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Title: Just not worth the time
Review: This is "exquisite," as several other reviewers have said. It is skillfully done, it is clever. It is deliberately old fashioned.But I think a reader needs to ask: why write such a book? If this is entertaining, then so is the whimsy and cuteness in "Murder, She Wrote" or the delicate fake nostalgia in Merchant and Ivory films.Late in his life, someone asked Ezra Pound to write a preface to his first book of poems, published when he was young. The early book was called "A lume spento" -- the poems were pretentious, precious, and old fashioned. Pound knew it, can said they were "stale cream puffs." I know that Chabon writes in several different styles, but I am not going to read any of his other books. Why? Because if he thinks something this artificial and concocted is entertaining, then I do not trust his taste. He can't possibly be a writer for the twenty-first century.
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