Chabon, Michael - Greg Johnson (review date Summer 1992)

Greg Johnson (review date Summer 1992)

SOURCE: “Heart Troubles,” in Georgia Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 358–65.

[In the following excerpt, Johnson offers a mixed assessment of A Model World, calling the short story collection an “immensely promising and curiously disappointing book.”]

Jane Austen declared that there were only two things worth writing about: love and money. Though one might wonder how Austen's sensibility would have coped with an era of AIDS and Reaganomics, it's clear from the lively gathering of short-story volumes reviewed here that contemporary writers are finding a particularly rich source of narrative possibilities in the conflict between the ageless intensity of passion and some of the bizarre conditions—by turns tragic, heartening, and absurd—of late twentieth-century America. Like the culture itself, current fiction is reflecting with admirable honesty the diversity of human...

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