Depravity and Wonder.

I’m reading an essay by Michael Chabon entitled “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes”. It is in his collection of essays Maps and Legends and I just came across a line I wanted to share with you, “Secret sharers, deception and disguise, imposture, buried shame and repressed evil, madwomen in the attic, the covert life of London, the concealment of depravity and wonder beneath the dull brick facade of the world”

Here he is talking about the motifs of Victorian literature, but I think that something about revealing “the concealment of depravity and wonder beneath the dull brick facade of the world” might as well be part of a writer’s job description. I would have just highlighted the line, but this is a library book and they keep yelling at me for doing that! So instead I am making a note of it here.

Oh! and just in case you are trying to decide if it is pretentious of me to be reading - for fun, no less - an essay by Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Chabon in which he opines on the writing proclivities of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, well then let me just save you some time: Yes, it is HUGELY pretentious. But that’s not why I’m doing it, I’m doing it because I like the way Chabon writes and because reading his nonfiction is a lot like the experience of hanging out with a hugely intelligent, slyly funny, but ultimately well-mannered college professor.

If I was going to be pretentious I would tell you about the time I read a Jonathan Lethem piece in Granta about the work of John Cassavetes. Even I had to not talk to me for awhile after that.

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