Bildungsroman

It was in an attempt to read the complete works of John Steinbeck that I ended up embroiled in an attempt to read the complete works of Michael Chabon. I don't know how I got from St to Ch, but I left the Swarthmore branch of the Delaware County Public Library system with "The Short Reign of Pippin IV" and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." Having already read "Kavalier and Clay," I moved on to "Gentlemen of the Road" and "The Final Solution," but it wasn't until two days after graduation that I finished Chabon's first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh." It's a bildungsroman, set during the summer after its protagonist's college graduation.

It was one day after graduation that "Pittsburgh" set me to wondering if I wasn't missing out on some important and formative adolescent angst. I was washing the furniture on the patio, preparing for my own graduation party when it hit me that, unlike the protagonist of almost every bildungsroman out there, I feel good about my life. The remorse that overtook me when I thought of what I was missing out on (transformative journeys, brief and ill-fated loves, deep psychological traumas, nostalgic walks through old neighborhoods) quickly became an angst of its own, thus paradoxically assuaging my fears. The kernel my autobiographical bildungsroman is there, in the lack of a kernel for my autobiographical bildungsroman, I thought. I laughed at my recursive post-(yet still eminently indicative of)-Swarthmore thinking. This dispelled the angst.

At the party, my various aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends all asked me some variation on this question "what's next?" My cousin Chris, just becoming a freshman at the same high school I attended, asked a very different question: "So, uh, Greg, what are you gonna be?" I was, at first, annoyed. Such a question begs a one-word answer, something out of a children's book or The Village People's costume department: Astronaut. Doctor. Firefighter. "Vagabond," I said.

I like Chris's question because I don't know the answer, and I am still in debate with myself over whether it is a question to which I can or should try to know the answer. In one sense, I'm gonna be the conglomerate of the answers to "what's next?". In another, sense, "what are you gonna be?" could give a framework for answering "what's next?"

Regardless, this moment before "next" is one that, today, feels like promise. As I lay in my hammock reading Chabon's early short fiction, I thought about what a time it was: A time to read complete works. A time to track down a banjo on the cheap. A time to decide to buy (or not buy) a car. A time like the time at the beginning of a bildungsroman.

FOR DISCUSSION:
What is the plural of bildungsroman? Bildungsromans? Bildungsromane? Bildungsromanen?
Do you have or know of anyone who has a cheap-yet-functional banjo and/or car with which you/they are willing to part?