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starladyI love Michael Chabon, and I also kind of despise him. Either way, I wish he were a woman.
But let me begin at the beginning, with Chabon's novelette The Final Solution, in which Sherlock Holmes, living out a beekeeping retirement in the south of England in 1944, is enlisted to track down the missing parrot of a young survivor of the Nazi "internment" camps. Chabon is (as Maps and Legends makes clear) a dyed-in-the-wool Sherlockian, of which more anon, and his tale is certainly a plausible take on Holmes at 89. Since Watson has evidently predeceased his friend, Chabon is freed from the constraints of sticking to Conan Doyle's style (which of course is Watson's), and it's an entertaining read, particularly since the penultimate chapter takes place from the point of view of the parrot in question, Bruno. After all, how many writers of fanfiction get to have their fanfictions professionally published, and put down as a credit to their career? That said, though, I know that other reviewers have excoriated Holmes for his inability to intuit the true meaning of the strings of German numbers that Bruno recites incessantly--particularly when troop trains rumble by. But to my mind, while this is in a sense the larger point of the story itself, it is not a failure on Holmes' part, because Holmes is a creature of detective fiction and the Holocaust is quite simply beyond detective fiction, beyond genre itself (the slave character makes a similar point about his own life story being beyond genre in the otherwise unremarkable book Blindspot). While I do not believe that it is beyond the reach of art to deal with the Holocaust (since both art and the Holocaust are human phenomena), it is certainly beyond the ken of Sherlock Holmes. So in the end I think Chabon, an avowed lover of genre fiction, is preserving his literary fiction street cred by showing its limits even as he plays within its confines: having his cake and eating it, too.
I was utterly charmed for the first half of Maps and Legends, thoroughly outraged for the third quarter, and somewhere in between for the final, extended fictional essay. This book collects much of Chabon's writing about comics, YA novels, ghost stories, and other vaguely illicit forms of literature, as well as several extended meditations on his own writing.
Chabon is at his most winning when he talks about other people's writing. I thoroughly enjoyed his review of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, though I categorically disagree with several of his opinions about it, namely that Lyra, Will and Mrs. Coulter become less interesting as the story moves along and that The Golden Compass is the best book of the lot. These opinion's of Chabon's, of course, are because he interprets the story as a Fall, not a Second, but from Childhood into Adulthood, and for him The Golden Compass is a sustained invocation of the magic and mystery of being a child. I first read The Golden Compass when I was twelve (not so very far removed from Lyra herself in that book, but desperately trying to act older), and disliked the first half of the book, in which Lyra more or less runs wild through Oxford with her uninspired boon companion Roger, intensely--I thought the story got good when Roger was snatched and the talk of mud-wars was replaced by armored bear wars, etc. I haven't reread the book since, and probably should, but I was not the only person I know who had trouble getting through the first half, though I remain devoutly grateful that I did. For me the story kicks into high gear in The Subtle Knife and bursts into dark, glorious flower in The Amber Spyglass. But that's another story.
To be honest, at several points I was reminded of Sarah Monette, for Chabon says some things about genre vs. literary fiction, and what genre fiction is, that Monette has said on her blog (and even in similar language); they also share a passion for M.R. James, the English writer of horror stories, and admire H.P. Lovecraft. But Monette is a woman, and furthermore she embraces her love of genre fiction and her desire to write within it. Outside of the final extended fictionalized memoir, "Golems I Have Known," Chabon mentions women fewer times than I have fingers on my left hand (five), and none of these references is to a woman as anything other than an enabler of Chabon's own writing. Upon reflection, this glaring defect is not terribly surprising: none of Chabon's works really feature women, or girls. Rosa of course is an instrumental element of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but she mainly functions as a facilitator and totem for Joe, and then as a weight around Sam's neck when she gets knocked up and Sam marries her. I can't remember if there are any girls or women in Summerland--all I remember is the female Sasquatch, who of course betrays the forces of good in the eighth inning of the final game against the forces of darkness. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about a young man who may or may not be gay but who has sex with at least one man; Wonder Boys is about sad young literary men and sad literary men who are no longer young. You get the picture.
I don't mean to imply that Chabon is a chauvinist or a misogynist or any such thing; he clearly loves his wife (a lawyer turned novelist whose current book is a series of essays called Bad Mother, which I hope includes the piece she wrote for The New York Times several years ago in which she confided her conviction that she was the only member of her mothers' group "getting any")--though Maps and Legends gives one the strong impression that, at least initially, the most important thing about her to him was that she was Jewish like him--and his children; he evidently has at least one daughter. But he clearly doesn't find women interesting in and of themselves; his impression of The Great Gatsby is that it has "problematic women," and he confides that he started the book that became his first novel wanting to write something like Gatsby, featuring "problematic women and the men who make them problematic."
I'm strongly tempted to connect this reluctance, or passing over, to Chabon's own evident, if unacknowledged, bisexuality. He admits in one piece to having had romantic and sexual relationships with at least two men, and in the next piece says that he was worried that people would think the protagonist of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was gay because he (the protagonist) had sex with a man in the book, attributing this fear on his own part to homophobia. Given all this, I'm also strongly tempted to not consider Chabon's evident affection for Proust (who has weird ideas and connections between Jews and homosexuals in his own writing) coincidental. But of course all these things are not necessarily connected. That said, (homo)sexuality is clearly a pet topic of Chabon's--paging Sammy Clay, to pick the most famous instance--and as I said, this book gives one an intriguing set of evidence from which to postulate various theories.
All this being said, after a while I grew rather tired of the maleness of Chabon's world. Almost every book or fictional character mentioned in these pages is by a man or written by one, and while many of these books sound awesome, particularly the comics Chabon proselytizes, such as Will Eisner, American Flagg! and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, by the end I was frustrated with the same frustration I felt at the PEN Festival when, in three panels of graphics novelists, not one was a woman and only one person mentioned the work of a woman comic artist. Of course, historically speaking, practically no comics have been written by women, and most writers throughout history have been men, but Chabon's evident incuriousity about the current work of women--who have made many splendid contributions to the genres Chabon claims to love in the past century--is infuriating.
Some of the same narcissicism permeates Chabon's claim to find the origins of fanfiction in the practice of the Sherlockians, those devoted fans of Holmes, Watson and Doyle who for nearly a century have made it their business to fill in and add on to the canon they love, many at high levels of literary acclaim and skill. I certainly think that the rise of the Sherlockians is an important precursor to fanfiction, but (while in no way implying that fanfiction writers are unlearned or poorly read, since they clearly aren't) I'm fairly certain that the crossover between Holmesians and the original Kirk/Spock slashers in the 60s is low. For the same reason, I'm inclined to treat Chabon's essay bemoaning the death knell of comics with a certain degree of skepticism, since he clearly has no concept of manga, and I don't think one can truly treat the current situation of comics vis-a-vis child readership without talking about manga.
For all these reasons and more, I'm inclined to treat Chabon's claims to love genre fiction as much as he does as questionable. Evidently, on one level, Chabon does love genre fiction, and of course I don't doubt his claims to love the works he devoured in his childhood. But the essays on Chabon's own writing paint a clear picture of a sad young literary man holed up in a basement in Southern California, twenty-two years old and too scared of lacking a wide audience to write an awesome-sounding novel about the investigation into the disappearance of Percival Lowell taking place along the canals of Mars that he mapped, shelving that concept permanently for what became The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Chabon's own youthful pretentiousness is hilarious on one level and infuriating on another, since it's clearly a pose that continues to come naturally to young aspiring male writers of a certain age (i.e. under thirty) and condition (i.e. unpublished). And like many such male conditions, I find it tedious in the final analysis. Likewise, in the final analysis, I see in Chabon a prodigiously gifted storyteller trying to convince himself that it's okay to write genre fiction, really, but unable to ever fully commit (with the possible exception of Summerland, which notably goes unmentioned in these pages) to doing so for fear of the calumnies which will be heaped upon his head. That Chabon is too scared to write anything but literary fiction which dabbles with genre tropes as plot elements is ultimately his loss, but also, I suspect, readers' in general, since we will never read that novel about life and detection on Mars. Chabon, commendably enough, is trying to shake literary fiction's self-satisfied complacency that it is the best and only true form of literature, but rather than leading the charge he is sending dispatches to the front. Literary fiction, or more precisely its defenders and adherents, have the high ground; as Morpheus says of the machines, "they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them." That person is not Chabon, for all that he at least has a sense (and indeed, an overdeveloped nostalgia) for all the glorious lands that lie in the blank spaces on literary fiction's map.
But let me begin at the beginning, with Chabon's novelette The Final Solution, in which Sherlock Holmes, living out a beekeeping retirement in the south of England in 1944, is enlisted to track down the missing parrot of a young survivor of the Nazi "internment" camps. Chabon is (as Maps and Legends makes clear) a dyed-in-the-wool Sherlockian, of which more anon, and his tale is certainly a plausible take on Holmes at 89. Since Watson has evidently predeceased his friend, Chabon is freed from the constraints of sticking to Conan Doyle's style (which of course is Watson's), and it's an entertaining read, particularly since the penultimate chapter takes place from the point of view of the parrot in question, Bruno. After all, how many writers of fanfiction get to have their fanfictions professionally published, and put down as a credit to their career? That said, though, I know that other reviewers have excoriated Holmes for his inability to intuit the true meaning of the strings of German numbers that Bruno recites incessantly--particularly when troop trains rumble by. But to my mind, while this is in a sense the larger point of the story itself, it is not a failure on Holmes' part, because Holmes is a creature of detective fiction and the Holocaust is quite simply beyond detective fiction, beyond genre itself (the slave character makes a similar point about his own life story being beyond genre in the otherwise unremarkable book Blindspot). While I do not believe that it is beyond the reach of art to deal with the Holocaust (since both art and the Holocaust are human phenomena), it is certainly beyond the ken of Sherlock Holmes. So in the end I think Chabon, an avowed lover of genre fiction, is preserving his literary fiction street cred by showing its limits even as he plays within its confines: having his cake and eating it, too.
I was utterly charmed for the first half of Maps and Legends, thoroughly outraged for the third quarter, and somewhere in between for the final, extended fictional essay. This book collects much of Chabon's writing about comics, YA novels, ghost stories, and other vaguely illicit forms of literature, as well as several extended meditations on his own writing.
Chabon is at his most winning when he talks about other people's writing. I thoroughly enjoyed his review of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, though I categorically disagree with several of his opinions about it, namely that Lyra, Will and Mrs. Coulter become less interesting as the story moves along and that The Golden Compass is the best book of the lot. These opinion's of Chabon's, of course, are because he interprets the story as a Fall, not a Second, but from Childhood into Adulthood, and for him The Golden Compass is a sustained invocation of the magic and mystery of being a child. I first read The Golden Compass when I was twelve (not so very far removed from Lyra herself in that book, but desperately trying to act older), and disliked the first half of the book, in which Lyra more or less runs wild through Oxford with her uninspired boon companion Roger, intensely--I thought the story got good when Roger was snatched and the talk of mud-wars was replaced by armored bear wars, etc. I haven't reread the book since, and probably should, but I was not the only person I know who had trouble getting through the first half, though I remain devoutly grateful that I did. For me the story kicks into high gear in The Subtle Knife and bursts into dark, glorious flower in The Amber Spyglass. But that's another story.
To be honest, at several points I was reminded of Sarah Monette, for Chabon says some things about genre vs. literary fiction, and what genre fiction is, that Monette has said on her blog (and even in similar language); they also share a passion for M.R. James, the English writer of horror stories, and admire H.P. Lovecraft. But Monette is a woman, and furthermore she embraces her love of genre fiction and her desire to write within it. Outside of the final extended fictionalized memoir, "Golems I Have Known," Chabon mentions women fewer times than I have fingers on my left hand (five), and none of these references is to a woman as anything other than an enabler of Chabon's own writing. Upon reflection, this glaring defect is not terribly surprising: none of Chabon's works really feature women, or girls. Rosa of course is an instrumental element of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but she mainly functions as a facilitator and totem for Joe, and then as a weight around Sam's neck when she gets knocked up and Sam marries her. I can't remember if there are any girls or women in Summerland--all I remember is the female Sasquatch, who of course betrays the forces of good in the eighth inning of the final game against the forces of darkness. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about a young man who may or may not be gay but who has sex with at least one man; Wonder Boys is about sad young literary men and sad literary men who are no longer young. You get the picture.
I don't mean to imply that Chabon is a chauvinist or a misogynist or any such thing; he clearly loves his wife (a lawyer turned novelist whose current book is a series of essays called Bad Mother, which I hope includes the piece she wrote for The New York Times several years ago in which she confided her conviction that she was the only member of her mothers' group "getting any")--though Maps and Legends gives one the strong impression that, at least initially, the most important thing about her to him was that she was Jewish like him--and his children; he evidently has at least one daughter. But he clearly doesn't find women interesting in and of themselves; his impression of The Great Gatsby is that it has "problematic women," and he confides that he started the book that became his first novel wanting to write something like Gatsby, featuring "problematic women and the men who make them problematic."
I'm strongly tempted to connect this reluctance, or passing over, to Chabon's own evident, if unacknowledged, bisexuality. He admits in one piece to having had romantic and sexual relationships with at least two men, and in the next piece says that he was worried that people would think the protagonist of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was gay because he (the protagonist) had sex with a man in the book, attributing this fear on his own part to homophobia. Given all this, I'm also strongly tempted to not consider Chabon's evident affection for Proust (who has weird ideas and connections between Jews and homosexuals in his own writing) coincidental. But of course all these things are not necessarily connected. That said, (homo)sexuality is clearly a pet topic of Chabon's--paging Sammy Clay, to pick the most famous instance--and as I said, this book gives one an intriguing set of evidence from which to postulate various theories.
All this being said, after a while I grew rather tired of the maleness of Chabon's world. Almost every book or fictional character mentioned in these pages is by a man or written by one, and while many of these books sound awesome, particularly the comics Chabon proselytizes, such as Will Eisner, American Flagg! and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, by the end I was frustrated with the same frustration I felt at the PEN Festival when, in three panels of graphics novelists, not one was a woman and only one person mentioned the work of a woman comic artist. Of course, historically speaking, practically no comics have been written by women, and most writers throughout history have been men, but Chabon's evident incuriousity about the current work of women--who have made many splendid contributions to the genres Chabon claims to love in the past century--is infuriating.
Some of the same narcissicism permeates Chabon's claim to find the origins of fanfiction in the practice of the Sherlockians, those devoted fans of Holmes, Watson and Doyle who for nearly a century have made it their business to fill in and add on to the canon they love, many at high levels of literary acclaim and skill. I certainly think that the rise of the Sherlockians is an important precursor to fanfiction, but (while in no way implying that fanfiction writers are unlearned or poorly read, since they clearly aren't) I'm fairly certain that the crossover between Holmesians and the original Kirk/Spock slashers in the 60s is low. For the same reason, I'm inclined to treat Chabon's essay bemoaning the death knell of comics with a certain degree of skepticism, since he clearly has no concept of manga, and I don't think one can truly treat the current situation of comics vis-a-vis child readership without talking about manga.
For all these reasons and more, I'm inclined to treat Chabon's claims to love genre fiction as much as he does as questionable. Evidently, on one level, Chabon does love genre fiction, and of course I don't doubt his claims to love the works he devoured in his childhood. But the essays on Chabon's own writing paint a clear picture of a sad young literary man holed up in a basement in Southern California, twenty-two years old and too scared of lacking a wide audience to write an awesome-sounding novel about the investigation into the disappearance of Percival Lowell taking place along the canals of Mars that he mapped, shelving that concept permanently for what became The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Chabon's own youthful pretentiousness is hilarious on one level and infuriating on another, since it's clearly a pose that continues to come naturally to young aspiring male writers of a certain age (i.e. under thirty) and condition (i.e. unpublished). And like many such male conditions, I find it tedious in the final analysis. Likewise, in the final analysis, I see in Chabon a prodigiously gifted storyteller trying to convince himself that it's okay to write genre fiction, really, but unable to ever fully commit (with the possible exception of Summerland, which notably goes unmentioned in these pages) to doing so for fear of the calumnies which will be heaped upon his head. That Chabon is too scared to write anything but literary fiction which dabbles with genre tropes as plot elements is ultimately his loss, but also, I suspect, readers' in general, since we will never read that novel about life and detection on Mars. Chabon, commendably enough, is trying to shake literary fiction's self-satisfied complacency that it is the best and only true form of literature, but rather than leading the charge he is sending dispatches to the front. Literary fiction, or more precisely its defenders and adherents, have the high ground; as Morpheus says of the machines, "they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them." That person is not Chabon, for all that he at least has a sense (and indeed, an overdeveloped nostalgia) for all the glorious lands that lie in the blank spaces on literary fiction's map.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-26 01:06 (UTC)He seems to want to write interesting characters in Trillian and Fenchurch, but ultimately they are only ever existent as someone's girlfriend and are disappeared when not needed in that capacity.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-26 01:22 (UTC)It's totally not even something I realized until I started thinking about it--I love The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Summerland is probably on my top 10 list of best fantasy books ever, simply because it's so refreshingly and thoroughly American. But men and boys are the ones who get to have fun, or to be the protagonists, in Chabon's books. It's as much a shame (and a waste of his talent) as the fact that he can't or won't let himself actually write genre fiction.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-23 17:56 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-24 05:32 (UTC)