often enemies, and the line separating the two is blurry at best. I fought with my next-door neighbor as frequently as we played, and as soon as we entered high school we ceased talking altogether. In this story, Paul – an elementary school oddball who spends his recess time in isolation, playing with ants – realizes that his next-door neighbor Timothy, the class outcast who he thinks is his enemy, is actually his only friend. It’s a bittersweet look at the nature of friendship and how trauma (in this case, Paul’s parents’ divorce) can strengthen our bond with others.
“Son of the Wolfman.” For better or worse, one of my main goals in life is to avoid conflict. I do what I need to do to get along, even as it gnaws at my gut. Like Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan, I don’t get angry; I grow a tumor. So it was with growing discomfort that I realized the degree to which I related to the character of Richard in this story. But first, Cara. Victim of a serial rapist, Cara is at first horrified to learn that she’s been impregnated by her attacker, even though she and Richard have tried for twelve years to have a child of their own. She eventually decides to carry the rapist’s baby to term. Richard, however, doesn’t act as we would expect. As their marriage crumbles around him, he maintains his equanimity, avoiding conflict and maintaining the position that whatever Cara wants is fine, regardless of the personal cost to him. It’s a story that challenges traditional gender roles, and it made me wonder at what point conflict avoidance does more harm than good.
“Green’s Book.” The squirmiest story of the bunch. In this one, Marty, father to four-year-old Jocelyn, is at a neighborhood party where he encounters Ruby, a girl in her early 20s who he – there’s no polite way to put it – nearly molested when he was thirteen and she was four. The residual guilt of this encounter, brought to the fore by Ruby’s presence at the party and her subsequent flirtation with him, has affected the way he interacts with his daughter, to the point where he’s reluctant even to bathe her. “Green’s Book” raises all kinds of problematic issues about the power of the past to influence our relationships in the present, and to what degree we remain responsible for actions in our early years.
The remainder of the stories are as good as we would expect from Chabon, profound and very, very funny, with a knack for crafting lines that cut right to the heart of the matter. Take this one, from “Mrs. Box,” on the demise of the protagonist’s marriage:
There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs.
The entertaining capper is the final story in the collection, “In the Black Mill.” Supposedly written by August Van Zorn (an author discovered by Grady Tripp, who is himself the protagonist of Chabon’s Wonder Boys), this story is pure genre pulp, a Lovecraftian horror story about an archeology grad student exploring the likelihood that the members of an ancient Native American tribe were actually cannibals. It’s an anomaly in a collection that otherwise deals with the profundity of minutiae, but it’s such a fun finale that it would be churlish to complain. I love every single one of Chabon’s novels, but his short fiction is so good that I’ll be more willing in the future to overlook my resistance to the genre.
February 11, 2018
Michael Chabon's, Werewolves in Their Youth, is a collection of nine short stories where divorce often plays a leading role and often not a pretty one. All of the narrators are male, frequently but not always, young men.
I'm not sure why, but my favorite stories had children in them, although sometimes these children had a tiny and nonspeaking role: the title story, Son of the Wolfman; Green's Book; The Harris Fetko Story; and if a 17-year-old counts as a child, In the Black Mill. These narrators were warmer and, while Chabon's stories often have ambiguous endings, these stories seemed more hopeful. Often but not always the adults would behave childishly, but the child somehow reminded the adults what their real goal was.
In Werewolves, marriage is not for the lazy or faint of heart. Nonetheless, although few characters are currently married, Chabon's characters remain ambivalent, but hopeful.
I love the spaciousness of Chabon's realistic works: often not much happens and little is resolved, but Chabon offers a beautiful and sympathetic snapshot of life. I haven't been as happy when he enters fantasy or horror, but the last story, In the Black Mill, is a horror story set in West Virginia. It appears realistic, until we learn this town's secret. This story was compelling. Although I didn't like its message on multiple levels, In the Black Mill is a fitting and compelling ending to this book.
Don't expect a happy ending.
I'm not sure why, but my favorite stories had children in them, although sometimes these children had a tiny and nonspeaking role: the title story, Son of the Wolfman; Green's Book; The Harris Fetko Story; and if a 17-year-old counts as a child, In the Black Mill. These narrators were warmer and, while Chabon's stories often have ambiguous endings, these stories seemed more hopeful. Often but not always the adults would behave childishly, but the child somehow reminded the adults what their real goal was.
Actually, she had said— and at first Dr. Schachter had concurred— that I needed to learn to “manage” my anger. This was a diagnosis that I never understood, since it seemed to me that I had no problems at all managing my anger. It was my judgment that I managed it much better than my parents managed theirs, and even Dr. Schachter had to agree with that. (p. 15)Marriage is difficult at best in these stories:
But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave. (p. 51).I love that characterization.
In Werewolves, marriage is not for the lazy or faint of heart. Nonetheless, although few characters are currently married, Chabon's characters remain ambivalent, but hopeful.
I love the spaciousness of Chabon's realistic works: often not much happens and little is resolved, but Chabon offers a beautiful and sympathetic snapshot of life. I haven't been as happy when he enters fantasy or horror, but the last story, In the Black Mill, is a horror story set in West Virginia. It appears realistic, until we learn this town's secret. This story was compelling. Although I didn't like its message on multiple levels, In the Black Mill is a fitting and compelling ending to this book.
Don't expect a happy ending.
July 18, 2018
I unevenly enjoyed this collection! The stories are in order of best-to-worst, with the exception of the final tale which was my favorite—very Appalachian Gothic :) If you liked Stone Mattress: Nine Tales or McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories I think you'll like this one.
March 26, 2007
I know everybody has to write their "Divorce Book" but jesus christ, as a reader, I'm totally over it. ENOUGH WITH THE DIVORCE BOOKS ALREADY. WE GET IT.
March 23, 2020
"On the beach at dusk, when he thought no one was looking, he practiced seagull impersonations, with some success." A gem from the story, "Spikes."
March 17, 2024
“Oke, oke, ‘t gaat dus niet alleen over uzelf”
Verzameling existentiële kortverhalen met een goeie dosis character development. Aanrader!
Verzameling existentiële kortverhalen met een goeie dosis character development. Aanrader!
July 18, 2022
There are some gorgeous stories here. Chabon excels at the infinite and idiosyncratic variety of human frailty. I especially love House Hunting, Son of the Werewolf and Mrs Box.
August 4, 2025
I am a great fan and evangelist for Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. On another occasion, I started and did not finish The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I think Michael Chabon is an incredibly good storyteller, when the story he’s telling is good.
As such, I found this collection to be a mixed bag. Characters in these stories grapple with losses of all sorts, a slew of unresolved traumas, and general discontentment with the burdens of life. I felt Chabon swinging for the fences in this collection, sometimes connecting with a touching resolution, and in other cases ending his stories on odd, flat terms.
I will add that the final piece is quite different, framed as a horror story written by a character in Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys (which I haven’t read). It’s got a pulpy sort of magazine vibe that was actually really fun.
As a fan, I think Werewolves in Their Youth was well worth a read, but ultimately not worth a recommendation.
As such, I found this collection to be a mixed bag. Characters in these stories grapple with losses of all sorts, a slew of unresolved traumas, and general discontentment with the burdens of life. I felt Chabon swinging for the fences in this collection, sometimes connecting with a touching resolution, and in other cases ending his stories on odd, flat terms.
I will add that the final piece is quite different, framed as a horror story written by a character in Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys (which I haven’t read). It’s got a pulpy sort of magazine vibe that was actually really fun.
As a fan, I think Werewolves in Their Youth was well worth a read, but ultimately not worth a recommendation.
September 16, 2018
So the word "werevolves" in the book's title attracted my attention... and the book was far from what I have expected. But it is definitely well-written and the stories were nice and fresh to read.
November 14, 2018
Magnífico libro de relatos de Michael Chabon, mente brillante y creativa de las letras norteamericanas contemporáneas. Al final de cuentas, la analogía de los hombres lobo es la más exacta que se puede encontrar para retratar las personas marginadas del mundo.
Magnífico.
Magnífico.
October 24, 2020
A very fine short story collection, with varied themes - humorous or tragic, I enjoyed this a lot, and I will start on some Chabon novels in the future. Recommended.
February 15, 2016
Lately I've been reading collections of short fiction by some favorite writers, and read Troublemakers by Harlan Ellison and Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. Both books had wonderful, deep, dark, resonant works, and also had light ditties that were charming. Both also had a weaker piece or two, which is pretty much inevitable. Not every story in a collection is going to be stellar, like not every song on an album is going to be a masterwork.
Werewolves in Their Youth just about challenged that notion. Looking back at each story, there isn't a weak one in the bunch. Some are mind-blowingly brilliant, some merely freaking awesome. For anyone who has been in a problematic relationship, "House Hunting" will be familiar territory but it also opens up the door to the unanalyzed pain that not only destroys marriages, but breaks people. "Green's Book," by allowing us to go along with Green as he works through his very real desire (and accompanying shame), is a window into our unsavory fascination with sexual deviancy. "Mrs. Box" is a step-by-step guide into how a life can go so irretrievably wrong. With the possible exception of "Spikes," every story has the proverbial "people behaving badly" and we watch as they struggle with that. I felt great affection for Kohn, the socially-awkward luthier who, despite his desire for peace and quiet, becomes a source of support for a discarded child who desperately needed him in his life. This is a character that I'd love to see Chabon revisit down the road. Mike, hon, if you or anyone connected to you reads this, Kohn deserves a second act.
Werewolves in Their Youth just about challenged that notion. Looking back at each story, there isn't a weak one in the bunch. Some are mind-blowingly brilliant, some merely freaking awesome. For anyone who has been in a problematic relationship, "House Hunting" will be familiar territory but it also opens up the door to the unanalyzed pain that not only destroys marriages, but breaks people. "Green's Book," by allowing us to go along with Green as he works through his very real desire (and accompanying shame), is a window into our unsavory fascination with sexual deviancy. "Mrs. Box" is a step-by-step guide into how a life can go so irretrievably wrong. With the possible exception of "Spikes," every story has the proverbial "people behaving badly" and we watch as they struggle with that. I felt great affection for Kohn, the socially-awkward luthier who, despite his desire for peace and quiet, becomes a source of support for a discarded child who desperately needed him in his life. This is a character that I'd love to see Chabon revisit down the road. Mike, hon, if you or anyone connected to you reads this, Kohn deserves a second act.
August 24, 2016
Everything that makes Michael Chabon one of my favourite novelists is found in these short stories. Tales of hard luck characters standing upon the precipice of bad decisions have a strong pull on my sympathies as a reader. People transformed by life events that simply spiralled out of control. Chabon's world is populated by marriages, business ventures, real estate deals and professional sports careers on the skids. Reasonably intelligent people unable to pull themselves out of disaster. They are rendered with a sympathetic voice. Their flaws never overwhelming their basic goodness. Then there are these vivid descriptions of so many of my old haunts in Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles. The collection then wraps up with a spooky bit of genre fiction inspired by Weird Tales that reads like a delicious, cannibalistic dessert. This collection reminds why Chabon's writing is so entertaining, poignant and literary all at once.
November 27, 2018
I am pleased to report there are no werewolves in this short story collection, unless you count the kid pretending to be one. Not even a whiff of fantasy, actually. One horror story and eight slice of (American) life pieces that are mostly relationship-centered (husband-wife, father-son, father-daughter, best friends, etc.). A few spring from good ideas and have interesting endings, but ultimately fail to accomplish much. Thoughts and characters are sent adrift in the direction of a general tediousness and pointlessness from which the book recovers a bit in the concluding story, only it's too late.
1. Werewolves in Their Youth 4
2. House Hunting 3
3. Son of a Wolfman 1.5
4. Green’s Book 2
5. Mrs. Box 2.5
6. Spikes 2
7. The Harris Fetko Story 1.5
8. That Was Me 1.5
9. In the Black Mill 3.5
1. Werewolves in Their Youth 4
2. House Hunting 3
3. Son of a Wolfman 1.5
4. Green’s Book 2
5. Mrs. Box 2.5
6. Spikes 2
7. The Harris Fetko Story 1.5
8. That Was Me 1.5
9. In the Black Mill 3.5
April 3, 2008
I am enamored with Michael Chabon. I love short stories. The two combined are a combination worth checking out.
February 13, 2018
It's an almost physical pain to give a Michael Chabon book only three stars. Granted, this is only the third book I've read by him, but the first two, "The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier Clay" and "Wonder Boys," were so amazing, so well written, so incredibly told, that I thought I would adore every word written by Chabon. Those first two books were so amazing that it was like his writing style was directly meant for me. So, it turns out, not exactly true.
Perhaps it was because this book is a collection of short stories. Perhaps it was the subject matter: most of the stories centered around divorce. Perhaps it was the writing style. I hate to admit, but if I were to reduce the style to one word, I'd have to call it Pretentious.
The best example of this would be the first story, which the books is named after. The narrator was a very young boy but had ridiculously SAT advanced vocabulary diction. Normally, that wouldn't have bothered me, but the voice was all wrong for the character. Even though it was written in the past tense, it didn't seem that it was told by an older and highly educated person reflecting on the past. Nor was the narrator established as especially erudite. And even if the character had a robust vocabulary, the overly complex word choice was off putting, especially when there would be a word that would show off an advanced education, but not so much as to distance the reader.
And that happened throughout the collection of stories, but less noticeable depending on the main character.
Then, the writing seemed overly self aware. Instead of the stories having a natural flow and rhythm, it seemed contrived and purposeful. It seemed like I was back in college reading and work-shopping short stories in my creative writing class. Okay, maybe it was a little better than that. But not by much. Reading it reminded me of other books by other authors, all acclaimed, that I felt the same way towards, almost as if it was the mode of the times. I would lump Eggers "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and Burroughs "Running with Scissors" into the same category. While both memoirs, I had the same feeling of their writing style.
HOWEVER! The last story in the collection "In the Black Mill," if I could give just that one five stars, I would. It was fantastically Lovecraftian, an archaeological dig dealing with the fictional mythology of the Miskahannock tribe. First of all, Chabon uses the fictional pulp horror favorite author of some of the character of "Wonder Boys" as his nom de plume. That in itself was interesting to include a story in this collection that was written by a fictional other of another book. And while it was clearly Lovecraftian, it didn't fall into Lovecraftian cliche or mimicry or beating the reader over the head with "non-euclidean geometry" and "Great Old Ones," a diary of a mad man, and definitely no actual mention of Cthulu, that typically pepper Cthulu Mythos stories.
This one dealt with a small town with a large mysterious mill that employs most of the residents and the town's economy. The narrator first notices that there is an especially large number of people missing limbs due to accidents at the Mill. Then there is his dig that keeps getting refilled. Then there is the one and only one brand of beer that everyone drinks.
And that's just getting the readers' toes wet as the story becomes more complex and riveting as the narrator tries to sneak in the mill and how the workers react to his presence, the teeth of the Miskahannock women, the warning to not drink the beer and the compelling desire to do so, the sudden deaths, the theory that the ancient tribe worshiped capital 'N' Nothing and not 'nothing,' the music coming from the dig's tunnel, the iron spiked gate around the mill, etc.
The descriptions were rich, capital R Romantic (as in classic horror), and vivid. I was tickled that from the descriptions alone, I was able to see the Lovecraftian story before it even became obvious (but not overly obvious). Perhaps it was because of the fictional author's biography from "Wonder Boys" that clued me in and prepared me.
Regardless, as a Lovecraftian tale, it was wonderfully and told. It was spooky and eerie and had an irrepressible narrative draw. As a horror story, it was imaginative and unique, setting it apart from most other Lovecraftian stories. As a Michael Chabon story, it was exactly what I wanted from him as far as style and story.
Perhaps it was because this book is a collection of short stories. Perhaps it was the subject matter: most of the stories centered around divorce. Perhaps it was the writing style. I hate to admit, but if I were to reduce the style to one word, I'd have to call it Pretentious.
The best example of this would be the first story, which the books is named after. The narrator was a very young boy but had ridiculously SAT advanced vocabulary diction. Normally, that wouldn't have bothered me, but the voice was all wrong for the character. Even though it was written in the past tense, it didn't seem that it was told by an older and highly educated person reflecting on the past. Nor was the narrator established as especially erudite. And even if the character had a robust vocabulary, the overly complex word choice was off putting, especially when there would be a word that would show off an advanced education, but not so much as to distance the reader.
And that happened throughout the collection of stories, but less noticeable depending on the main character.
Then, the writing seemed overly self aware. Instead of the stories having a natural flow and rhythm, it seemed contrived and purposeful. It seemed like I was back in college reading and work-shopping short stories in my creative writing class. Okay, maybe it was a little better than that. But not by much. Reading it reminded me of other books by other authors, all acclaimed, that I felt the same way towards, almost as if it was the mode of the times. I would lump Eggers "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and Burroughs "Running with Scissors" into the same category. While both memoirs, I had the same feeling of their writing style.
HOWEVER! The last story in the collection "In the Black Mill," if I could give just that one five stars, I would. It was fantastically Lovecraftian, an archaeological dig dealing with the fictional mythology of the Miskahannock tribe. First of all, Chabon uses the fictional pulp horror favorite author of some of the character of "Wonder Boys" as his nom de plume. That in itself was interesting to include a story in this collection that was written by a fictional other of another book. And while it was clearly Lovecraftian, it didn't fall into Lovecraftian cliche or mimicry or beating the reader over the head with "non-euclidean geometry" and "Great Old Ones," a diary of a mad man, and definitely no actual mention of Cthulu, that typically pepper Cthulu Mythos stories.
This one dealt with a small town with a large mysterious mill that employs most of the residents and the town's economy. The narrator first notices that there is an especially large number of people missing limbs due to accidents at the Mill. Then there is his dig that keeps getting refilled. Then there is the one and only one brand of beer that everyone drinks.
And that's just getting the readers' toes wet as the story becomes more complex and riveting as the narrator tries to sneak in the mill and how the workers react to his presence, the teeth of the Miskahannock women, the warning to not drink the beer and the compelling desire to do so, the sudden deaths, the theory that the ancient tribe worshiped capital 'N' Nothing and not 'nothing,' the music coming from the dig's tunnel, the iron spiked gate around the mill, etc.
The descriptions were rich, capital R Romantic (as in classic horror), and vivid. I was tickled that from the descriptions alone, I was able to see the Lovecraftian story before it even became obvious (but not overly obvious). Perhaps it was because of the fictional author's biography from "Wonder Boys" that clued me in and prepared me.
Regardless, as a Lovecraftian tale, it was wonderfully and told. It was spooky and eerie and had an irrepressible narrative draw. As a horror story, it was imaginative and unique, setting it apart from most other Lovecraftian stories. As a Michael Chabon story, it was exactly what I wanted from him as far as style and story.
January 10, 2019
Leí la mitad de los cuentos. Da la sensación de que todos son el mismo cuento, los mismos personajes. Hombres, mujeres y niños con los mismos complejos aburridores. Adornados con actitudes sensacionalistas. Las típicas historias gringas con las que nos han bombardeado hasta el cansancio. Un libro intrascendente.
August 23, 2020
Disliked more stories in the collection than I liked.
April 25, 2022
Michael Chabon is an author I know primarily from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union; both of these are novels, and for me Chabon needs the length of a novel to weave his excellent prose into a full narrative. Both of those books were 5 stars for me. Werewolves in Their Youth is from 1999, and the short stories do show some of Chabon's flares of brilliant writing, that would grow into the Pulitzer Prize-winnng Kavalier and Clay novel.
My favorite stories in Werewolves in Their Youth are the first and last; the relationship of the two boys in the title story stole my heart. And the horror tribute to Lovecraft in the last one, "In the Black Mill", sent shivers down my spine. Here's a review from the 1999 NY Times:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
Endangered Species by Michael Gorra
A story collection looks into the animal spirit that lurks in us all.
Why do so many of the men at work in the ''famous Plunkettsburg Mill'' seem to be missing a piece of themselves -- an ear or a couple of fingers or sometimes even a foot? What, exactly, gets made ''in that bastion of industrial democracy?'' Why won't the townspeople help the stranger among them, an archeologist -- and our narrator -- known only by the courtesy title of professor? Might the clue to these mysteries lie in the ''not entirely pleasant savor of autumn leaves or damp earth'' that flavors the local beer, called Indian Ring?
These are the questions raised by ''In the Black Mill,'' the last story in ''Werewolves in Their Youth,'' and if I describe it as much the most successful story in Michael Chabon's second collection, I must also say that Chabon doesn't officially claim to have written it at all. The name on its first page belongs instead to one August Van Zorn, a pulp horror writer who figured as a model of literary endeavor in Chabon's 1995 novel ''Wonder Boys'': an English professor and eventual suicide who writes at night ''in a bentwood rocking chair . . . a bottle of bourbon on the table before him.'' And although aficionados will doubtless find fault, ''In the Black Mill'' seems to me a letter-perfect pastiche of that particular kind of midcentury magazine fiction. It stops just sort of parody, raising one's hair and not one's eyebrows, even as it also seems to cast a loving wink at the whole ''Weird Tales'' world of writers like H. P. Lovecraft.
To call this the book's best story is to suggest that Chabon seems strongest when most self-conscious, when he displays his control of literary convention and his interest in genre. But the genre he most often chooses is not, alas, horror or crime or science fiction -- those things we call genre fiction -- but that of the mainstream American short story, with its small moments of epiphany and emotional resolution.
''Werewolves in Their Youth'' includes a story set at a graduation party and another at a bris (a ritual of circumcism for Jewish male babies). A third happens at an 11-year-old's first baseball practice, and a fourth, ''House Hunting,'' involves, well, house hunting -- a young couple's tour of a place that's as ''all wrong for them'' as they seem to be for each other. Such tight and circumscribed situations, so sharply limited in time as well as place! They are -- or were -- the coffee spoons by which we measure out our lives, and it's precisely because they're so standard-issue that the esthetic of such stories demands they be ripe with the possibility of change.
So in reading ''Green's Book'' or ''The Harris Fetko Story,'' you know from the start that Green -- or, as it may be, Fetko -- will come to some kind of accommodation with his troubled past, a moment of illumination in which, however briefly, ''everything's fine.'' Chabon's endings almost always swell into lyricism...
Of course, the stories' small changes imply a changed fictional world as well, and at times Chabon does indeed offer something more reckless than the old-fashioned structure with which his stories would seem most comfortable. ''House Hunting'' features a drunken real-estate agent showing what used to be his own house, a place that his ex has put on the market; as he walks through its rooms, he keeps on pocketing things, ''a box of nails, a Lufkin tape measure. . . . and a package of deodorizing shoe inserts.'' Meanwhile the young couple, Daniel and Christy Diamond, tremble on the brink of discovery: while the real-estate agent goes after the silver, they're learning, in an upstairs bedroom, that they like their sex rough.
''Son of the Wolfman'' seems equally twisted and baroque. After five years of fertility treatments, Cara Glanzman has been unable to conceive; ''this unbroken chain of menses had been a source of sorrow, dissension, tempest and recrimination'' in her marriage. Then she is raped, becomes pregnant and decides against an abortion. Yet Chabon concentrates not on her but on her husband, Richard, who now finds himself lost: ''His conversation, never expansive, dwindled to the curtness of a spaghetti western hero. . . . One Saturday his best friend found him weeping in a men's room.''
This could be grim, but Chabon plays it as a kind of bitter comedy in which Richard finds himself unwillingly drawn toward the delivery room....Richard does indeed show up for the birth, and when ''with a soft slurping sound the entire child came squirting out'' he catches it; afterward, the family has its picture taken. Daniel, in ''House Hunting,'' comes to a sudden understanding of the nature of marriage (''at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it'') and realizes that this ''all wrong'' house is now ''perfect.'' Both stories make nice: the mainstream short story's generic need for resolution imposes a wry conclusion that seems both formally and emotionally buttoned down. But a story like ''House Hunting'' isn't really nice at all. Its premise and its comfortable ending contradict each other, and while with some writers those mismatched socks might be intentional, I don't think they are here.
What's most alive in this book is the witty and resonant prose that has always been Chabon's strength, a prose in which sharp observation shades into metaphor: ''Inside Harris Fetko the frontier between petulance and rage was generally left unguarded, and he crossed it now without slowing down.'' Yet such prose does have its risks, and Chabon seems incapable of resisting a clever simile. In ''That Was Me,'' a drunk awakens to the pop of an opening beer can ''like a dog at the sound of a can opener grinding away on its evening Alpo,'' and in ''House Hunting,'' Daniel and Christy agree with their real-estate man ''at once, like people trapped in an empty bus station with a fanatical pamphleteer.'' Those sentences aren't so much clever as simply overwritten....
My favorite stories in Werewolves in Their Youth are the first and last; the relationship of the two boys in the title story stole my heart. And the horror tribute to Lovecraft in the last one, "In the Black Mill", sent shivers down my spine. Here's a review from the 1999 NY Times:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
Endangered Species by Michael Gorra
A story collection looks into the animal spirit that lurks in us all.
Why do so many of the men at work in the ''famous Plunkettsburg Mill'' seem to be missing a piece of themselves -- an ear or a couple of fingers or sometimes even a foot? What, exactly, gets made ''in that bastion of industrial democracy?'' Why won't the townspeople help the stranger among them, an archeologist -- and our narrator -- known only by the courtesy title of professor? Might the clue to these mysteries lie in the ''not entirely pleasant savor of autumn leaves or damp earth'' that flavors the local beer, called Indian Ring?
These are the questions raised by ''In the Black Mill,'' the last story in ''Werewolves in Their Youth,'' and if I describe it as much the most successful story in Michael Chabon's second collection, I must also say that Chabon doesn't officially claim to have written it at all. The name on its first page belongs instead to one August Van Zorn, a pulp horror writer who figured as a model of literary endeavor in Chabon's 1995 novel ''Wonder Boys'': an English professor and eventual suicide who writes at night ''in a bentwood rocking chair . . . a bottle of bourbon on the table before him.'' And although aficionados will doubtless find fault, ''In the Black Mill'' seems to me a letter-perfect pastiche of that particular kind of midcentury magazine fiction. It stops just sort of parody, raising one's hair and not one's eyebrows, even as it also seems to cast a loving wink at the whole ''Weird Tales'' world of writers like H. P. Lovecraft.
To call this the book's best story is to suggest that Chabon seems strongest when most self-conscious, when he displays his control of literary convention and his interest in genre. But the genre he most often chooses is not, alas, horror or crime or science fiction -- those things we call genre fiction -- but that of the mainstream American short story, with its small moments of epiphany and emotional resolution.
''Werewolves in Their Youth'' includes a story set at a graduation party and another at a bris (a ritual of circumcism for Jewish male babies). A third happens at an 11-year-old's first baseball practice, and a fourth, ''House Hunting,'' involves, well, house hunting -- a young couple's tour of a place that's as ''all wrong for them'' as they seem to be for each other. Such tight and circumscribed situations, so sharply limited in time as well as place! They are -- or were -- the coffee spoons by which we measure out our lives, and it's precisely because they're so standard-issue that the esthetic of such stories demands they be ripe with the possibility of change.
So in reading ''Green's Book'' or ''The Harris Fetko Story,'' you know from the start that Green -- or, as it may be, Fetko -- will come to some kind of accommodation with his troubled past, a moment of illumination in which, however briefly, ''everything's fine.'' Chabon's endings almost always swell into lyricism...
Of course, the stories' small changes imply a changed fictional world as well, and at times Chabon does indeed offer something more reckless than the old-fashioned structure with which his stories would seem most comfortable. ''House Hunting'' features a drunken real-estate agent showing what used to be his own house, a place that his ex has put on the market; as he walks through its rooms, he keeps on pocketing things, ''a box of nails, a Lufkin tape measure. . . . and a package of deodorizing shoe inserts.'' Meanwhile the young couple, Daniel and Christy Diamond, tremble on the brink of discovery: while the real-estate agent goes after the silver, they're learning, in an upstairs bedroom, that they like their sex rough.
''Son of the Wolfman'' seems equally twisted and baroque. After five years of fertility treatments, Cara Glanzman has been unable to conceive; ''this unbroken chain of menses had been a source of sorrow, dissension, tempest and recrimination'' in her marriage. Then she is raped, becomes pregnant and decides against an abortion. Yet Chabon concentrates not on her but on her husband, Richard, who now finds himself lost: ''His conversation, never expansive, dwindled to the curtness of a spaghetti western hero. . . . One Saturday his best friend found him weeping in a men's room.''
This could be grim, but Chabon plays it as a kind of bitter comedy in which Richard finds himself unwillingly drawn toward the delivery room....Richard does indeed show up for the birth, and when ''with a soft slurping sound the entire child came squirting out'' he catches it; afterward, the family has its picture taken. Daniel, in ''House Hunting,'' comes to a sudden understanding of the nature of marriage (''at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it'') and realizes that this ''all wrong'' house is now ''perfect.'' Both stories make nice: the mainstream short story's generic need for resolution imposes a wry conclusion that seems both formally and emotionally buttoned down. But a story like ''House Hunting'' isn't really nice at all. Its premise and its comfortable ending contradict each other, and while with some writers those mismatched socks might be intentional, I don't think they are here.
What's most alive in this book is the witty and resonant prose that has always been Chabon's strength, a prose in which sharp observation shades into metaphor: ''Inside Harris Fetko the frontier between petulance and rage was generally left unguarded, and he crossed it now without slowing down.'' Yet such prose does have its risks, and Chabon seems incapable of resisting a clever simile. In ''That Was Me,'' a drunk awakens to the pop of an opening beer can ''like a dog at the sound of a can opener grinding away on its evening Alpo,'' and in ''House Hunting,'' Daniel and Christy agree with their real-estate man ''at once, like people trapped in an empty bus station with a fanatical pamphleteer.'' Those sentences aren't so much clever as simply overwritten....
July 29, 2020
I freely confess to being a Michael Chabon completist, at least as far as his fiction goes. Ever since reading his 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I have aspired to read every novel and short story Chabon ever wrote, from his acclaimed first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) through his most recent semi-fictional novel about his grandfather, Moonglow (2016). The list includes two collections of short stories: A Model World and Other Stories (1991) and this one, with the promising title Werewolves in Their Youth. With Werewolves, I have completed this self-imposed task—at least temporarily, until Chabon’s current fictional project (purported to be a sequel to his 2002 YA novel Summerland) is published. One general truth I’ve observed in all of this reading, which pertains to the book under discussion here, is that Chabon’s novels tend to be far more impressive than his short stories.
I’m probably not the first of Chabon’s sympathetic readers to think this, and I’m certainly not the first to put it in writing. In 2003, Chabon was guest editor for McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, and in the editor’s preface to that collection he lamented—humorously but not insincerely—that the short story in English, as practiced for some fifty years, was almost exclusively “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” Most readers, he suggested, were bored by this. And, he added, “I am that bored reader, in that circumscribed world, laying aside his book with a sigh: only the book is my own, and it is filled with my own short stories, plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew.” He seems to have been referring to his own (at that time) recent collection, Werewolves in Their Youth: nine stories, the first eight of which follow the sort of Joycean pattern he suggests in this comment. Chabon was making an argument for genre fiction in his editorial comments for McSweeney’s, an argument for science fiction or mystery or horror (the American short story was fathered, after all, by Poe), and in the final story of Werewolves, Chabon breaks out of his slavish homage to Joyce and provides a macabre homage, instead, to H.P. Lovecraft.
That final story, “In the Black Mill,” actually purports to be written not by Chabon himself but rather by August Van Zorn, whose name readers of Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995) will recognize as the pulp fiction writer who, as a boarder in his grandmother’s hotel, served as a kind of role model for the young Grady Tripp, the protagonist of that novel: Van Zorn wrote horror stories at night '”in a bentwood rocking chair…a bottle of bourbon on the table before him”—until his ultimate suicide. He’s the model of the old plot-driven genre writer who cranks out one story after another while Grady spends seven years writing an unpublishable novel thousands of pages in length. In a move reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s use of his imaginary science-fiction author Kilgore Trout, it’s Van Zorn Chabon turns to as the supposed author of the very Lovecraft-esque “In the Black Mill.”
This story, set in the Yuggogheny Hills near Chabon’s native Pittsburgh, involves an archeologist who, researching the former Native American residents around the town of Plunkettsburg, begins to take an interest in the history of the local Plunkettsburg Mill, wondering why so many of the men who work at the Mill are missing parts of their bodies: here a finger, there an ear, even perhaps a foot. What exactly do they manufacture in this Mill? No one ever seems to be able to tell him. He tries at one point to enter the Mill, passing as a laborer, but is thrown out before he can get inside. The feeling that something sinister is going on in that place becomes stronger and stronger, and the narrator needs to drown his apprehensions by indulging in the local beer, “Indian Ring.” The horrifying denouement is everything you’d want in this particular sort of genre thriller.
There is a kind of Gothic vibe that unifies all the stories in the collection, though in all but the last it is more figurative than real. The title story, which begins the volume, focuses on two schoolboys, Paul and Timothy, the latter of whom consistently says he is a werewolf. Paul ties to dissociate himself from his friend, who is too weird for anyone else in the class, and Timothy ends up attacking another student and gets sent to a special school. In “House Hunting,” a young quarreling couple is shown a house by a drunken realtor who keeps pocketing random items as they go through the house. In “Son of the Wolfman,” a couple who have unsuccessfully tried everything to have a child is rocked when the woman is raped and becomes pregnant. In “The Harris Fetko Story,” a professional football player is estranged from his father and former coach, now remarried, and has to decide whether to attend the bris for his new half-brother. And in one of the most successful stories, “Mrs. Box,” a young bankrupt optometrist with $20,000 worth of equipment in his trunk is fleeing town to get away from his failed business and his failed marriage, when on a whim he decides to visit his ex-wife’s elderly grandmother only to find that she’s lost her short-term memory, and he decides to rob her.
Each story has a kind of monster, a kind of extreme character whose behavior is beyond everyday classification. A “werewolf” as it were. The stories are also united by the recurring theme of failed marriage or other significant relationship, and by the conventional “epiphany” ending that often restores a relationship or brings a flash of insight to the protagonist: In other words, the kind of story Chabon deprecated in his McSweeney’s foreword. But the collection is not so very disappointing: Chabon’s insightful and vivid prose, what critics have called his “perfectly self-contained” and “finely crafted” sentences, still sparkles in these stories. Marriage, he writes in what could describe the whole collection, is “at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it.” Of our football player he says “Inside Harris Fetko the frontier between petulance and rage was generally left unguarded, and he crossed it now without slowing down.” And our realtor is described thus: “Bob Hogue was a leathery man of indefinite middle age, wearing a green polo shirt, tan chinos, and a madras blazer in the palette favored by the manufacturers of the cellophane grass that goes into Easter baskets.”
If you decide to take a look at these stories, you’ll enjoy this kind of vivid language, and you’ll be rewarded with the tour de force horror story in the end. It’s also fascinating to consider this book as the one that immediately preceded the publication of Chabon’s work of genius, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in which he might be said to break out of the mold of the conventional realist novel. Prior to that novel, Chabon was most often compared to Fitzgerald, or occasionally Cheever or Updike. After Kavalier and Clay—well, he’s a genius in his own right That shift seems to occur in this particular book, in the chasm between the first eight stories and “In the Black Mill.” If you’re a Chabon fan, you’ll definitely find this book worthwhile. If you’re a Chabon completist, you’ll have to.
I’m probably not the first of Chabon’s sympathetic readers to think this, and I’m certainly not the first to put it in writing. In 2003, Chabon was guest editor for McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, and in the editor’s preface to that collection he lamented—humorously but not insincerely—that the short story in English, as practiced for some fifty years, was almost exclusively “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” Most readers, he suggested, were bored by this. And, he added, “I am that bored reader, in that circumscribed world, laying aside his book with a sigh: only the book is my own, and it is filled with my own short stories, plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew.” He seems to have been referring to his own (at that time) recent collection, Werewolves in Their Youth: nine stories, the first eight of which follow the sort of Joycean pattern he suggests in this comment. Chabon was making an argument for genre fiction in his editorial comments for McSweeney’s, an argument for science fiction or mystery or horror (the American short story was fathered, after all, by Poe), and in the final story of Werewolves, Chabon breaks out of his slavish homage to Joyce and provides a macabre homage, instead, to H.P. Lovecraft.
That final story, “In the Black Mill,” actually purports to be written not by Chabon himself but rather by August Van Zorn, whose name readers of Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995) will recognize as the pulp fiction writer who, as a boarder in his grandmother’s hotel, served as a kind of role model for the young Grady Tripp, the protagonist of that novel: Van Zorn wrote horror stories at night '”in a bentwood rocking chair…a bottle of bourbon on the table before him”—until his ultimate suicide. He’s the model of the old plot-driven genre writer who cranks out one story after another while Grady spends seven years writing an unpublishable novel thousands of pages in length. In a move reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s use of his imaginary science-fiction author Kilgore Trout, it’s Van Zorn Chabon turns to as the supposed author of the very Lovecraft-esque “In the Black Mill.”
This story, set in the Yuggogheny Hills near Chabon’s native Pittsburgh, involves an archeologist who, researching the former Native American residents around the town of Plunkettsburg, begins to take an interest in the history of the local Plunkettsburg Mill, wondering why so many of the men who work at the Mill are missing parts of their bodies: here a finger, there an ear, even perhaps a foot. What exactly do they manufacture in this Mill? No one ever seems to be able to tell him. He tries at one point to enter the Mill, passing as a laborer, but is thrown out before he can get inside. The feeling that something sinister is going on in that place becomes stronger and stronger, and the narrator needs to drown his apprehensions by indulging in the local beer, “Indian Ring.” The horrifying denouement is everything you’d want in this particular sort of genre thriller.
There is a kind of Gothic vibe that unifies all the stories in the collection, though in all but the last it is more figurative than real. The title story, which begins the volume, focuses on two schoolboys, Paul and Timothy, the latter of whom consistently says he is a werewolf. Paul ties to dissociate himself from his friend, who is too weird for anyone else in the class, and Timothy ends up attacking another student and gets sent to a special school. In “House Hunting,” a young quarreling couple is shown a house by a drunken realtor who keeps pocketing random items as they go through the house. In “Son of the Wolfman,” a couple who have unsuccessfully tried everything to have a child is rocked when the woman is raped and becomes pregnant. In “The Harris Fetko Story,” a professional football player is estranged from his father and former coach, now remarried, and has to decide whether to attend the bris for his new half-brother. And in one of the most successful stories, “Mrs. Box,” a young bankrupt optometrist with $20,000 worth of equipment in his trunk is fleeing town to get away from his failed business and his failed marriage, when on a whim he decides to visit his ex-wife’s elderly grandmother only to find that she’s lost her short-term memory, and he decides to rob her.
Each story has a kind of monster, a kind of extreme character whose behavior is beyond everyday classification. A “werewolf” as it were. The stories are also united by the recurring theme of failed marriage or other significant relationship, and by the conventional “epiphany” ending that often restores a relationship or brings a flash of insight to the protagonist: In other words, the kind of story Chabon deprecated in his McSweeney’s foreword. But the collection is not so very disappointing: Chabon’s insightful and vivid prose, what critics have called his “perfectly self-contained” and “finely crafted” sentences, still sparkles in these stories. Marriage, he writes in what could describe the whole collection, is “at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it.” Of our football player he says “Inside Harris Fetko the frontier between petulance and rage was generally left unguarded, and he crossed it now without slowing down.” And our realtor is described thus: “Bob Hogue was a leathery man of indefinite middle age, wearing a green polo shirt, tan chinos, and a madras blazer in the palette favored by the manufacturers of the cellophane grass that goes into Easter baskets.”
If you decide to take a look at these stories, you’ll enjoy this kind of vivid language, and you’ll be rewarded with the tour de force horror story in the end. It’s also fascinating to consider this book as the one that immediately preceded the publication of Chabon’s work of genius, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in which he might be said to break out of the mold of the conventional realist novel. Prior to that novel, Chabon was most often compared to Fitzgerald, or occasionally Cheever or Updike. After Kavalier and Clay—well, he’s a genius in his own right That shift seems to occur in this particular book, in the chasm between the first eight stories and “In the Black Mill.” If you’re a Chabon fan, you’ll definitely find this book worthwhile. If you’re a Chabon completist, you’ll have to.
July 11, 2009
I'm going to keep this short, considering I need to get some laundry done and I read this book about four months ago or something.
The guy is just very good at creating fiction that splits between the literary and the more-or-less popularly entertaining story. The measured voice of the narrator is the one constant, although the subjects of the stories being told varies a lot one to the next. I seem to remember stories touching on genre being blended with those that approach memoir - very much in the vein of Joe Hill's "20th Century Ghosts." All in all, these were very enjoyable stories. I am a bit embarrassed I don't remember more of the details here, but I do recall Chabon's narrator's voices, often a bit sullen or world-weary, but nonetheless optimistic. One might call that dramatic, but personally I find it a badge of verisimilitude, a connection between myself and these various narrators and, at the risk of presuming maybe too much here, a possible perception of the relationship between these narrators and their author.
I'd be more surprised, however, if this review ends up making any sense at all, than whether or not this author has or hasn't intended for there to be a dynamic between creator and created that is actually worth exploring in this collection of stories.
The guy is just very good at creating fiction that splits between the literary and the more-or-less popularly entertaining story. The measured voice of the narrator is the one constant, although the subjects of the stories being told varies a lot one to the next. I seem to remember stories touching on genre being blended with those that approach memoir - very much in the vein of Joe Hill's "20th Century Ghosts." All in all, these were very enjoyable stories. I am a bit embarrassed I don't remember more of the details here, but I do recall Chabon's narrator's voices, often a bit sullen or world-weary, but nonetheless optimistic. One might call that dramatic, but personally I find it a badge of verisimilitude, a connection between myself and these various narrators and, at the risk of presuming maybe too much here, a possible perception of the relationship between these narrators and their author.
I'd be more surprised, however, if this review ends up making any sense at all, than whether or not this author has or hasn't intended for there to be a dynamic between creator and created that is actually worth exploring in this collection of stories.
September 5, 2017
I love Michael Chabon, but this early collection, while it has its gems, is fairly painful for me to read when I compare it with his later more nuanced masterpieces. It is too masculine, too obsessed with fatherhood and death and grim conclusions, and absent almost entirely the engagement with sympathy and love that makes Chabon the least grating of exuberantly male fiction writers. The last story is overtly Lovecraftian and also racist--while it starts out as a folk tale about an industrial town being slowly eaten by the machines that it operates, it ends as a bizarre Indian Curse thing that just left me nauseous and somehow managed to be misogynist at the same time.
The title story is one of the best in the book ; there is also a funny one about a Brit that foreshadows Chabon's interest in the meaning of Jewish fatherhood and in sportsmanship. The main good things about this book involve seeing the evolution of Chabon as a writer. I give it three stars because I like the guy in general and think it's worth looking at if you like him, though I probably would check it out from a library .
The title story is one of the best in the book ; there is also a funny one about a Brit that foreshadows Chabon's interest in the meaning of Jewish fatherhood and in sportsmanship. The main good things about this book involve seeing the evolution of Chabon as a writer. I give it three stars because I like the guy in general and think it's worth looking at if you like him, though I probably would check it out from a library .
October 29, 2009
This has, so far, been the most disappointing book by Chabon that I've read. I would say that he's a very talented writer, one of my favorites, but here he seems tangled in his own words. Beautiful metaphors and images drop from the sky like gleaming marbles, but they land on an otherwise flat, nearly featureless plane. Many sentences feel overwrought to the point where they stretch thin enough to see the webbing that holds them together. Emotions, in particular, don't reach the reader until they've bounced through a Rube Goldbergesque matrix of conjunctions, phrases, and clauses. The story-lines themselves begin to feel like object lessons in their contrivances. All that said, the collection has its high points. The title story and "Spikes" return to what provided the best material in A Model World: the confusion and uncertainty of childhood and adolescence. Meanwhile, the odd "In the Black Mill" easily provides the most purely entertaining story, and arguably marks the formal beginning of Chabon's public embrace of "genre fiction."
February 4, 2016
Chabon's novels are sprawling and lush and expansive, so I wasn't exactly sure what to expect from his truncated fiction. I'm happy to say, though, I found these short stories, from one of my favourite all-time writers, to be satisfying and entertaining. I felt like these early stories provide a lot of insight into some of the developing themes and concerns in his impressive work in the 21st century.
Honestly, I believe no one captures the follies and complexities and brokenness of being a male in our age--as husbands and fathers and sons in a forever shifting world--better than Chabon. Even the seemingly out-of-place horror story finale comments on the tensions of deeply changing male code in a pretty unexpected, but fascinating way.
In many ways, this collection is a nice companion to Chabon's now-expansive literary repertoire, but even better, this book belongs next to his brilliant essay collection, Manhood for Amateurs, as yet another guide to understanding the modern male condition.
Honestly, I believe no one captures the follies and complexities and brokenness of being a male in our age--as husbands and fathers and sons in a forever shifting world--better than Chabon. Even the seemingly out-of-place horror story finale comments on the tensions of deeply changing male code in a pretty unexpected, but fascinating way.
In many ways, this collection is a nice companion to Chabon's now-expansive literary repertoire, but even better, this book belongs next to his brilliant essay collection, Manhood for Amateurs, as yet another guide to understanding the modern male condition.
August 18, 2019
No puede decirse que Michael Chabon no escriba bien. Los lugares tienen una atmósfera bien definida, las situaciones son lo suficientemente singulares para resultar interesantes, y a los personajes los visualizamos sin problema porque están bien caracterizados y descritos. De hecho está todo como demasiado descrito. Demasiado descrito, escrito y contado, y ahí es donde llaga el conato de bostezo. Chabón mete demasiadas cosas en la foto, y por buena que sea la técnica con que las retrata, no deja esas áreas difusas que te clavan los dientecillos y hacen que un relato te acompañe durante cierto tiempo como un inquietante parásito mental. Quizás por eso el relato que más gracia me ha hecho es el último, «In the Black Mill», pues como es un relato de terror de aire lovecraftiano se ve obligado a no contar demasiado para el que final no sea tan previsible. Bueno, por eso y porque no tiene nada que ver con lo anterior, y ya estaba yo un poco cansadita de tantas historias de divorcios, eso también hay que decirlo.
October 20, 2009
I'm only rating this four stars due to a few flat stories in the collection (house Hunting and The Harris Fetko Story). The best of the bunch is Son of Wolfman, a tale with precisely the correct lilt of redemption at the end. If this story doesn't lift your heart, read it again and again. My other favorites were the title story and The Black Mill.
In all these tales, Chabon manages to pack tiny corkscrews of philosophy and tangential notions into the prose. He uses quirky metaphors that pull the reader right into the text. These are mostly tales of marriages and all the troubles they can bear. The Black Mill is the odd duck, and Chabon surprised me with how well he captures the spirit of a run-down Western PA 'company' town. The tale is chilling, even if a bit over the top near the end.
Even if you don't care for his novels, read this--it's one of the best collections out there from a currently active author.
In all these tales, Chabon manages to pack tiny corkscrews of philosophy and tangential notions into the prose. He uses quirky metaphors that pull the reader right into the text. These are mostly tales of marriages and all the troubles they can bear. The Black Mill is the odd duck, and Chabon surprised me with how well he captures the spirit of a run-down Western PA 'company' town. The tale is chilling, even if a bit over the top near the end.
Even if you don't care for his novels, read this--it's one of the best collections out there from a currently active author.
September 22, 2012
Chabon's a brilliant writer, but I didn't feel his imagination had the room to unfurl itself in these short stories. Though told from various points of view and with some clever variants, these are all essentially portraits of middle-class American marriages in collapse. They're well-written and fun -- except when Chabon strays into the area of US sports, making no concessions to the ignorant reader and becoming completely impenetrable -- but basically inconsequential. The one exception is the final story, "In the Black Mill", an exuberant and loving Lovecraft parody attributed to the nonexistent pulp author August Van Zorn, which nonetheless manages -- if I'm reading it correctly -- to implicate the unthinking antisemitism of Lovecraft and some of his pulp-writing peers in the attitudes which led to the Holocaust.
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