Few contemporary American fiction writers begin their literary careers with such public notoriety as Michael Chabon gained with his best-selling first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which made him wildly successful at the age of twenty-four. Though he has been grouped with other popular young authors in their twenties, such as Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Jay McInerney, Chabon's work could never be mistaken for their consciously minimalistic style, dark subject matter, and social criticism, or their pessimistic view of the materialistic downside of the American Dream. Chabon himself feels he shares little with the so-called literary Brat Pack: "I never thought I had any connection with 'the usual suspects'; but I suppose that youth was the main handle, an inevitable handle. I just didn't pay much attention to it. I was 23. I thought in terms of what I had in common with Cheever, Nabokov or Flaubert...