Tag: Michael Chabon

‘More than Human’ by Michael Chabon

Chabon’s story is another about father-child relationships and the pains of family life. This is one of a series of stories in a sequence called The Lost World, which charts the unfolding of the divorce of the parents of Nathan Shapiro and the boy’s realisation that this is what is now definitely happening. As the dents in the carpet where some of the furniture once stood quietly but telling testify, his father really is leaving the house.

One of the few short stories I can remember ever making me cry, especially in its ending, as we see – through Nathan’s eyes but from his father’s written testimony – how the closeness they both sought has evaded both of them. Yet the story is as bottled, unspoken and afraid to bare its emotions as its characters (indeed, the father is referred to as ‘Dr. Shapiro’ throughout). It’s what they can’t say – or can only hint at – that is so strong here. Yet we are also left wondering if the outcome would have been the same even if they had: even conquering male reticence might have left Nathan and his father in separate houses, unsure of their futures, although they may have preferred imperfection to absence.

First published in GQ, 1989, and collected in A Model World and Other Stories, William Morrow, 1991

‘Millionaires’ by Michael Chabon

The One You Spent Years Getting Over:

It’s possible that I wasted at least half my twenties being obsessed by this short story from Michael Chabon’s first collection – wanting to permanently inhabit its nostalgic, winter-afternoon mood of doomed and unnecessarily complicated young relationships, wanting to meet and fall in love with a woman as magnificently over-romanticised as its damaged and gloriously-named heroine Kimberly Ellen Donna Marie Trilby, wanting to somehow one day write a story exactly the same as it.

Harry was my best friend, but millionaires have squandered their fortunes, and men have lost their minds, and friends have tracked each other down for less than the sight of a lovely woman in nothing but a sweater.

Re-reading the story now I’m embarrassed by who I was then, and even more by who I wanted to be (it’s not for nothing that someone once wrote a paper on ‘The Short Fiction of Michael Chabon: Nostalgia in the Very Young’), but, my God, Chabon writes some beautiful, beautiful prose. And knows better than anyone how and when to leave stuff out.

I’ve also realised that the best story in that debut collection is actually not ‘Millionaires’ at all, but ‘The Lost World’ (there’s that nostalgia again), a much lower-key, coming-of-age piece that recreates with astonishing grace the exact moment when adolescence tips you out of childhood and into an unknown new country.

You should read them both, though.

(First published in The New Yorker, 1990. Collected in A Model World, and Other Stories, William Morrow/Sceptre 1991)