On the road again

With the eight or nine hours each way to North Carolina and back, we had enough time to digest a couple of audio books (it's tough to not type books on tape whether the books are on cd or fully digital). Instead of taking in a single huge book, though, we went with two smaller books.

Michael Chabon - Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure - This makes my fourth novel (this more of a novella, really) by Chabon - having read Summerland, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and The Yiddish Policeman's Union before - and I find myself a strong fan of Chabon's writing style at this point. His words meander along the trail of the plot, creating a very rich world into which he drops his characters, a world full of back story and color, fully-rounded and developed supporting characters, and dynamic obstacles against which they must persevere.

Gentlemen sees this rich world taken to extreme as the color or the setting edges toward overwhelming the titular Gentlemen - Amram and Zelikman. The two are mercenary wanderers, and we meet them as they stage a bloody fight in a 10th-century, northeastern African roadhouse, taking a cut of the owner's wagered winnings from an arrangement made before the book begins. From there, they stumble into responsibility, riding away with a deposed teen prince who resists his captivity with vitriol and invectives hurled at our gentlemen.

On the road, the prince escapes, is captured by his deposers, and eventually turns them to his cause of regaining the throne in his native kingdom. Along the way, the gentlemen come around to his cause and help lead his revolution.

In the course of the tale, Chabon explores the intermingling of a dozens of cultures in his period Azerbaijan, visiting different versions of Jewish culture at the time, all imagining themselves too different from the others to coexist but all revealing their similarities through the tale. Chabon's humor comes through often in this work, especially in the relationship between the titular characters as well as the background revelations of Zelikman.

This isn't Chabon's finest work - I would put Kavalier and Clay forward as that of my readings - though it certainly is an entertaining and colorful read.

Stephen Chbosky - The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Wallflower explores the freshman year of an intelligent but socially- and emotionally-stunted young man in suburban Pittsburgh. In the course of the book, our main character, Charlie, finds himself befriending a pair of far more socially advanced seniors and falling into - and occasionally in love with - their group of friends.

Chbosky tells the tale in a series of letters written by Charlie and mailed to an anonymous, unknown confidant in you. The letters are written by Charlie because he needs to tell his tale and believes that we are someone that he believes to be a good person who will not judge him on his tale, someone who will care about him and won't mind that he changes some of the names so that his new group of friends would not be harmed by his honesty.

Charlie develops relationships with the siblings Sam and Patrick who together bring him into their world of typically and uniquely high school, artistic, counter culture friends. They enjoy the school's football games, late night coffee and cigarettes at the local Big Boy, explore sexuality and dating both within and outside the group, perform at the weekly showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show, and view themselves as adults able to control their explorations of alcohol and drugs.

As the book progresses, we get revelations of Charlie's caring and strong family and the initially unremembered incident that has created our somehow damaged, titular wallflower. Charlie spends nearly the entire book simply observing the actions that go on around him, only barely taking part and even then finding himself more often acting as he thinks that his new friends want him to act. He does not allow himself to truly become a part of the group but rather the observe and drift within his circle of new friends.

Bill, Charlie's English teacher, offers him a series of great novels to read and write about, a project that he hopes to further Charlie's intellectual development and draw Charlie out of his self-imposed shell. In the course of his readings, Charlie allows these novels to explore his burgeoning maturity through the eyes of the various authors and to improve his writing, to which he aspires as a career.

The novel explores themes - homosexuality, molestation, dating, self-revelation, drugs - that occasionally come across in ways that seem a bit too mature for a fifteen-year old main character. The distance in age between Charlie - a freshman who is a year older than his classmates - and his circle of senior friends at times seemed a bit unbelievable from my knowledge of high school students. Neither of these challenges were anything more than momentary distractions to my enjoyment of the book, however.

This is a marvelous tale of self-discovery and -development, a rich character sketch of a young man who wants to be more mature, older than he is but cannot become that person until he is able to reflect on a singular event in his past that has lead to his status as a non-participating resident of his world.

The book receives my highest recommendation. Very strong, tale.