More Amazing Adventures
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Say what you will about the stories of Michael Chabon, but don’t call him a snob. After staking a claim in the American literary landscape with “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” (1988) and “Werewolves in Their Youth” (1999) — fine contributions to late-century naturalism, with its glut of existential insecurity and sexual dysfunction — Mr. Chabon, with a wink and smirk, began to chip away at the demarcations of genre, and those priggish divisions between “high” and “low” art.
“I’m really not interested in those kinds of distinctions,” he told the Arizona Republic last year. “I know what I like.” “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (2000), which won the Pulitzer Prize, masterfully juxtaposed the disparate arenas of World War II and comic books. Mr. Chabon’s 2004 novella, “The Final Solution,” upended the classic detective story, while this year’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” proposed an alternative Zionist history, flinging the state of Israel to the Alaskan frontier and creating a “frozen chosen.” Mr. Chabon has also penned a well-received young-adult novel, “Summerland,” and he contributed to the screenplay for “Spider-Man 2.” Reading Mr. Chabon is a bit like enlisting in an all-night scavenger hunt: Who knows where the trail will lead, and what has come before is little indication of what lies ahead.
In his newest work, “Gentlemen of the Road” (Del Rey, 204 pages, $21.95), Mr. Chabon has merrily chosen to rework the swashbuckling tale of derring-do. Inspired by “The Arabian Nights,” and by Fritz Leiber’s “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser,” Mr. Chabon has imagined a sweeping cloak-and-dagger, swords-and-horsemen saga, full of audacious skullduggery and heedless escapade. “Gentlemen of the Road,” set in the Caucasus Mountains, circa 950 C.E., tells of a pair of con artists who bumble along the Silk Road in search of little more than sacks of coin. They are less of the road than of the wind, allowing themselves to be blown anywhere there are fools to swindle and fights to win.
Amram, an oversize African, with skin as “lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle” and “eyes womanly as a camel’s,” is an expert in shatranj, a Persian forerunner of chess, and wields, with comparable expertise, an axe he calls “Defiler of Your Mother.” His companion, Zelikman, is a pencil-thin, near-albino, polyglot Frank. He loves hats and his horse, a beast “stolen from those who had stolen it from Zelikman, who had stolen it from a thief.” The two are as different from each other as the best partners always are.
Amram and Zelikman soon stumble upon a deposed prince of Khazaria, a fabled Jewish tribe of the Dark Ages, and eventually agree to help the mysterious young man reclaim his land. Before long, they are ensnarled in a fractious, geopolitical world of marauding armies and teetering nation-states.
The book itself is elegant, practically pocket-size, with captivating ink drawings by Gary Gianni, and Chabonian chapter titles, such as “On Discord Arising from the Excessive Love of a Hat.” Mr. Chabon’s historical knowledge is impressive, and the writing is often first-class. A man is impaled with a sword and “to his great surprise his death was accompanied or heralded by the sounding of ram’s horns, which struck him as a little showy, perhaps, and then there was a silence that accorded more with his expectations.”
Somehow, though, “Gentlemen of the Road” remains frustratingly torpid. There are surprisingly few cliffhangers, even though the genre demands it, and, while the book began as a serialization for the New York Times Magazine, there seems little intrigue to have retained readers from week to week. Amram and Zelikman are more ruminative than swaggering, animated more by despondence than by brio. They engage in violence and deceit only regrettably. Zelikman comes from a family of physicians, and he generally uses his sword, “Lancet,” to mend rather than to wound. Amram, in turn, declares himself a “hunter of a ghost girl,” woefully longing for a daughter who was inexplicably “stolen” from him decades earlier.
Part of the problem is that Mr. Chabon, for all his good intentions, trips on his own erudition. Nearly every paragraph contains a consternating amount of esotericism, vertiginous references to forgotten cultures and customs. (How familiar are you with the “lost writings of the tzaddik of Regensburg”?) Also, Mr. Chabon is a self-declared logophile, who writes with a particular Webster’s dictionary by his side, a book he earned by winning a fiction contest as a senior in high school. But his dependence on sesquipedalianism is distracting. Why must horses be “gourmandizing” rather than “eating”? Is a reader really benefited by a “contumelious” villain, rather than one who is merely “rude”?
Mr. Chabon has included an afterword in which he offers his rationale for selecting a neglected genre and an abstruse historical era. “I have gone off in search of a little adventure,” the author writes. The coda provides an unwelcome transparency and reads almost like an apologia, demonstrating Mr. Chabon’s insecurity about his latest genre choice. The anxiety is warranted, and so it is that “Gentlemen of the Road” assumes a place on the ever-lengthening list of Mr. Chabon’s genre-bending works — not, however, atop it.
Mr. Peed is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker. He last wrote for these pages on the novelist Jonis Agee.