Gentlemen of the Road, which was first published as a serial in the New York Times Magazine last spring [2007], is a self-consciously old-fashioned adventure story given a Jewish twist. The gentlemen in question are two blades for hire in the Caucasus and what's now Ukraine; the action takes place some time around 950AD. Zelikman - young, skinny, pale - is a Frankish Jew from Regensburg, a physician by training, who fights with an outsized bloodletting instrument and rides a horse called Hillel. Amram - older, bulky, dark - is an Ethiopian who thinks of himself as being Jewish, a former soldier in the Byzantine army and the owner of an axe called "Defiler of Your Mother".
"An excellent tale of honorable thieves, swindles, sword fights and vengeance . . . evokes the childhood glee of reading by the flashlight, under the covers."
- The Star-Ledger
"Within a few pages I was happily tangled in [Chabon's] net of finely filigreed language, seduced by an old-school-style swashbuckling quest . . . laced with surprises and humor"
- San Francisco Chronicle
"Some writers try to build bridges over the chasm that separates genre fiction from 'serious' lit. Michael Chabon simply denies the gap exists. He walks on air, never looking down, and dares you to contradict his assertion that comic books, noir whodunits, boys' stories of derring-do, and Pulitzer-worthy novels share the same DNA."
- Entertainment Weekly
Gentlemen of the Road
The simplest step in book reviewing is checking my gut, and coming up with a rating between zero and ten. But when I do just that, it doesn't tell you much: You may have completely different taste than I do. A review that's all enthusiasm or scorn might be fun to read, but it doesn't tell you much about the book's quiddity, its distinct essence.
I can give you a sense of a book by summarizing its plot - but that reduces the pleasure you'll find if you read the whole book, the joy of discovering every piece of the journey in the exact order and depth that the author meant to show you. I can yank out the skeleton of the beast, but that spoils your first encounter with it in the wild.
Most often in my reviews I look to capture the flavor of the book in question, by giving you a spoonful of the whole stew. I find an excerpt which holds some of the texture and light that the author has cooked up, so you can test for yourself whether it appeals to you. Here are the first paragraphs of Gentlemen of the Road. Note how rich a world Chabon is painting, how colorful and unusual his language gets, and the deftness of his storytelling.
ON DISCORD ARISING FROM THE EXCESSIVE LOVE OF A HAT
For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve. Engrossed in the study of a small ivory shatranj board with pieces of ebony and horn, and in the stew of chickpeas, carrots, dried lemons and mutton for which the caravansary was renowned, the African held the place nearest the fire, his broad back to the bird, with a view of the doors and the window with its shutters thrown open to the blue dusk. On this temperate autumn evening in the kingdom of Arran in the eastern foothills of the Caucasus, it was only the two natives of burning jungles, the African and the myna, who sought to warm their bones. The precise origin of the African remained a mystery. In his quilted gray bambakion with the frayed hood, worn over a ragged white tunic, there was a hint of former service in the armies of Byzantium, while the brass eyelets on the straps of his buskins suggested a sojourn in the West. No one had hazarded to discover whether the speech of the known empires, khanates, emirates, hordes and kingdoms was intelligible to him. With his skin that was lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle, and his eyes womanly as a camel's, and his shining pate with its ruff of wool whose silver hue implied a seniority attained only by the most hardened men, and above all with the stillness that trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road, the African appeared neither to invite nor to promise to tolerate questions. Among the travelers at the caravansary there was a moment of admiration, therefore, for the bird's temerity when it seemed to declare, in its excellent Greek, that the African consumed his food in just the carrion-scarfing way one might expect of the bastard offspring of a bald-pated vulture and a Barbary ape.
For a moment after the insult was hurled, the African went on eating, without looking up from the shatranj board, indeed without seeming to have heard the remark at all. Then, before anyone quite understood that calumny so fine went beyond the powers even of the myna, and that the bird was innocent, this once, of slander, the African reached his left hand into his right buskin and, in a continuous gesture as fluid and unbroken as that by which a falconer looses his fatal darling into the sky, produced a shard of bright Arab steel, its crude hilt swaddled in strips of hide, and sent it hunting across the benches.
Neither the beardless stripling who was sitting just to the right of its victim, nor the one-eyed mahout who was the stripling's companion, would ever forget the dagger's keening as it stung the air. With the sound of a letter being sliced open by an impatient hand, it tore through the crown of the wide-brimmed black hat worn by the victim, a fair-haired scarecrow from some fogbound land who had ridden in, that afternoon, on the Tiflis road. He was a slight, thin-shanked fellow, gloomy of countenance, white as tallow, his hair falling in two golden curtains on either side of his long face. There was a rattling twang like that of an arrow striking a tree. The hat flew off the scarecrow's head as if registering his surprise and stuck to the post of the daub wall behind him as he let loose an outlandish syllable in the rheumy jargon of his homeland.
In the fireplace a glowing castle of embers subsided to ash. The mahout heard the iron ticking of a kettle on the boil in the kitchen. The benches squeaked, and travelers spat in anticipation of a fight. . . .
Language, Imagination & Craft
Let's look at these three aspects, in this excerpt from Gentlemen of the Road. Chabon also wove a lot of other ingredients into this book, such as Adventure, Humor and Wisdom. You can see glimmers of those threads already in these opening pages. I'll tell you what grabbed me and swept me away, after reading only this far: Chabon was having so much fun. His exuberance and exhilaration were contagious - I just wanted to hop up on my camel and follow wherever his story went.
At the atomic level of language, consider Chabon's words. You came into this diary because you enjoy reading books; you might be so well-read that you grasped even Chabon's more obscure words. But I'll bet there were a couple you didn't know, and a few that you couldn't have explained if your kid asked you precisely what they meant. Here are the hardest words, defined -
- Myna: any of various Asian starlings; esp: a dark brown slightly crested bird of southeastern Asia with a white tail tip and wing markings and bright yellow bill and feet.
- Caravansary: an inn surrounding a court in eastern countries where caravans rest at night.
- Buskin: a laced boot reaching halfway or more to the knee.
- Carrion-scarfing: greedily eating dead and putrefying flesh.
- Barbary ape: a tailless monkey of North Africa and Gibraltar.
- Calumny: the act of uttering false charges or misrepresentations maliciously calculated to damage another's reputation.
- Mahout: a keeper and driver of an elephant.
- Shank: the part of the leg between the knee and the ankle.
- Tallow: the white nearly tasteless solid rendered fat of cattle and sheep used chiefly in soap, margarine, candles and lubricants.
Those are most of the hard ones. There are a few others you probably know, but which are about the level of SAT words: eyelets, pate, temerity, stripling, daub and rheumy. All the definitions I just gave came from my go-to dictionary, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate. However, two of Chabon's nouns weren't in there. Nor were they in my second-shelf dictionary, Webster's New Universal Unabridged. At which point I look to my top shelf, the king of books, The Oxford English Dictionary. Lo, gadzooks, they aren't even in the OED! Luckily, I'm already on the internet, so I'll poke through Bing. Here, finally, are the two hardest words -
- Shatranj: an ancestor of modern chess, which came to the West via the Persians and later Greeks, and ultimately from India.
- Bambakion: a type of padded under-garment, worn under armour, especially by Byzantine troops.
If you inspect various online dictionaries, those that quote a usage all cite this excerpt we're looking at. So Chabon has stretched our language a little here (as he does in his ambitious books), and left it slightly richer, both in words and concepts. Should an author drop such arcane words into their text? Won't their readers all just scratch their heads (and some, like me, dig into their dictionaries fruitlessly)?
James Joyce does this so much in Ulysses, it looks like an avalanche of obfuscation. He read the OED from cover to cover, then stuffed a twentieth of it into the books he wrote. Then again, Shakespeare introduced hundreds of words into English. And he was dropping them into speeches where the audience only heard them once, had no dictionary at hand - and yet, they frequently got the gist of what he meant. A skilled writer can place their words in a context where their meaning shines out. For example, by the time Chabon told us that Amram was "Engrossed in the study of a small ivory shatranj board with pieces of ebony and horn", most of us had figured out what sort of game he was inspecting. These alien words can be handled deftly, so we grasp them; yet they also shock us with their strangeness, and enrich the scene with exotic local color. You'll find the same technique used with entirely made-up words throughout A Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Rings, Dune. Many ambitious SF or Fantasy books do this, to help map out a brave new world.
Gentlemen of the Road has an afternote wherein Chabon mentions all the books and websites he immersed himself in, to soak up all he could discover about the Khazars. That's where a lot of his exuberance came from. He loved this world he discovered, he scarfed it down; by the time he sat down to write this book, Khazaria was bursting out of his fingertips. As Chabon says in his Afterword,
All adventure happens in that damned or magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into an adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret.
I find Michael Chabon's powerful yet graceful command of English, and of storytelling, quite astounding. He's good on so many levels. Like Austen, he makes it look easy, yet there's so much going on here. He's crammed a phenomenal amount of his world and story into this one excerpt, he's transported us halfway around the world and a millennium into the dark backward and abysm of time. We're so caught up in Chabon's characters and action that we never question his magic that brought this world alive. Look at the poetry of his perspective, the note-perfect metaphors. From the two Africans feeling chilled on a temperate autumn day to clothes hinting at a life of wars and treks, from that stiletto of an insult to Amram's "continuous gesture as fluid and unbroken as that by which a falconer looses his fatal darling into the sky, produced a shard of bright Arab steel, its crude hilt swaddled in strips of hide, and sent it hunting across the benches", every word shows us more of the texture of this world and the spirit of its heroes. The Arab knife is a fatal darling is a hunting falcon: nailed it.
When I had transcribed that opening excerpt, I read back through it out loud, to ensure that I hadn't missed or twisted any words. At which point, Michael Chabon began to irk me a bit. Why should he have so much craft, and so few flaws? Isn't that an embarrassment of riches, right next door to being greedy and smug? Even Chabon's commas are just so, helping his language to dance and his story to shine. In fact, this whole endeavor was something of a dance for Michael Chabon, a room to cavort in after years of heavy workouts.
Look again at the quote two paragraphs above: "that place where the structures, laws and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had". Now replace "your upbringing" with "serious literature", and "your family and neighbors" with "your peers and critics". Now you see the delicious freedom and adventure Chabon discovered, around the time he was writing Gentlemen of the Road.
Michael Chabon's first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh came out when he was 25, catapulting him to relative fame and fortune. He got a $155,000 advance: about 20 times the average, for novelists who manage to interest a publisher.
He then spent 5 years working on an epic which never fully gelled.
Called Fountain City, the novel was a "highly ambitious opus ... about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida", and it eventually ballooned to 1,500 pages, with no end in sight. . . At one point, Chabon submitted a 672-page draft to his agent and editor, who disliked the work. Chabon had problems dropping the novel, though. "It was really scary", he said later. "I'd already signed a contract and been paid all this money. And then I'd gotten a divorce and half the money was already with my ex-wife. My instincts were telling me, This book is fucked. Just drop it. But I didn't, because I thought, What if I have to give the money back? I used to go down to my office and fantasize about all the books I could write instead."
When Chabon finally set that book aside,
Wonder Boys poured out of him, earning even greater success. I've read both of those books, and enjoyed them both. I wouldn't call them pedestrian, but they were relatively middle of the road, especially compared to the explosions of originality that were to come.
I've read a lot of books which were in the same ballpark as Chabon's first novels. I've never read anything similar to his magical third, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It's a blockbuster, more than 600 pages of richly woven friendship, tragedy, history and magic. It won the 2001 Pulitzer, various other prizes, kudos from all quarters, and is probably still his most highly esteemed book. Bret Easton Ellis called it "one of the three great books of my generation".
In 2004 Chabon came out with a far shorter book, The Final Solution, playing with Sherlock Holmes and other themes Chabon wanted to explore. I haven't read that one. But his next novel was his second tour-de-force, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Like Kavalier & Clay, this has a lot of realism and carefully drawn characters, with some oblique magic infusing it. It's set in a world just like ours - except that Israel didn't grow in the Middle East, instead the Jewish people were given a homeland in Alaska. So instead of winning the highbrow literary prizes, this one scooped the two biggest SF prizes, the Hugo and the Nebula. It didn't sparkle as much for me as K & C, but it came close.
There were elements of fantasy, and a lot of playfulness, in all of these novels. But Chabon was constantly honing his craft as a serious writer, and working out all the nuts and bolts of convincing realism (in his slightly skewed worlds). It was at this point, when he'd developed every skill a novelist needs, and proved them all, that Chabon took his wild gallop to Khazaria with Gentlemen of the Road.
In 2012 Chabon wrote a third of his more ambitious, colorful masterpieces, Telegraph Avenue. I haven't read that yet, but the R&BLers who have speak well of it. From some reviews and interviews I've read, I sense that Chabon keeps pushing his boundaries, and achieves things in his latest that he'd never tried before.
If you haven't read any Michael Chabon yet, I recommend him very highly. He's not only one of the best US writers working today, he's one of the most thrilling and original. While it's far from his most ambitious novel, Gentlemen of the Road would be a perfect place to first meet Chabon. It's a lovely book and a wild journey.