All I have to say is: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay better be a hell of a lot better. God DAMN is this a frustrating book. Author Michael Chabon’s first novel is a hodgepodge of various tropes we’ve seen before all muddled together into an unsatisfying mixture that doesn’t even resolve by the time it’s all through. It’s not particularly bad, but it certainly isn’t satisfying. Like a meal of powdered mashed potatoes when there was access to a gourmet Thanksgiving feast.

I’ll start with the good, as I usually do: Chabon is clearly a gifted writer. Every ten pages or so, there seemed to be a phrase that popped out at me that I wanted to write down (as well as an entire passage that I think is perfectly written). Lines like “I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon” or “Solace is in the fabric of sweatshirts” had a nice ring for me, and Chabon consistently impresses with his writing. The book tells the story of an Eventful Summer After College where Art Bechstein works a nothing job at a chain bookstore and dates Phlox (ugh, what a literary name) and befriends her co-worker Arthur. Art’s dad is a mobster in Pittsburg (Pittsburg has organized crime?), and Arthur’s friend Cleveland starts working for him. Oh, and Art may or may not be in love with Arthur, who’s gay.

It’s all a weird mixture to handle. The Phlox/Art/Arthur triangle is enough for one novel, but Chabon has this weird tacked-on mob thing going on that never quite gels with the love story. Cleveland, in particular, feels like he’s from a completely different novel and I found his chunks of the narrative to be a chore to read. Chabon is much more successful with the central love triangle, though I never particularly bought Art’s conflict about his bisexuality. Maybe Chabon is trying to make a statement about the fluidity of sexuality, but Art instead comes off as frustratingly indecisive. Simply having Art acknowledge that he’s conflicted doesn’t provide a satisfying conclusion to this element of his character for me – throughout the novel he wavers between the two, never deciding if he likes guys, girls, or even if he definitively likes both.

And then there’s the open-ended finale. In a word: frustrating. It seriously leaves so many questions open that it almost reads like Chabon had his deadline for the publisher and hadn’t finished writing so he wrapped things up as best he could in time to send it off at Kinko’s. If this were a Lit class, I could pull some analysis out of my ass about the open-ended nature of the novel mirroring Art’s open-ended feelings, but this isn’t a Lit class: I literally finished the book and scowled with dissatisfaction. Not because the book was particularly terrible (like I said: Chabon is clearly gifted and I look forward to reading something else of his), but because I felt like Chabon had let me down as a reader. For me, stories need endings. They need catharsis. Having Art close the book by essentially saying that he looks back on That Summer and thinks “boy golly gosh, what a wacky summer!” is not satisfactory for me. There’s some interesting stuff going on in The Mysteries of Pittsburg, but it’s buried in a wholly infuriating package.