Chabon Hits the Road

This review recently appeared in the Dallas Morning News and the San Jose Mercury News

GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD
By Michael Chabon
Del Rey, 204 pp., $21.95

When you’ve written such terrific novels as “Wonder Boys,” “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” you’re probably entitled to indulge yourself however you see fit. And Berkeley writer Michael Chabon has been doing just that, trying his hand at various genres – a fantasy for children (“Summerland”), the detective story (“The Final Solution”) and now the picaresque adventure novel.

“Gentlemen of the Road” is a sword-and-sandals tale with an exotic setting – the contentious no-man’s-land of southeastern Europe in the tenth century, a place where today a tendril of Russia and other former Soviet states bump up against Turkey and Iran between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Chabon’s protagonists are a pair of itinerant rogues, far from their widely separated homes: Zelikman, a lanky blond Frank from what’s now Bavaria, and Amram, a brawny black man from Abyssinia. Together, they find themselves caught up in the fortunes of a youth known as Filaq, who claims to be a prince of the Khazars whose father has been overthrown by a usurper.

It won’t take the reader as long as it takes Zelikman and Amram to figure out that Filaq isn’t exactly what he seems, but the reader has the advantage of having read Shakespeare’s tales of exiled youths wandering incognito in strange lands. For that matter, the reader has read other tales of ingenious underdogs struggling against enormous odds to achieve great if bloody victories, which is what the narrative drift of this small novel amounts to.

Chabon is on record as a staunch defender of genre fiction. “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” after all, is a shrewd combinatory riff on two genres: alternative history and the hardboiled detective story. In fact, he delights in good genre fiction as a kind of nose-thumbing to the literary establishment. “I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized,” he told one interviewer, “whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. … To me, it's about pleasure, and the pleasure of reading, and I like to define pleasure broadly.”

Chabon can say this because whatever he’s writing – either “literary” or “genre” – gives us one central pleasure: that of seeing a master of prose at work. “Gentlemen of the Road” is no exception here, although the prose style here is parodistic, a deft adaptation of the rambling periodic style of some nineteenth-century teller of adventure tales – an H. Rider Haggard or a Charles Reade, perhaps – enlivened by Chabon’s own keen descriptive powers. And like a nineteenth-century adventure tale, it began as a newspaper serial, in the New York Times Magazine.

But the trouble with “Gentlemen of the Road” is that Chabon has tried to stuff an epic into a novella. A lot of essential back story – color, characterization, historical context – has been abbreviated or lopped off. For example, we learn that Zelikman, a widely traveled soldier of fortune, is apparently a virgin, but we are left to wonder why. The characters are, well, generic, even if Chabon gives them a special twist by making Zelikman and Amram Jewish – a fact consistent with the time and the locale of the novel.

The original title of the book, Chabon tells us in his afterword, was “Jews With Swords.” When he tried the title out on his friends, however, they laughed. “They saw their Uncle Manny, dirk between his teeth, slacks belted at the armpits, dropping from the chandelier to knock together the heads of a couple of nefarious auditors.” The thing is, that might have made a more interesting novel than “Gentlemen of the Road.”