Verbal Mandalas

Chabon’s prose is meticulously crafted and playful. A page would jolt with phrasings so visual, often times original, that I would stop and read the lines over again. It got to the point where I didn’t care what became of the codes Bruno kept singing. The plot didn’t really matter, and I gave in to that ‘doomed contentment’ that had similarly tranquilized the bees as the old man came and dispossessed what was rightfully theirs (75). Chabon had a choice, really. He could make the plot more intricate, fill it with more twists and turns, and amp up the stakes. But he decided on what I think a surrealist approach, which was possible because most of the time he wrote in third person, although there was this one time he changed it to first person abruptly and quickly. It interrupted the flow for me, and I felt the confusion could have been intentional, but the intention was lost on me regardless.

This surrealist approach, evident in the way Chabon recorded the psyches, the vulnerabilities, the convictions, the hopes and dreams, and the changes, too, of the characters as the story went on, played itself out like a live play-by-play analysis of a sport commentator who just happened to smoke a lot of weed two hours before. It’s effortlessly nuanced, constructed to sound quick-witted, it’s experimental, and it’s definitely mellow. If it were, for instance, commonplace for the unblazed to make an allegory to a “city sleeping it off on the day after carnival, contemplated from a hilltop by an army of Huns” when describing a beehive, then for sure I was over the line (75). Whatever is the case, his prose makes for an interesting juxtaposition and complementation with the genre that one would normally classify this novel. Its maze-like verbal construction both complicates the common demystifying, problem-solving ideals of mystery novels (like those by Conan Doyle or, if you’re  a fan of all things manga, Gosho Aoyama, who gave the former a nod by naming one of his most popular characters after Doyle) and at the same time hints at itself as being a mystery in its own rights, thereby honoring the essence of this fictional genre in quite a metatextual way.

 But what’s the point? Take the imagery of the stoned soccer commentator, for instance. Audience will definitely notice the unusual verbal ticks, the uncommon word choice, the off-tangent existential rhetorical questions that came out of nowhere as the man in all his wisdom ponders on why thousands of men pay money to watch and celebrate as a group of men do monkey tricks with another group of men while they can just watch monkeys do what they know best. Some will get mad. Others will enjoy. But for sure there will be something to talk about. The same thing happens here. It keeps the mystery going even long after the novel ends, just in a different form.