Michael Chabon’s Magical Year

A Leap into Non-Fiction with Maps and Legends

Michael Chabon is having a productive couple of years. After publishing the award-winning The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and the serial novella Gentlemen of the Road in 2007, Chabon moved deftly into 2008 with the release of his first book of essays and non-fiction. The collection, Maps and Legends (McSweeney’s 2008), traces Chabon’s development as an author, from a young dreamer living in the suburbs of coastal Maryland to his current status as Jewish-American fiction’s leading man.

The collection opens with a slightly revised version of an essay that appeared in the 2005 edition of America’s Best Short Stories, which Chabon edited. Defending what he defines as “entertainment literature,” Chabon decries the ghettoized state of genre fiction and encourages a general reexamination of how stodgy literary types view the odd world of mass-market paperbacks. “Entertainment, as I define it, pleasure and all, remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else,” Chabon writes. By marginalizing “entertainment lit,” readers have lost their connection to a common literature of the past. There was a time, Chabon asserts, that entertainers, court jesters, bards, men of the theatre, were the literary elite.

In the following essays, Chabon unfolds a broken-up narrative showing how his belief in genre fiction made him into the literary man he is today. He describes writing his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh tells of how his first marriage fell apart and his second bloomed in the rubble; and explains how his Judaism fits into his fascination with wandering, lost souls. One can read in his account of himself a hungering for association with the Other that rings true in the broad arc of the Chabon compendium.

Thematically, Maps and Legends covers no ground that hasn’t already been trod in one of Chabon’s longer novels. Anyone who knows something of his biography is aware of the real-life romances, heterosexual and homosexual, that informed the bulk of his first novel, and the difficulty he had following up on its success, which was central to the plot of his second novel, Wonder Boys. His well-known love of comic books is readily apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and his 2007 efforts demonstrate his love of genre fiction.

All that said, anyone who enjoys Chabon’s writing would be remiss not to pick up a copy of this bundle of essays. Chabon demonstrates with uncanny ease that which makes him both so elusive and accessible as an author: the ability to blend myth and history to create what can only be called a realist fantasy. His wit and charm are present en force in each essay. Chabon writes his history as if he were spinning a forgotten subplot out of the Pittsburgh suburbs of his restive mind.

It also serves to note that Chabon delivered a handful of these essays as opening remarks at his readings of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union in 2007. Those essays deal with Jewish Diaspora identity and transmuting the idea of Diaspora into “home.” Chabon explains that his fascination with the image of the wandering Jew stems from the precise fact of his own boundedness: he is at home in America and at home as a writer in Berkeley, far from the “eternal homeland of the Jewish people.” His narratives and his essays, so filled with flawed saviors and failed protectors, are an anti-expression of the Jewish sentiment “out of Diaspora;” as Kafka once surmised, the great joke of the Jewish experience is that the road home has become a home itself. If Chabon’s opening explorations of that sentiment are to be found in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay  and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, it reaches full expression in Maps and Legends.