Travel&Vacation

Michael Chabon claims that the working title for this novel was Jews With Swords. But when he mentioned the name to acquaintances, he found they tended to laugh. “They saw their uncle Manny,” he noted, “dirk between his teeth, slacks belted at the armpits, dropping from the chandelier to knock together the heads of a couple of nefarious auditors.” Instead his swashbuckling tale, originally serialized in the New York Times, sees light of day as Gentlemen of the Road.

The new title is a bit of a let-down — it sounds like a manual from my high school drivers education class. But the book itself does not disappoint. Chabon takes the basic formulas of old-fashioned adventure novels, and sprinkles them with the pixie dust of his charming prose and fervid imagination. The result is a fanciful narrative, well plotted and artfully written.

If one were looking for a catch-phrase to describe fiction in the new millennium, one might do worse than announcing the “Return of Storytelling.” Or perhaps, once could proclaim the “Mixing of Highbrow and Lowbrow” as the key contemporary trend, or else the “Arrival of Post-Modern Genre Fiction.” Chabon is at the center of all these developments, and nowhere more clearly than in Gentlemen of the Road. He borrows from the most unlikely of sources – how many serious writers note their similarity to Fritz Leiber in their dust-jacket copy? — but twists the oldest recipes into surprising new dishes.

It was inevitable that Chabon would tackle an adventure novel. No contemporary novelist has gotten more mileage from the ups and downs of male-bonding. In a Chabon book, relationships between the opposite sexes always seem shaky and ephemeral, while boy buddies build their friendships on firmer foundations. For a writer with Chabon’s sensibility, a "Three Musketeers" type of tale must hold extraordinary appeal. In Gentlemen of the Road, he brings together the gaunt physician Zelikman, the aging ex-soldier Amram, and mixes them with a host of mercenaries, wandering merchants, and power-hungry aspirants to a bloody throne. One can almost hear his heroes shouting out, in tandem: “All for one, and one for all.”

Chabon follows his protagonists through a series of adventures in a mythical reconstruction of Asia Minor, circa the year 950. Sometimes they are con men looking for an easy mark, but just as easily slip into the role of altruistic heroes out to help an innocent orphan or topple a tyrant. The story lines will be familiar territory to anyone who has ever watch a Sabu movie or kippled with Kipling, but Chabon always finds an interesting twist or peculiar detail to raise his tale to a higher level. Above all, the author had a lot of fun with this project, and his enthusiasm is evident at almost every turn.

Gentlemen of the Road will not make anyone forget Chabon’s major works – Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and his recent The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. This is a modest work, only a little longer than a novella. But Chabon continues to charm with the scope of his imagination, the sparkle of his writing, and his willingness to sabotage the pieties of serious fiction. And needless to say, after you read it, you will never look at Uncle Manny the same again.