# Read the first page of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon Read the opening of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon free, no signup. A gangster's son spends a heady post-college summer between a woman and a man. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh-michael-chabon - Genre: Literary fiction - Year: 1988 - ISBN: 9781453234099 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781453234099&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781453234099 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781453234099 ## The opening At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business. We'd just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will—a year I'd spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. But Claire had moved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom. I saw Lenny Stern this morning, he said. He asked after you. You remember your Uncle Lenny. “Sure,” I said, and I thought for a second about Uncle Lenny, juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District a million years ago. I was nervous and drank more than I ate; my father carefully dispatched his steak. Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It’s the beginning of the summer and I’m standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. I said, “I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.” My father told me that I was overwrought and that Claire had had an unfortunate influence on my speech, but something in his face said that he understood. That night he flew back to Washington, and the next day, for the first time in years, I looked in the newspaper for some lurid record of the effect of his visit, but of course there was none. He wasn’t that kind of gangster. Claire had moved out on the thirtieth of April, taking with her all of the Joni Mitchell and the complete soundtrack recording of the dialogue from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, a four-record set, which she knew by heart. At some point toward the sexless and conversationless finale of Art and Claire, I had informed her that my father said she suffered from dementia praecox. My father’s influence upon me was strong, and I believed this. I later told people that I had lived with a crazy woman, and also that I had had enough of Romeo and Juliet. The last term in my last year of college sputtered out in a week-long fusillade of examinations and sentimental alcoholic conferences with professors whom I knew I would not really miss, even as I shook their hands and bought them beers. There was, however, a last paper on Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess, for which I realized I would have to make one exasperating last visit to the library, the dead core of my education, the white, silent kernel of every empty Sunday I had spent trying to ravish the faint charms of the study of economics, my sad and cynical major. So one day at the beginning of June I came around the concrete corner that gave way to the marbleized steps of the library. ## Books with a similar feel - [For One More Day by Mitch Albom](https://uncovered.ink/read/for-one-more-day-mitch-albom.md) - [On Beauty by Zadie Smith](https://uncovered.ink/read/on-beauty-zadie-smith.md) - [Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett](https://uncovered.ink/read/percival-everett-by-virgil-russell-percival-everett.md) - [The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-refugees-viet-thanh-nguyen.md) - [The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-thing-around-your-neck-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie.md) - [Interpreter Of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri](https://uncovered.ink/read/interpreter-of-maladies-jhumpa-lahiri.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.