The Genius Who Wanted to Be a Hack

By Lev Grossman

In the past eight years Michael Chabon, who is probably the premiere prose stylist--the Updike--of his generation, has written a novel about superhero comics; a fantasy tale; a mystery starring an old man who may or may not be Sherlock Holmes; and a pulp crime book set in an alternate time. (That last would be The Yiddish Policemen's Union, about a murder in a what-if world where Alaska becomes a homeland for the Jews, or as they're called there, "the frozen Chosen.") Chabon is still a literary novelist, but he's having a hot, star-crossed flirtation with the "popular" genres. He riffs on them, toys with them, steals their best tricks, passes them notes in class, etc. In Gentlemen of the Road (Del Rey; 204 pages)--which appears a scant, almost show-offy six months after Policemen's Union--he achieves something like consummation. He goes all the way.

Gentlemen is set around A.D. 950 in a politically chaotic region of the Caucasus mountains. Our heroes are two rootless adventurers: Amram, a massive Abyssinian axman, and Zelikman, a pale, painfully skinny Frank (a kind of proto-German) who dresses in all black and carries a surgical instrument as a weapon. They are fast friends, seasoned brawlers and amateur philosophers given to terse exchanges of melancholy wit. They resemble--as all couples who stay together long enough ultimately do--Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot.

Amram and Zelikman are too cynical to take up anything resembling a cause, but on a whim and for the promise of gold, they undertake restoring to the throne a deposed princeling named Filaq. This involves much swordplay, thieving of horses, charging of war elephants, lodging of arrows in throats and so forth. There's virtually no line in this book that isn't typical of the whole, so this one will serve: "She flung herself onto the Turkoman's back and with the rank bacon smell of his oiled hair in her nostrils bit off his ear, a salt apricot between her teeth."

Chabon is playing a double game here: he's a Pulitzer winner with the verbal chops of a mandarin writing in the voice of a junk-sick 1950s pulp hack who dreams of being a Pulitzer winner. He seems to find the masquerade liberating. For once he never has to stop the action or worry about the prose being too purple or not purple enough. Gentlemen contains only trace amounts of irony. Best of all--and this is good for Chabon, who, unlike Updike, has a sentimental streak--the characters feel emotions only when they want to, and never more than necessary. "Are you sad?" a chatty prostitute asks Amram. "Filled with remorse?" No, he says: "I've lost the knack." The charade feels oddly right--so right that one suspects that where literature is concerned, high and low are no longer easily distinguished.