Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories - Softcover

Chabon, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312254385 ISBN 13: 9780312254384

Publisher: Picador, 2000

Synopsis

The author of Wonder Boys returns with a powerful and wonderfully written collection of stories, Werewolves in Their Youth. 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.

About this title

Review

Wonder boy Michael Chabon's second collection of stories tackles the American family in all its tragic and often frighteningly funny dysfunction. In the title story, a self-professed "King of the Retards" tries to distance himself from his next-door neighbor and only friend, who has taken their games (Plastic Man, Titanium Man, Matter-Eater Lad) just a little too far. In "House Hunting," a drunk real-estate agent shows a young couple through a house far too expensive for them, pocketing knickknacks and demonstrating a strange familiarity with its rooms. The wrenching "Son of the Wolfman" follows the aftermath of a rape; after a long struggle to conceive, Cara Glanzman becomes pregnant by her rapist and decides to keep the child, even as her husband struggles with his violent thoughts. In spite of the potential for sensationalism in such a plot, "Wolfman" is moving, unsentimental, and like the rest of these tales, wholly original.

Chabon is a master of the lively and unexpected description, his prose studded with images that split these mostly conventionally themed stories wide open. Consider his burly Quebecois carpenter, who has "a face that looked as if it had been carved with a pneumatic drill by a tiny workman dangling from the sheer granite cliff of Olivier's forehead." Or the "local drunks" of a Chubb Island bar, "a close-knit population, involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the building, over several generations, of a basilica of failure, on whose crowded friezes they figured in vivid depictions of bankruptcy, drug rehabilitation, softball, and arrest." Or, the narrator of "Mrs. Box" and his failed marriage: "...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." Werewolves in Their Youth is worth reading for such moments alone. When Chabon uses them to illuminate our darkest impulses and fears, the result is often revelatory.

From the Publisher

"He's Updike without the condescension, Cheever without the self-pity, a young American Nabokov who writes with a rueful joie de vivre from within his own culture." --James Hynes, The Washington Post Book World

"[Michael Chabon] has a captivating, fluid way of writing that surrounds and shields these bewildered people with descriptions and observations both apt and moving.... When you read these stories, it may strike you how seldom you come across really beautiful writing...Chabon's writing is unique. It's truthful and lyrical, and it bestows on these troubled children of his imagination a measure of grace." --Susan Kelly, USA Today

"Mr. Chabon writes with enormous fluency in these pages, captivating the reader with his descriptive and metaphoric powers." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"A loving craftsman and the author of superb, seemingly alchemically rendered sentences, Chabon has been producing pitch-perfect, at times even dazzling, fiction.... While his language has relinquished none of its vividness, Chabon has mellowed it into an elegant vessel of irony and empathy." --Michael Carroll, Los Angeles Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0312254385
• ISBN 13: 9780312254384
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224