WEREWOLVES IN THEIR YOUTH
By Michael Chabon
Random House, 212 pages, $22.95
The children in short stories and novels offer clues to the source of a writer’s inspiration and sensibility. It is the trauma and triumphs of childhood, after all, that orient you to the human world. A persistent sense of alienation can foster keen observational skills, while love engenders empathy, and a volatile mix of these two precious qualities is essential to the mysterious process of writing fiction.
Michael Chabon possesses both in spades, as well as such intimacy with language that his psychologically acute metaphoric descriptions bloom in the mind with as much prismatic dazzle as the fireworks ignited by psychedelics. His fictional children are ardent and critical beings sparking with off-kilter wisdom and wit, edgy imaginations and precocious resiliency. Chabon writes confidently from their point of view, and then, making the leap from child to man, captures the confusion, wonder, fear and gratitude fathers experience as they muddle through each stage of parenthood, entranced and frightened by the magnetism and vulnerability of the young.
The title story in this knockout volume, Chabon’s second story collection, is a droll yet searching tale of boyhood and the valiant attempts to stave off disaster that growing up so often entails. A structural marvel, “Werewolves in Their Youth” slowly opens out from a spotlight focus on 11-year-old Paul to gradually illuminate the complexities of his parents’ floundering marriage and the predicament of their neighbors, whose son, the out-of-control Timothy, is on the brink of being sent off to the dreaded special school.
It’s recess, and Paul, alone and intent, is constructing an elaborate city for a terrorized ant population, explaining the layout to them in the same tone of voice he has heard his real-estate-agent mother use with dazed first-time home-buyers. Suddenly, screams erupt from the playground, and Paul jumps up just in time to see Timothy snap into full, make-believe werewolf mode. Paul stands rigid with reluctance, knowing he’s the only one who can talk Timothy out of his monster trance and resenting his connection to the class freak.
As this many-faceted story unfurls, Chabon keeps the definition of “freak” in play and shifts the balance of power back and forth between his young, unhappy protagonists. When he describes Timothy on the rampage, Chabon subtly raises the question of who is tormenting whom? And, more importantly, who is crazy and who is sane? He reminds us, almost subliminally, that every situation can be interpreted in at least two ways, and then broaches his primary theme: the incessant inner battle that rages between our instincts–our werewolf selves–and the precepts of civilization. Timothy, it turns out, is the first in a line of evocative characters personifying this tug-of-war between nature and nurture, intuition and reason, survival and ambition.
This fundamental conflict drives the highly suspenseful and slashingly funny “House Hunting.” Here Chabon ponders the violence inherent in sex, and the precariousness of marriage, which he sees as “at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made.” This vision hovers along the periphery of each subsequent story as the monstrous and the random take on ever-more-troubling forms.
In the masterful “Son of the Wolfman,” a tale that secures Chabon a place alongside Raymond Carver and E.L. Doctorow, he portrays a faithful wife who has always longed for children but who only gets pregnant when she is raped by a stranger. Overcoming her anger and revulsion, she decides to have the baby, and her tormented husband must figure out if he has what it takes to stay and be a father to this child of violence. As Chabon dramatizes this excruciating situation with breath-catching intensity and flashes of humor, his readers will hope that compassion and love win out over lunacy and ferociousness.
Chabon’s consummate and surprising stories relate significantly to each other, and their sequencing creates a resonant progression. The riveting “Son of the Wolfman” is followed by “Green’s Book,” a superb display of Chabon’s deservedly famous humor and a welcome entry into the world of the absurd after the mythic dimensions of the previous tale. Fatherhood is again the topic. Marty Green, recently divorced, is traveling with his young daughter, with whom he spends little time. He stops to visit a family he baby-sat for in his youth and is unnerved by the presence of his former charge, once a trusting toddler he nearly abused while in an erotic fugue state, now a provocative and disturbingly frank (make that hilarious) young woman. Green panics and promptly forgets everything he has written in his rather smug book about the rules of fatherly conduct. So much for expertise. But like all of Chabon’s fumbling male characters, Green is acutely aware of his shortcomings, and open to, indeed, hungry for, enlightenment, a willingness to change that infuses Chabon’s tales with a wry and stirring optimism.
Further variations on the theme of fatherhood are found in “Spikes,” a radiant story about a man and a surrogate son, and the comic “The Harris Fetko Story,” in which a football player reluctantly attends the ritual circumcision of his half-Jewish half-brother at his father’s car dealership. In the final tale, “In the Black Mill,” Chabon zaps us into an entirely different time and place, indulging his fascination with terror in a full-blown Gothic horror story that would have made Shirley Jackson proud. The author, too, of two fine novels, Chabon is a luminous and thrilling writer: funny, imaginative, insightful and madly in love with our wild and timid species.
