№ 2
Maps and Legends
Michael Chabon Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
—The Globe and Mail
This review ran in the Globe and Mail’s Saturday Books section under Martin Levin.
A Ferris wheel of obsessions fuels Michael Chabon’s fiction: comic-book myths, Holmesian whodunits, fractured father-son relationships, writers’ lives, Jewish lore. His most ambitious novels, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), turn these fascinations into full-scale, could-this-be-true reality, the former with its Jewish colony in Sitka, Alaska, post-Holocaust, sans Israel; the latter with its comic-book creation tale, The Escapist, seamlessly woven into mid-20th-century New York.
It’s a recipe Hollywood admired straight away. Chabon wrote an unused screenplay for Spider-Man 2. His second novel, Wonder Boys, morphed into a film starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire; others are either on the cusp of release (Mysteries of Pittsburgh) or in pre-production (Kavalier & Clay).
“Entertainment has a bad name,” Chabon writes at the start of Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, his exhilarating first book of non-fiction. “Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle.… Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.”
If Chabon’s work has been a 20-year proof against this line of thinking, Maps and Legends is its 200-page précis. This man reads for entertainment. He writes for entertainment, too. End of story. He could, he admits, “decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations,” but he won’t. When this pastime (and profession) clicks, when the attentive mind encounters the irresistible page, you feel “an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders.”
Call it what you will — Chabon’s “throb of delight” sounds very similar to Nabokov’s “telltale tingle” at the top of the spine — but Maps and Legends still provides its own little buzz. This lithe little collection — 16 loosely connected essays, speeches and remembrances — becomes an unobstructed tour of Chabon’s art and inner life, his own deftly constructed looking-glass anthology.
It is a declaration of Chabon’s tastes and habits, his beginnings and his imaginings. Many of his real-life heroes are here, from authors Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, to M. R. James, the ghost-story master.
Chabon puts himself under the microscope, as well, writing openly about his early-20s angst (My Back Pages), his second, dead-end novel (Diving into the Wreck) and his layers of Jewish identity which, ultimately, led to the alternative universe of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Imaginary Homelands). The collection’s title piece is a remarkable example of convergence art: minute observations from a childhood moment in Columbia, Md., part urban history, part memoir, part literary criticism.
If Maps and Legends has something to declare, it also has something to reclaim. To start, of course, Chabon wants entertainment put back into play (Trickster in a Suit of Lights); comic-book geniuses (Howard Chaykin) count, too.
And he’s drawn to all sorts of strange anachronisms, under-the-radar minutiae and seemingly vanished delights. In an essay on cartoonist Ben Katchor, Landsman of the Lost, Chabon laments the death of nostalgia: “Those of us who cannot make it from one end of a street to another without being momentarily upended by some fragment of outmoded typography, curve of chrome fender, or whiff of lavender hair oil from the pate of a semi-retired neighbor are compelled by the disrepute into which nostalgia has fallen to mourn secretly the passing of a million marvellous quotidian things.”
Inevitably, it’s Chabon’s eye, his mastery of those million marvellous quotidian things, that makes so many of these pieces hum. Observing, say, the union of art and commerce: “the quickening force, neglected, derided, and denied, of money and the getting of it on a ready imagination.” Or his beloved comics: “the literary equivalent of bubblegum cards, to be poked into the spokes of a young mind, where they would produce a satisfying — but entirely bogus — rumble of pleasure.”
That the Berkeley, Calif.-based Chabon is a man of McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers’s San Francisco publishing house, adds to the easy allure of Maps and Legends. Chabon may be well into middle age (he’s just turned 45), but it’s high season for his tastes. Take the book itself, a buoyant product of cultural intermarriage, with its nifty, faux-pop-out-book jacket overtop a series of pieces that, in many cases, first appeared in the august New York Review of Books.
In the end, it’s here where Chabon’s real virtue lies. The book business is sagging, web-based readership is exploding, but Maps and Legends is, implicitly, a clarion call back to the future, where serious entertainments count, where the written word — framed by images or just plunked down, alone on the page — create what Chabon calls “a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely bridgeheads.”