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| Image via Alex-quisite |
This winter, I decided, for reasons not entirely clear to me, to go back and re-read Michael Chabon.
Chabon, an American writer who won the Pulitzer in 2001, has written nine novels since 1988, as well as a number of other short-story collections, comic books, and essay collections. As I declined to spend any money on this endeavour, I read the books held by my local library and my own personal bookshelf, which means I did not—and have never—read his first two novels, Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys. Since his novels skew either very short or very long, and are often challenging (for reasons to be discussed below), I felt that skipping the non-fiction and comics was a fine omission. Seven of these books were re-reads; two were newly encountered.
I suffer, often, from a reluctance to revisit the important texts in my life. The movies I watched multiple times in high school have not been viewed since graduation; the books that opened by eyes in university were dutifully shelved, longstandingly admired, but not reopened. Fear underlies this disinclination to revisit: what if the books have become less compelling? What if I, as a reader and as a person, have changed so much that stories that were once spellbinding have become trite? What if the world itself has moved on, leaving these books as time capsules rather than vital works of art? What if I thought something was good, and I was wrong?
Anyway, there was only one way to find out. I re-read them in the order I thought would be most enjoyable, or in the order they were available at the library, or the order that my whims dictated. They are presented in that order below.
Summerland (2002): Far and away my favourite of the early Chabon. A high-concept novel about the youthful saving of a cosmic world, it involves brave girls, baseball, the history of Washington State, Norse cosmology, giants, and the price we pay when good people become involved in terrible projects. Aimed at younger readers, it remains one of Chabon's best-plotted books, and his most diverse worlds. After re-reading this on a whim, I felt generous and inspired to read the others. Chabon does best with a firm editor and an large set of themes, both of which seem to be on full display here. I suspect he actually wrote this prior to Kavalier & Clay, but it was published after; maybe this accounts for the relatively out-of-scope subject matter and style. In any case, I enjoy it every time I read it.
Read again: absolutely, probably aloud to my kiddo.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000): This is the one that started it all. I first read it sometime in the early 2000s, after I had enrolled in university and was meeting Judaism in the real world for the first time. I was swept up in the story, the details of the writing: the early days of comic books, and the damaged young men who created them. By turns thrilling and tedious, the central relationship between cousins doesn't leave much space for any female characters—justice for Luna Moth, of course—but the sprawl was a hoot to get lost in. Going back to it, I was struck by how little I had retained of the story, but how much the feeling it evoked had remained. Michael Chabon is firmly established as a man's writer (that is, one who struggles to remember that women exist, and could be characters in books), and it started here. Still, there is magic in the amazing adventures, even if it's just the nostalgia for the person I had been when I first read it.
Read again: maybe in another 20 years?
The Final Solution (2004) and Gentlemen of the Road (2007): I read these back to back, two shorter novels—at least in theory—and a palate-cleanser before The Yiddish Policeman's Union. TFS was fine, a trim little mystery that centres on a parrot (an unlikely but real motif in Chabon's work), a mute boy, and the atrocities of war. It's fine! It's...fine. This was clearly a little amuse-bouche between longer novels, and it feels light and relatively unserious.
GotR was an absolutely slog, a sub-150 page novella that nonetheless wandered, lost and obscure in the desert, knee-deep in period jargon and technical language, through characterizations that never told me who anyone actually was, through telegraphed details that I, a person reading in 2023, did not understand whatsoever. Originally published as a serial in the New York Times Magazine, I was first flummoxed, then enraged, then ultimately bored as the story unspooled and I found no place where I could get swept along. It took me weeks to read and I resented it the entire time.
Read again: neither appeals, frankly. And I would rather impale myself on a lancet that interact with those infernal gentlemen again.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007): This, finally, was the proper successor to Kavalier & Clay: a big, meaty, alternate history that supposed what might happen if, instead of Israel, the post-WWII Jews had been installed in Alaska. Things kick off with a murder and wrap up with a terrorist attack; in the middle is some fine alternate world-building (things like dialog happening "in American" and a minyan's worth of Orthodox thugs were great); however, Chabon has never really been able to steer a plot from A to C, and this is a critical failure in a mystery novel. This may feel ungenerous, to force a master of American letters into a little genre-specific box, but he is the one who chose the genre, friends. In any case, I remember being most disappointed by this book when it first came out; re-reading it, I found myself surprised to enjoy it more, but the still-unsatisfying third act is still a drag.
Read again: probably not!
Telegraph Avenue (2012): Man....okay, look, I want to like this book. I want to enjoy the California landscape, the dipped-in-honey feeling of Oakland in what feels like 1975, or 1995, but turns out to be 2008. I want to get into Brokeland Records with Archy and Nat and their midwife wives, I want to roam the streets with Julius and Titus, and in small doses, with the prose flowing like funk across a golden August afternoon, I can dig it. But as a text? A story? A book? This is a mess. As pointed out elsewhere, Chabon has never been able to hold a plot, but this is egregious. His prose is sticky, including one absolutely self-indulgent eleven-page sentence that made me mad. I wish we had spent more time with the wives, rather than these silly men. The casual homophobia reeks of trying to get away with something through a character. And yet: and yet. I actually went out and bought a thrift-store copy of this book, because I feel like it might be one I come back to one day. In small doses—like when I'm trying to fall asleep—the vibe of it all might overpower the mess. It will always be a mess, but sometimes, when your muse is Calliope in a fur coat and disco shorts, it's a mess worth rolling around in bed with.
Read again: yeah! I'm not sure why! But there's something about it that feels fertile.
Moonglow (2016): I'd soured on Chabon after the one-two punch of The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Telegraph Avenue, and while I still admired his earlier work, I was less inclined to seek him out. But this was the capstone of the project, and I'm glad I read it for the first time now. A faux-memoir (or is it?) of "Mike Chabon"'s grandparents, both Jews who survived WWII, and their subsequent mental health woes, incarcerations, and rocketry obsessions. The prose is infinitely tighter than anything he's produced before: snappier sentences, more comprehensible action, and even some jokes! We love a joke. I sense that this is Chabon as he's trying to craft a narrative, not a vibe, and he's still a bit amateurish (especially for someone who has written nine novels), but, despite the nesting and sometimes confusing timelines, the story itself is relatively straightforward in a way that feels downright refreshing. I loved the grandfather—a muscular, take-no-shit fightin' Jew who was streaked with romance and sadness—and I shuddered along with the grandmother as she rode out her hallucinations and trauma. There are sections that feel more well-drafted than others, but this is forgivable, as it's true of any book. And overall, this is a good place to end.
Read again: maybe. But I do recommend it.
This re-read project has led to some interesting places. I am not quite a fan of Chabon's—what is good is very good, but what is bad is appalling—but I will always respect his imagination. Even missteps like Telegraph Avenue and Gentlemen of the Road are interesting failures. I feel like a piratical editor could have salvaged many things, if not for the fact that authors of this level are rarely taken in hand in the ways they ought to be. And his resistance to contemporary stories is an interesting throughline (along with those damnable parrots): what does it say when an author reflects nearly everything through the lens of the past, especially one as calamitous as that of 20th century European Jewry? Is that just authors being authors, or is there some deep discomfort with a level gaze on this new millennia? As we get farther from the horrors of World War Two, we rely more on authors like Chabon to transport us back there in ways that feel meaningful; at the same time, his writing often grapples with what it means to storytell about the black hole that is the Holocaust, and how often writing will come up short. (Telegraph Avenue doesn't bother at all with this topic; is it coincidence that it is his most formless and least serious book?)
Will there be a sequel to this project? I may indulge in some of his essays; I may counterbalance this by reading all of, say, Ann Patchett or Virginia Woolf or Margaret Atwood or Elena Ferrante or Toni Morrison or Nnedi Okorafor or Becky Chambers. I may come back to these books at a time when I feel less nostalgic for my early 20s and the person I had been once; I may leave them on the shelf forever. But I do love the ways this project shined a light on me and my strange little soul. I loved the parts that made me mad, and the parts that made me wonder, and the parts that made me feel like my heart was hurtling through time and space. That, in those brief moments, is possible with this writer; that is not nothing.
