PITTSBURGH, PA—We were in an old blue Volvo station wagon, the kind with Lightning Hopkins on the AM radio and black leather interior that’s worn out at the seats. Rain was driving Pittsburgh even deeper into the rusty ground. I was in the backseat, watching the city through the rhythm of the windshield wipers, and as we careened around the preposterous angles of Polish Hill, I couldn’t help but expect to see Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat around the corner of our next forty-degree turn.

The Hat, as regulars call it, is a ramshackle old juke joint on the Hill, the site of one of my favourite scenes in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and precisely the sort of place a man visiting Pittsburgh would like to spend his Thursday night. But the sad fact is that the Hat doesn’t actually exist, though it might as well, for like most of the fabricated details of Chabon’s Pittsburgh it exists in countless variations across the hills and valleys of this city. (If you’ve got the time and inclination, I think you’ll find Gooski’s a more than adequate stand-in; they’ve got Roy Orbison on the jukebox, and it’s the sort of establishment where a man can accomplish a round of three pints and three Jagermeister shots for less than twenty bucks.)

Pittsburgh is a town that splits opinion. Because of its big universities, there is a large population of students who are, in a sense, captives. They go to Carnegie Mellon because it’s a professionally advantageous place for them to stare at a computer screen, but they do not love where they live. In fact, in my time here I have encountered only two people who’ve said they truly loved the city, and they were the only two who grew up here. Countless more have complained about the weather, about the geography, the sprawl, the bad economy, and basically everything else. Talking to these people, it seems as if there are two Pittsburghs. What’s a romantic, tragic, beautiful place to one person is a shithole of epic proportions to another. I’m happy to report that I fall into the former camp, if only because my first and best tour guide loved this place too.

Polish Hill itself is exactly like you’d imagine it to be if you’ve read the book: veined with narrow snow-piled streets that creep up and down the slopes between dilapidated piles of shuttered businesses and row houses that look like they knew their happiest days in the ’50s, the home of “the boarded-up storefront of a Jewish fish wholesaler and a medical supply company whose grimy display windows featured, and had gone on featuring ever since, a miniature family of headless and limbless human torsos dressed up in exact, tiny replicas of hernia trusses.”?

(This, for the record, is the sort of scene one encounters frequently in Pittsburgh [see illustration below, which was not staged]. On an unrelated but remarkable note, I was also told the story of a building that burned down and from which those inside had difficulty escaping because the fire escape was made of wood.)

My vivid sense of Wonder Boys’s Pittsburgh comes in no small part from descriptions like that of Polish Hill. Chabon’s always loving in his detail, sometimes too much so, and one cannot leave a book of his without a clear sense of what pretty much everything contained therein looks like. But it’s also thanks to Curtis Hanson’s excellent film adaptation in which Michael Douglas’s Grady Tripp spends three days high on marijuana, prowling the late-winter streets with a dead dog in his trunk. As far as movies of books go, this one is about as good as it gets. (So good, in fact, that one is inclined to forgive it an inconceivably lame moment at the very end. I will not ruin this moment, for it really must be seen to be hated.) After spending some time here, it seems to me that Hanson managed to shoot not only the novel’s governing spirit, but the hidden nature of the city itself.

Which means that there’s a small chance that the upcoming film adaptation of Chabon’s first novel and true love letter to the city, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, might not be as terrible as most available evidence suggests. For instance, it is a film by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who wrote and directed Dodgeball. Now I liked Dodgeball just fine, but nothing in it suggested a talent that could craft a picture about complicated relationships, let alone one with the subtle shading of Chabon’s accomplished novel.

Mr. Thurber has also seen fit to alter the book in a way that sounds, basically, pretty dumb. Rather than position the novel’s narrator, Art Bechstein, between his girlfriend, Phlox Lombardi, and his lover, Arthur Lecomte, Thurber has just removed Arthur from the story completely, and reduced Phlox to a minor character. Instead, he has made Cleveland, who in the novel is a grizzly Hells-Angels type with a predilection for Rolling Rock, into a bisexual who is interested in his own girlfriend, Jane, and Art.

When asked about this by The Advocate, Thurber noted that this idea was “really interesting to [him]: someone falling in love irrespective of gender.�? And in order to explore that, it was evidently necessary to change the character makeup of a novel that was already, you know, about falling in love with people irrespective of gender. Early reviews out of Sundance have not been positive and, perhaps most damningly, it stars the thoroughly unpleasant Sienna Miller. (Miller, it should be said, falls in the category of people who do not appreciate Pittsburgh.)

It’s probably foolish of me, then, to hold out a sliver of hope. But what if, for all the terrible rewrites and ill-advised casting, the film somehow manages to capture the Pittsburgh of the book—the swampy heat, the Cloud Factory, the late-night garden parties in hyper-verdant Shadyside, the gin-and-tonic camaraderie, the sort of time and place where somehow seems like real talk to note that one “anticipate[s] a coming season of dilated time and women in all disarray�??

If it does, then it will at least capture the spirit of Chabon’s Fitzgeraldian romp, and not all will be lost. In other words, there is an atmosphere to some books that transcends character and plot. It is an essential part of what makes Wonder Boys work so well; few writers can conjure a texture for their fictional worlds as rich and nuanced as Chabon. That spirit is a hard thing to film, but it’s also not necessarily destroyed by casting the wrong actors or putting them in contrived situations. If Thurber can find the same Pittsburgh that Hanson did, it’ll be worth watching just to see the city itself. If Thurber can’t, then an opportunity will have been wasted. But we’ll always have Polish Hill, and maybe the Hi-Hat is around the next bend.

Tags: books, literature, michael chabon, pittsburgh, screen adaptation

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Posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 10:44 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.