Pittsburgh's Plenty

Try to forget that Michael Chabon was only twenty-three when he sold his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh {William Morrow), for $155,000. Don't even think of what Alan Pakula is going to make of the movie. Instead, settle in and read this appealing bildungsroman of an ambivalent young man (living, miraculously enough, in neither New York nor California) who is confused about his gangster father, and swinging like a hypermagnetized compass needle between his spaced-out girlfriend and a young gay Gatsby. Unlike some of the precocious entries on the literary fast track, Chabon has ivritten a book remarkably free of cynicism. He may use a few too many literary allusions, but it's warm-blooded, wide-eyed, wistful. Until an early-aging ray zapped the creative-ivriting classes, that's what being young was all about.

ARTHUR LUBOW