Posts tagged Fiction

Parts of Pittsburgh were used in the post-apocalyptic world of The Road.

… interesting that our city is both a “model of recovery” and a model of a post-apocalyptic world.

Across the Tracks I guess my question about transportation was a bit leading.  I had a number of scenes from Wideman’s novel (Sent for You Yesterday) in mind at the time.  The train seems to play a lot of neat roles in the novel, namely confining the characters to the relatively small area in Homewood shown in the novel.  The tracks, in addition to the land’s geography, are a very real boundaries that separate the neighborhood from surrounding neighborhoods like Point Breeze and Shadyside. I’m especially interested in one episode in the novel in which Brother has a dream in which he is Albert Wilkes on his way back to Pittsburgh after fleeing the town years earlier.  The train is consistently used in the novel to bring characters back to the city rather than leave it.  But despite the way the characters are confined, the novel spends a lot of its time bringing characters together and creating a community that sustains the neighborhood.

Across the Tracks

I guess my question about transportation was a bit leading.  I had a number of scenes from Wideman’s novel (Sent for You Yesterday) in mind at the time.  The train seems to play a lot of neat roles in the novel, namely confining the characters to the relatively small area in Homewood shown in the novel.  The tracks, in addition to the land’s geography, are a very real boundaries that separate the neighborhood from surrounding neighborhoods like Point Breeze and Shadyside.

I’m especially interested in one episode in the novel in which Brother has a dream in which he is Albert Wilkes on his way back to Pittsburgh after fleeing the town years earlier.  The train is consistently used in the novel to bring characters back to the city rather than leave it.  But despite the way the characters are confined, the novel spends a lot of its time bringing characters together and creating a community that sustains the neighborhood.

There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.
Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

I’m eager to see this adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 1988 novel by the same name, but I’ve been hearing mainly negative reviews.  However, with respect to the image of the city in the film, a review that I read either in the Post-Gazette or The Tribune remarked that the city “has never looked better.”

Pittsburgh has so often beeen used in film as a run down town that the protagonist wants to get away from (see Flashdance, & Deerhunter).  In Chabon’s book though, we get a version of Pittsburgh that is far more complex — one that breaks outside the reductive image of it as an old steel town, or the rust belt’s Bedford Falls.