The first novel by Michael Chabon, this book is a coming-of-age tale of the first summer after college. I've enjoyed the author's later books, so thought I'd go back and read his earlier one.

This first novel by Chabon shows his promise as a writer. He manages to write characters that are compelling even when he isn't sure what he wants to say about them. This is a coming of age story, with the honesty, confusion, sexual experimentation, and fantasy of so many young men. This may not be the story of the author's own actual life, but it reads like the story that you can at least imagine that 24-year-old author Chabon kind of wished was his life, if not really, at least in novelistic fantasy. But because Chabon is a good writer, even this semi-fantasy navel-gazing coming of age reads in a compelling way.

These characters are really pretty different from me and from anything that I ever felt, but it nonetheless aroused in me fantasy-nostalgia for the time after college when I could have been this sort of undirected and carefree person even though I wasn't actually. It's not easy to engender this sort of feeling writing about hapless, drinking and drugging twenty-somethings. Usually that just ends up seeming either anti-her0-ish or boring.

In the end, maybe what this all means is that Chabon just turns out to be a really good novelist. Or maybe I liked his book because I'm predisposed to like him since I know of his later work. Either way, I'm glad to have read this one.