Biography

By his own account, in an essay called “Maps and Legends,” one of Michael Chabon’s most lasting formative experiences was the result of his parents’ idealistic decision to join an experiment in urban development. The Chabons were ground-floor members of developer James Rouse’s new, utopian city, Columbia, Maryland. The enterprise was a seminal moment in the development of the six-year-old Chabon’s imagination, and the author recounts hours poring over conceptual maps of his future home and imposing imaginative worlds upon them. It seems somehow natural then that so much of Chabon’s literary work has the feel of world-building, and the worlds he has constructed are spun from his active imagination’s encounters with literature, popular culture, ethnicity, and history.

Michael Chabon was born on May 24, 1963 in Washington, DC. Blessed with a vivid imagination at an early age, Chabon began writing fiction as a young boy. As would become a prominent feature of his literary career, the youngster’s early forays into writing demonstrated an affinity for pastiche. Chabon describes, in an essay called “Fan Fictions,” a story, written when he was ten years old, placing Sherlock Holmes into an adventure with Captain Nemo, and the writer uses this as an example of the pleasurable power of pastiche. That experience also compelled the young Chabon to pursue writing as a career. He voraciously read and particularly enjoyed comic books and pulp fiction.

Chabon’s parents divorced when the young writer was eleven, and he split time between Columbia, Maryland, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The talented young writer immersed himself in imaginative worlds and even went so far as to found a comic book club (which no one else joined).

After high school, the aspiring writer attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduating with his BA in 1984. True to his artistic nature, the author would draw on this lived experience and set his first two novels in the city of Pittsburgh. After graduating, Chabon enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, attaining his masters of fine arts in creative writing.

His first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was written as Chabon’s master’s thesis at Irvine. Not only was the work successful enough for the writer to graduate, but his professor, Donald Heiney, submitted the manuscript to an agent without Chabon’s knowledge. Ultimately, the novel incited a bidding war among publishers, and the twenty-three-year-old writer accepted a lofty advance of $155,000 for his first novel. This turn of events introduced Chabon to the literary world loudly and prominently and placed an imposing spotlight on the young writer that brought with it heavy expectations.

The pressure Chabon felt after his meteoric rise to prominence posed a serious challenge to the young writer on both personal and professional levels. His first marriage, to the poet Lollie Groth, ended in 1991. Chabon’s writing also felt the effects of the pressures brought on by his celebrity. Though he filled many manuscript pages, Chabon’s ambitious follow-up novel, Fountain City, would not come together, and he would eventually have to abandon the project.

Eventually the sophomore writer would metamorphose his artistic failure into the very subject matter of his second published novel, Wonder Boys. The novel (which, like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was adapted into a motion picture) features a character named Grady Tripp, a writer who, like Chabon, cannot put the finishing touches on a follow-up novel and has a meandering 2,600-page manuscript (also called Wonder Boys) to show for it. The novel seemingly solved Chabon’s artistic crisis, and he has consistently produced work since.

Between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, Chabon published a collection of short stories called A Model World and Other Stories (1991). Wonder Boys (1995) was followed by another collection of stories, Werewolves in Their Youth (1999). In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which was followed by Summerland (2002) and The Final Solution (2004). In 2007, both The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road were published. Chabon’s most recent novels are Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012, and Moonglow, published in 2016. In addition, Chabon has published two volumes of essays and criticism, Maps and Legends (2008) and Manhood for Amateurs (2009); a comic book series, The Escapist; and several film scripts, most notably Spider-Man 2 and John Carter.

After a blind date with him in 1993, novelist Ayelet Waldman eventually proposed marriage. The literary power-couple now live in Berkeley and have four children, Ezekiel Napoleon Waldman, Sophie Chabon, Abraham Wolf Waldman, and Ida-Rose Chabon.

Chabon’s work, particularly beginning with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, has increasingly engaged with Jewishness in a postmodern geopolitical context. This has led to some controversy between the liberal-leaning Chabon and some conservative members of the Jewish community. A notable example of this conflict occurred when Chabon wrote an essay called “Imaginary Homelands,” which offended some on two fronts: first, the essay irreverently pokes fun at aficionados of the Yiddish language; most importantly, however, the essay was labeled anti-Zionist in its identification of Jewishness with diaspora. This political controversy eventually inspired Chabon to write The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which spun the real-life contentiousness into a plot that imagines Jewishness (and Yiddish) in an alternate reality in which Israel was destroyed and the world’s Jews live in Alaska. The novel won widespread acclaim and cemented Chabon’s place in American letters.

Controversies like the one Chabon experienced with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union place the author in the long tradition of great Jewish American novelists. Like Philip Roth, who famously grated the patience of establishment American Judaism, Chabon’s work also draws from that religious and ethnic tradition for inspiration. Unlike older writers such as Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud, however, Chabon also draws inspiration from an intense love of popular culture, which leads his work into more postmodern territory than those literary forebears.

Analysis

The outsized role that popular culture has played in Chabon’s work cannot be understated. His fiction draws as much on comic books and pulp fiction as it does upon great literary traditions. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh elicited comparisons to canonical writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Chabon was immediately touted as a serious artist, but he has always looked as much into supposedly low cultural productions as he has the literary canon for inspiration.

In addition to Chabon’s fluency in popular culture, however, he also brings an introspective engagement with his Jewishness to his work. Even early on, Chabon’s fiction reflects upon the nature and place of Jews in American culture. From Grady Tripp’s memory of his police officer father’s killing a prominent Jewish citizen in Wonder Boys, to the Jewish twist on Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in The Final Solution, to the bewildering postmodern alternate Jewish world of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon’s work has demonstrated an engagement with and thoughtful meditation on his Jewish heritage. In fact, his most successful work seems to spring from his ability to combine his ethnic imagination with his love of popular culture.

Chabon’s engagement with the sociological reality is not limited to entertainment and ethnicity, however. His fiction has also investigated economics, for example. Much of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay examines the cruelty of the economic systems that drove the early comics industry. Dark money and the movement of capital also permeate The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Also, from the beginning of his career, Chabon has investigated the complexities of human sexuality. In fact, so many characters in his early work were gay that many people (his second wife, Ayelet Waldman, included) assumed Chabon was himself a gay writer. As with his explorations of popular culture, ethnicity, and religion, Chabon’s curiosity about the world extends to many aspects of the human experience.

Chabon’s novels and short stories typically showcase his talent for bending genres to suit the literary worlds he constructs. There is a playfulness in his work that enthusiastically mixes and matches plot structures, character types, and references from across multiple genres. Chabon’s skill as a writer keeps this playfulness from collapsing into pure irony, however. Unlike some postmodern writers whose work eschews meaning and profundity in favor of intellectual claims about relativism, Chabon’s best work maintains a keen interest in character and emotion. There is a poignancy to even his wildest of literary experiments, and this surely helps explain his consistent success with critics and readers.

In an essay about his love of Sherlock Holmes stories, “Fan Fictions,” Chabon explicitly uses the term “pastiche” to describe the joyful imaginative engagement that the writer experiences when crafting his stories from other stories that gave him pleasure. Chabon’s literary imagination is populated with joyous reading experiences from his childhood, and they provide the material for pastiche that defines his fiction. This interest in genre fiction has also led Chabon into creative genres that transcend literary fiction. Chabon wrote a defining early draft of the screenplay for Spider-Man 2 and has also demonstrated an intense interest in comic books.

Comics have had a powerful influence on Chabon’s literature. Not only do they serve as the subject matter for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, they also have provided a medium for him to work in. The character “The Escapist” was the fictional creation of Chabon’s protagonists in Kavalier & Clay. In a metafictional move, Chabon created a real comic in the wake of his novel’s Pulitzer Prize winning success and teamed up with Dark Horse comics to create a real comic series following the adventures of the formerly fictional Escapist. This type of metafictional play is, like Chabon’s dedication to pastiche, a hallmark of postmodernism. Still, one of the hallmarks of Chabon’s work is its ability to engage in such play while still striving for sincerity and humanity.

Chabon’s human-centered vision of postmodernism can be seen clearly in his 1993 New Yorker story “Werewolves in Their Youth.” The story, about two misfit children with behavioral issues and their friendship at school, employs humor and pathos in equal doses. The boys, who experience a great deal of pain due to bullying at school and their parents’ failed marriages, have a strained, yet necessary friendship. Furthermore, that friendship is based on a shared imaginative world populated with werewolves, comic book heroes, and mad scientists. The story provides a good example of Chabon’s ability to combine postmodern literary technique with touching characterization and plotting.

Chabon’s canny ability to straddle artistic lines—popular and literary, modern and postmodern—has made his work both well-reviewed and accessible. Key themes that often arise in his work are the nature of Jewishness, the power and difficulty of family, human sexuality, the conflict between tradition and the individual, and a celebration of the human imagination.

Wonder Boys was the result of Michael Chabon’s own struggles to complete his second novel, the abandoned Fountain City. After the success of his first novel, Chabon undertook an ambitious follow-up and found himself unable to achieve his vision. After writing hundreds and hundreds of pages, he eventually abandoned the project (without telling anyone) and began Wonder Boys. No doubt written in part to deal with that failure, the book was also partially inspired by one of Chabon’s teachers at the University of Pittsburgh, Chuck Kinder, who reportedly experienced a similar struggle (Kinder’s novel was eventually published in 2001). The narrative follows novelist and college professor Grady Tripp as he flounders through life. Burned by divorce and disappointment, he smokes pot; is in love with the chancellor’s wife; and attempts to mentor a talented, yet troubled student—all the while trying to avoid his editor, who expects the follow-up to Tripp’s last successful novel. Tripp, like his creator, is unable to find focus for the book and 2000 pages in, cannot finish it. All of this takes place on a rather dream-like odyssey through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The novel combines, uncomfortably for some critics, high drama with comedy that borders on the slapstick. The novel opens with Grady’s memory of a writer’s suicide and periodically drifts into other painful memories from Tripp’s past: his father shot and killed a prominent Jewish citizen; his mother died when Grady was an infant. These moments of tragic pathos are juxtaposed with surreal moments of comedy. An example of this juxtaposition occurs when James Leer steals a garment worn by Marilyn Monroe after weeping over her frail humanity.

The book also participates in the long tradition of campus novels in American literature. Tripp is not only a writer; he is a college professor and, as is standard in the campus narrative, he demonstrates a certain antipathy toward his institution (a fact illustrated by his affair with the chancellor’s wife). The novel also shares other campus novels’ tendency to emphasize the landscapes of the campus for effect. In Wonder Boys, the campus maintains an idyll, an aloofness that binds it to the tradition that suffocates Grady Tripp. In addition, it contrasts with the landscape of Pittsburgh, in which the novel’s strange, almost magical comedy takes place. Grady’s favorite bar, the Hi-Hat, is a particularly important setting in this regard.

Like much of Chabon’s other work, human sexuality is explored in depth in Wonder Boys as well. Crabtree’s dalliance with a person who is obviously, to Grady, a transvestite is just one way that the novel refuses to adhere to clearly defined expressions of sexuality. The novel, once again through Crabtree, also explores the complicated sexuality of Tripp’s troubled student, James Leer. These relationships, depicted as playful and self-asserting, provide stark relief against Grady’s more conventional, yet disastrously unsuccessful, sexual relationships. His three failed marriages point to a problem with conventional male-female relations, and his most successful relationship, with Sara Gaskell, is achieved by breaking the bonds of conventional marriage.

Death lingers throughout the book as well. Grady’s memories are littered with people who died tragically: his mother; the man his father killed; and his first literary role model, August Van Zorn. Even one of the book’s most surreal and comical moments involves death, when James shoots and kills Gaskell’s blind dog with Grady’s gun. Furthermore, much of the death that permeates the book is focused on suicide. Van Zorn died by suicide, and young Grady discovered his body. This image haunts Grady and casts a pall over the vocation of writing for him. Similarly, James Leer is seemingly obsessed with death and suicide, having memorized the means of death of countless Hollywood stars. Once again, however, Wonder Boys works to conflate death and comedy, which, like the book’s exploration of sexuality, undermines any strict binary distinction between the two.

Ultimately, Wonder Boys is a serio-comic investigation of what it is to be a writer, for both better and worse. Through the experience and perception of Grady Tripp, Michael Chabon faced down the demons that haunted him in his failure to complete Fountain City. The book once again earned positive reviews for Chabon and, in 2000, was adapted into a film starring Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr., and Tobey Maguire.

In 2000, Chabon published the sprawling novel that would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and garner near universal critical acclaim. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay brings together in its 600 pages all the themes that characterize Chabon’s work in an epic story of the early comic book industry. The novel tells the vast, exhilarating, and tragic story of Josef Kavalier, who recently escaped from the Holocaust, and his American cousin Sammy Klayman as they team up and create a staple of successful and popular comic characters, most prominently, The Escapist. The novel follows the two as they struggle to navigate the comic book industry and the complicated love triangle they form with Rosa Saks, inspiration for one of their creations, Luna Moth. In addition to these professional and personal trials, Josef struggles for years to help his European family escape the Nazis’ reign of terror.

Chabon grew up voraciously reading comic books, and the novel is, in part, an homage to that form. Chabon, however, characteristically merges this aspect of the story with the novel’s larger investigation of Jewish identity. The story is partially crafted from variations on the stories of several monumental figures, most notably Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Ohio who invented Superman, only to have the comic industry rob them of the fruits of their creation. Furthermore, just as Superman was born from the Jewish experience of Siegel and Shuster and represents that experience in coded form, Kavalier and Clay’s creation, the Escapist, serves as an extended metaphor for both Joe and Sammy’s ethnic experience.

Jewish themes had always been prevalent in Chabon’s fiction, but they are intensified exponentially in this novel. Early in the narrative, several variations of the Jewish experience are brought together in one exhilarating escape scene. First, the context of Joe Kavalier’s escape is that of the Nazi occupation of Europe and the subsequent Holocaust. Chabon complicates this Jewish narrative with others right away, however. Kavalier’s role model and hero, the great Jewish escape artist Harry Houdini, is intricately involved with Josef’s identity as well as the means of his escape. In addition, Kavalier escapes in a box that is also exporting the ancient Golem of Prague to keep it out of Nazi hands. In just these three symbols, Chabon is able to construct a postmodern Jewish identity that is one part history and politics, one part popular culture, and one part folklore and legend. In other words, Chabon’s playful practice of pastiche is the means by which he constructs and investigates Jewishness in the novel.

Chabon’s skill as a writer keeps the novel from being limited to a playful act of parody and pastiche. The novel’s poignant exploration of human tragedy is every bit as moving as the book’s parody is funny. Josef’s tragic romance with Rosa is effective because of its complexity. Their relationship contains love, loss, reconciliation, and hope. It is the fullness of this relationship that makes it so compelling and not simply a love interest in the midst of an adventure story. Likewise, Sammy’s experience and confusion with his homosexuality offers the book’s story another level of human depth in the midst of the postmodern play.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay became a watershed moment in Michael Chabon’s career. Thematically it shares much in common with his other work. Jewish identity is reflected upon in all its complexity and juxtaposed against meditations on human sexuality and the joy and pain of family. The matrix of human experience is woven from a pastiche of popular culture, history, and politics. What makes this novel different from its predecessors is the ambition and scope of the book. The novel was optioned for film before it was even written, but has yet to be put into production. Chabon has suggested that one reason for the delay is the sheer scale of the book, which takes place over several decades and includes decade-long gaps in the characters’ lives. The size of the vision here makes the story difficult to translate into a two-hour film, but the resulting novel is one with ambitions on the title of Great American Novel. Furthermore, the book marked the beginning of a new period of experimentation in Chabon’s career.

Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union represents, in some ways, the apotheosis of the writer’s literary interest in the nature of Jewish identity. The story is set in a fictional universe in which the state of Israel falls and the world’s Jews are given a provisional, and temporary, home in Sitka, Alaska. The Jewish world that Chabon creates resembles those from film noir, with wisecracking detectives, gangsters, and conspiracy around every corner. The story follows detective Meyer Landsman as he attempts to solve the murder of one Mendel Shpilman, the ostracized son of a powerful Hasidic gangster and also possibly the Messiah. With his partner and cousin, the half-Jew, half-Tlingit Berko, and Landsman’s ex-wife and boss Bina, Landsman delves into the seedy underworld of Jewish gangsters, chess, and religion to find out who killed Mendel Shpilman. Landsman’s investigation ultimately reveals a vast worldwide conspiracy to return the Jews to Jerusalem.

Like Chabon’s other work, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union prominently features pastiche in the construction of Jewish Sitka, Alaska. The alternative universe is both recognizable and entirely new, with an aesthetic veneer drawn from hardboiled detective fiction and film. One primary site of Chabon’s experimentation is on the linguistic level. The people in this world speak with a wise-guy style appropriate to life in the streets. Chabon combines this language with a heavy dose of Yiddish as well. Reminiscent of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, the novel supplies a glossary to translate the Yiddish-inflected phrases Chabon invents for his characters to speak in this alien, yet familiar world. The Yiddish in this book, therefore, is a double-hybrid. It is a distinctly Jewish language that is mixed with the language of the detective genre, and in that way, it creates something new out of something received. The Yiddish in this novel is also changed by its combination with noir-speak. The words Chabon invents are a Yiddish that has been morphed by the Sitka experience.

Characters in the novel also demonstrate Chabon’s interest in recombination. Berko, for example, is Landsman’s cousin. His father was Jewish and his mother a native Alaskan. He chooses Jewish orthodoxy, although, in appearance, he is a huge Eskimo. That dissonant identity defines not only his character’s conflict, but also a central interest of the book. Similarly, the Hasidic gangsters in Sitka are drawn from multiple sources. In appearance and speech, Rabbi Shpilman, the leader of the Verbover Island Hasids, is a type taken from popular images of Hasidic Jews. The Rabbi has piercing eyes and a soft voice and carries a formidable authority among his followers. These traits are both the source of his religious authority and his criminal power, however. The novel transposes the religious nature of the sect into a criminal empire that is taken from the conventions of detective genre fiction.

Likewise, the plot employs a great deal of hybridization. For example, Landsman’s investigation has several facets. Nominally, he is investigating the death of a citizen, but he discovers less about that than he does a global conspiracy. In other words, the local and global are inseparable in this inquiry. Added to that combination is the fact that Landsman unexpectedly discovers the facts of his sister’s death, an event that had not yet been a mystery until his investigation of Mendel’s murder. The local, the global, and the personal are all intertwined in this case, a plot structure consistent with the novel’s preoccupation with pastiche.

The style and form of the novel work to emphasize the philosophical exploration of Jewish identity Chabon undertakes in it. The novel was inspired by a controversy Chabon was involved with over the roles of Israel and diaspora in Jewish identity. Accused of anti-Zionism in some quarters, Chabon responded by writing a novel in which all Jews live in diaspora and must work out their Jewishness within that context. The elements of pastiche emphasize the hardscrabble task of assembling Jewishness with no Israel.

A clear nod to the controversy that inspired the novel is the uneasy relationship between the immigrated Jews and the native peoples they have displaced. Much of the book’s backstory revolves on past violence between Jew and Eskimo (this is, in fact, the source of Berko’s personal conflict). The parallel between Israeli and Palestinian is painfully obvious. Chabon, whose own politics skew liberal, is clearly asking difficult questions about the state of Israel as it relates to an essential Jewish identity. Landsman’s investigation into the death of a single Jew turns out to be an investigation into what it means to be a Jew.

Summary

A writer of prodigious talent, Michael Chabon has established himself as one of the most popular and important American novelists of his generation. His work combines a wide-ranging love of fantasy and other popular forms of genre fiction with a profound knowledge and versatility with literature. His enthusiasm for combining supposedly high forms of art with supposedly low forms makes his work a fascinating example of world-building and situates him solidly within postmodern aesthetic traditions. Furthermore, his willingness to explore Jewish identity in such a postmodern context has situated his work solidly within the canon of great Jewish American writers, a tradition he both draws upon and challenges.

Bibliography

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