Hey! Is this yet another poorly researched and overwrought Chabon tour de force starring a young, confused and closeted gay guy who blossoms into his sexuality in a spectacular manner then freaks out about it? 'Cause that'd be awesome...

Too bad it's a terminally boring mystery retread mashed up with the same old Jewish folklore we've already read a half dozen times. Which is unfortunate because Cavalier and Clay was brilliant.

That graphic blows my mind.
Tlingit meets 8-bit '87... I'm pooting hearts. I know, "books by their covers", but this...

@Gyrus:
C&C was pretty good, but I read Mysteries of Pittsburgh and something else (the title escapes me it was so bad) and every book he writes is the same story hung in different frames.

Damn!
What's with the Chabon hate?

I liked it. I liked it a lot. Of course, I ended up consulting Wikipedia every other chapter for some bit of Judaica I wasn't familiar with.

"Damn! What's with the Chabon hate?"

I know -- the bile in here is so thick, I'm gonna need to go get a mop...

Seriously, what gives? Criticism is one thing, but these people are angry!

@BSAKat: Odd, because I don't remember much of that in 'Gentlemen of the Road', his latest book.

Well, with any luck, when the Oscar Award (c) winning Cohen Brothers get a hold of it for the movie, maybe they'll improve the lame way that Chabon wrote it.

Hi Charlie - you missed the corrections. Ron and I have egg all over our faces. Jeff Ford's excellent The Girl in the Glass was a Nebula Nominee and the Edgar winner last year.

I like Chabon, was just disappointed by this book. Not his best work. Maybe the Cohens can improve it, in which case, cool! otherwise? Meh.

Quick clarification, because I learned over the weekend: Chabon's the first author to have the same book nominated in the Best Novel category for both the Edgar and the Nebula, but not the first author to have the same book nominated for both prizes. Jeffrey Ford's The Girl in the Glass was up for the Best Novel Nebula last year, and it won the "Best Paperback Original" Edgar.

@Whitworthian:
I never got around to "Gentlemen" because "Pittsburgh" left me so cold. And you want to talk about criticism vs. bile? All I have is contempt for someone who is so lazy in their research that they can't spend ten minutes on the phone or on the internet to find out if a major prop of a major character is something that actually exists (Cleveland's BMW motorcycle in "Pittsburgh"). Same reason I hated "Lovely Bones".

"with any luck, when the Oscar Award (c) [sic] winning Cohen [sic] Brothers get a hold of it for the movie, maybe they'll improve the lame way that Chabon wrote it..."

Clearly the committee who judged Chabon worthy of a Pulitzer prize hadn't considered "the lame way" he writes. They really should have taken your opinion into account.

Yes, you wonder why all the Beavis and Butthead crit.. "It sucks..." "Yiddish" was ok, not much of a plot, which he covered up with lots of wacky characters.

He's got the "not-SF SF" market sewed up ain't he?

And Jack Vance won the Hugo, Nebula and Edgar awards, but not for the same book.

That must be a pretty exclusive club, especially if it's Pulitzer, Nebula and Edgar.

He must be doing something right, even if he didn't appease some people.

Maybe if he gets a Hugo and and Oscar, people might like him... Naaaa... need a Grammy to be a real artist.

@BSAKat:

Contempt? That's way harsh. It's fiction man, an author can do whatever they like.

As for 'Lovely Bones' - you feel Alice Sebold didn't research the after life enough?

@tezby:
No, I felt Sebold didn't research the human skeleton and the technology and history behind DNA testing well enough. There is no "elbow" bone, and you're not going to get a positive DNA identification off the ball on a knit cap that laid in a field for two weeks in winter...in 1972...

As for the author making it up in fiction? I know, I do it all the time (I write fiction and game source material for a pen and paper RPG company), but if I'm going to write something that takes place in the real world, I'm sure as hell going to check to see if BMW ever made a 1600cc bike (which they didn't). I research my ass off when I write fiction, because verisimilitude is the key to successful fiction. I don't want my readers to be pulled out of the story by a glaring error on my part.

@BSAKat: Sure, if the editor or the proof reader didn't screw up either.. Elbow bone is pretty glaring, but 1600 cc BMW could be a typo.. Dunno, never read either.

So many books use automatic and pistol and revolver interchangeably it hardly hurts any more.

But i see from your logo, you're a bike person, so that would bug you.

Not criticizing, just pointing out that nobody can know everything, and you can spend your life finding flaws..

But you have a valid point. I remember calling up a Mercedes dealer to see if a certain model had a roll down rear window the hero could shoot out of.

In SF it gets a little harder. For example, i need to know if "Grad" is a valid Russian suffix indicating "City" in a 1918 Russia that never had a revolution.

Who would know?

Somebody does, and if i get it wrong, they will know i'm making this stuff up.

@codydog:
Speaking of guns and motorcycles, know what's always bugged me? In SF/Comic art you always see some hero screaming along on his motorcycle and firing his sidearm or sub-machinegun with his right hand...his throttle hand.

@BSAKat: Yup.. I'd like to see anybody ride a bike and fire a pistol with either hand. Seems a little unstable to me. The Viet Cong and Taliban use two guys, one to drive and one to shoot.

But you know, this is hard.. Travis McGee/John D MacDonald was very good with guns and boats and stuff, but dropped a couple of howlers about guitars in one of his books.. He called the fancy stuff on the neck "Fretwork" which is a type of decoration made with a jig saw, like on coocoo clocks..

Guitars have "frets" and "inlay work" on their "fingerboards" thirty years later, and i still remember..