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Liked It “Most of these stories involve marriage in some respect. The first gives us a story through a child's perspective which Chabon is great with. The others range from good to okay with Son of the Wolfman being the only story that matches the heights of the first. There are no outright bad stories...” see full review » see other reviews » |
Didn’t Like It “Bleak and filled with despair, each story of alienated people and unhealthy relationships ends with a glimmer of hope but it's not enough to keep this book from being ugly and depressing. Chabon is a beautiful writer, but these stories don't seem as much insightful as bitter.” see full review » see other reviews » |
Newest Reviews
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“ Most of these stories involve marriage in some respect. The first gives us a story through a child's perspective which Chabon is great with. The others range from good to okay with Son of the Wolfman being the only story that matches the heights of the first. There are no outright bad stories though Green's Book doesn't quite work but remains facinating. The last story is a very well realized Lovecraft pastiche that outdoes everything else in the book. ”
Robephiles wrote this review Thursday, September 3 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Some of the stories were better than others. They definitely had a masculine voice. I didn't care for the last story - it was rather predictable. And the fact that the yokel locals couldn't figure it out could only happen in western Pennsylvania. ”
Ellie K wrote this review Saturday, March 14 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I hope Chabon's novels are better than his short fiction. The stories I've read so far are alright, but not amazing. The first few I read each involved an estranged couple that solved all their problems by having spontaneous, amazing sex. How simple.”
apokalypsis wrote this review Tuesday, November 11 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Bleak and filled with despair, each story of alienated people and unhealthy relationships ends with a glimmer of hope but it's not enough to keep this book from being ugly and depressing. Chabon is a beautiful writer, but these stories don't seem as much insightful as bitter.”
jentaw wrote this review Monday, April 7 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Not up to the Chabon's standard. The first story is great, but doesn't quite justify the cover price.”
Gavin A wrote this review Sunday, November 4 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Good collection of short stories but not my favorite of Chabon's work.”
TenBodyGun wrote this review Sunday, October 14 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“This is the volume of stories that made me fall in love with short stories all over again. Beautiful prose, strong charachters, and touching stories.”
DK Thompson wrote this review Friday, August 10 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Arias and Symphonies
AlissaNielsen wrote this review Saturday, June 2 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
review by Alissa Nielsen
Werewolves in Their Youth
by Michael Chabon
Picador, 1999
To describe a character in a short story takes a subtle hand, the author must introduce the character to the reader without falling into big chunks of description which can bloat the story and slow the pace. In short story lyricism plays a different role than in novel-length, the pace of the words flowing more like an aria than a symphony. In Michael Chabon’s collection of nine short stories, Werewolves in Their Youth, he often uses paragraph or simile to describe a character. Both structures set a pacing that sometimes succeeds and, at other times, fails.
In the story “House Hunting” struggling couple Daniel and Christy are being shown a house by drunken family friend in real estate, Bob Hogue. After Chabon describes Hogue’s cologne and his car, there is a long list of description in the third paragraph of the story starting with “Bob Hogue was a leathery man of indefinite middle age...”(32) and ending with “...his nose lettered with minute red script, gave him a look of a jet pilot gone to seed” (32). These details about the character are important but the fact of being strung together in a long list lessens the beauty of the writing and slows the pace down enough to take away from the story.
On the same page the narrator describes Christy as having “a Stanford graduate’s aggressive nice manners, and the eyes of a cheerleader atop a struggling pyramid of girls” (32). “She had been the Apple Queen of Roosevelt High.” The narrator continues, “From her mother, she had learned to try very hard to arrange everything in life with the flawlessness of a photograph in a house-and-garden magazine, and then to take it just as hard when the black plums went uneaten in the red McCoy bowl and filled the kitchen with a stink of garbage.” (32-33). Just these couple sentences give the reader a large amount of information about Christy’s background – family upbringing, class, education – as well as great details about her personality and how it applies to their marriage. It slows the pace down just enough to give the reader a break from the scene and some important details about Christy.
Chabon is a sucker for a clever simile. His similes work best when they emphasize the character or the particular mood to a scene. Such as in the same story above where Daniel and Christy agree with Hogue about not rushing into buying a house, “like people trapped in an empty bus station with a fanatical pamphleteer (33).” This simile works well because it shows a little about Christy and Daniel’s state as well as setting a mood. However, Chabon’s similes can feel very forced at time, and though clever, are sometimes long and overly-wordy. Such as in the story “That Was Me” where a drunk awakes to a character cracking open a beer “like a dog at the sound of a can opener grinding away on its evening Alpo (170).”
Where Chabon may excel at the pacing of novel-length medium, the pacing of character development and resolution in his short stories is a little rapid, starting with long, pronoun heavy first sentences, big chunks of character description and often swelling into lyricism at the resolution – problems that might go unnoticed in longer length stories. Despite the pacing, Chabon’s stories are dark, funny, heavy-hearted, rich with metaphor and overall, very compelling, which, in the end, keeps people enthusiastically reading his work.”
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