Great title, good story, one quibble : on Michael Chabon's piece in the New Yorker

We mostly think of Michael Chabon as a novelist - and a novelist who's done very well with the long form (Kavalier & Clay), but actually some of his best work has been short fiction - I remember a very interesting story with the great title of S Angel (from a weirdly folded map of Los Angeles, I think) and another excellent one about a young couple house-hunting in the Seattle area - realtor takes them to a house owned by his ex and complications ensue - so it's nice to see a (relatively) short piece by Chabon in the current New Yorker, with another good title, Citizen Conn (ha!) - not a great piece but it does stand alone well on the strength of its two vividly drawn central characters, an old comic-book illustrator, Feather, living alone in a Santa Monica nursing home and his one-time partner, Conn, who had edged him out of the business and now is trying desperately to make amends before Feather's blown away on the wings of death. Nice setup - and of course it seems like an outtake from Kavalier and Clay. My quibble with the story lies with the other two characters, the narrator, a rabbi working in the home, and her husband, a professor who was a huge childhood fan of Feather's artwork. This foursome has great potential, too - imagine the possibilities for a story, series of stories, or novel about a (female) rabbi assigned to a nursing home - the stories she'd hear! But I think Chabon doesn't do much with these two characters, they add very little to the story - he would have done better in this short space to focus on the two old guys, protagonist and antagonist, Cain and Abel. Still, some wonderful passages in this story and, for all I know, Chabon may be working on or planning to publish more about these two, or about these four.