Chabon, Michael 1963–

views updated

Chabon, Michael 1963–

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "shay-bahn"; born 1963, in Washington, DC; son of Robert (a physician, lawyer, and hospital manager) and Sharon (a lawyer) Chabon; married Lollie Groth (a poet; divorced, 1991); married Ayelet Waldman (a writer), 1993; children: (second marriage) Sophie, Ezekiel, Rosie. Education: University of Pittsburgh, B.A., 1984; University of California—Irvine, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—Berkeley, CA. Agent—Mary Evans, Inc., 242 East 5th Street, New York, NY 10003.

CAREER: Writer and screenwriter.

AWARDS, HONORS: Publishers Weekly best books, New York Times Notable Book, both 1995, and Scripter Award, Friends of the University of Southern California Libraries, 2000, all for Wonder Boys; O. Henry Award, Third Prize, 1999, for story "Son of the Wolfman"; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, 2000, short-listed for PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 2001, New York Society Library Award, 2001, Gold Medal, Commonwealth Club of California, 2001, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2001, all for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for children's literature, 2003, for Summerland.

WRITINGS:

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (novel), Morrow (New York, NY), 1988.

A Model World, and Other Stories (includes "The Lost World," "The Little Knife," "More Than Human," and "Blumenthal on the Air"), Morrow (New York, NY), 1991.

Wonder Boys (novel), Villard (New York, NY), 1995.

Werewolves in Their Youth (stories), Random House (New York, NY), 1999.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 2000.

Summerland (juvenile novel), Hyperion/Miramax (New York, NY), 2002.

The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, Fourth Estate/HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2004.

Also author of screenplays, including The Gentleman Host, The Martian Agent, and The Amazing Spider-Man, a 2004 sequel to the original movie. Author of introduction to Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real-Estate Photographer, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1996. Contributor to periodicals, including Gentlemen's Quarterly, Mademoiselle, New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Playboy, Forward, Paris Review, Civilization, and Vogue. Guest editor of McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, McSweeney's Books (San Francisco, CA), 2002. Contributor to Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce, edited by Caitlin Shetterly, Berkley (New York, NY), 2003. Contributor to Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, a quarterly comic book based on the character from Cha-bon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 2003.

ADAPTATIONS: Wonder Boys was adapted for film and released by Paramount Studios; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay has been optioned for a film by Paramount.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel, Hotzeplotz.

SIDELIGHTS: Michael Chabon is considered by many critics one of the major literary authors of his generation, and with his 2002 novel, Summerland, he turned his hand to juvenile fiction, serving up a five-hundred page children's fantasy novel intended to give J.K. Rowling and her "Harry Potter" series a bit of American competition. As Patrick Meanor noted in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chabon "consciously set out to create his own kind of American magical world, combining elements of Native American and Norse myth and folklore." Such a turn to juvenile fiction was all the more surprising, considering that Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a book that confirmed the early critical response to his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and of his second, the wryly humorous Wonder Boys.

Dubbed a "virtuoso" by Booklist's Donna Seaman, and a "master stylist" by Book's James Sullivan, Chabon has achieved "buzz most writers only dream about," according to Rex Roberts, writing in Insight on the News. Such "buzz" has made life easier at the Chabon household, where he and his wife, also a writer, of mysteries, share parenting duties of their children. The versatile Chabon has, in addition to his novels, penned two short story collections, A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth, as well as television pilots, screenplays, and articles

Chabon was born in Washington, DC, in 1963, the son of Robert and Sharon Chabon. His father was a physician, lawyer, and hospital manager; his mother later be-came a lawyer. At the age of six, Chabon and his family moved to the city-in-construction of Columbia, Maryland. They were, as Chabon wrote in "Maps and Legends" on his Web site, "colonists of a dream, immigrants to a new land that as yet existed mostly on paper. More than four-fifths of Columbia's projected houses, office buildings, parks, pools, bike paths, elementary schools and shopping centers had yet to be built; and the millennium of racial and economic harmony that Columbia promised to birth in its theoretical streets and cul-de-sacs was as far from parturition as ever." It was in this never-never land of a city-in-the-making that Chabon came of age. "My earliest memories of Columbia are of the Plan," Chabon wrote, indicating the blueprint for the structure and shape of the city. Hanging a copy of this plan, or map of the projected town, on his wall, Chabon took to studying it as closely as he did the map of Walt Disney's new Magic Kingdom, also thumbtacked nearby. "I glanced up at the map at night as I lay in bed, reading The Hobbit or The Book of Three or a novel set in Oz. And sometimes I would give it a once over before I set out with my black and white friends for a foray into the hinterlands, to the borders of our town and our imaginations…. How fortunate I was to be handed, at such an early age, a map to steer by, however provisional."

A second guidance system for young Chabon was the world of comic books. "I was introduced to them pretty early," Chabon told Scott Tobias in an Onion interview, "right around the age of six or so, by my father, who had himself been a devoted reader of comics when he was a child." Chabon's paternal grandfather, a typographer in New York, worked in a plant where they printed comic books and would thus bring home loads of the comics to his son, Chabon's father. Repeating this favor, Robert Chabon introduced his own son to the wonders of DC Comics. Chabon remembered, in his interview with Tobias, the "naive, innocent, primary-colored" nature of these comics, "set in a world with very clear distinctions between good and evil." This was the world of Superman, primarily; as he grew older he sought out the "murkier and more ambiguous" world of the heroes found in Marvel comics. However, by the time he was fourteen or fifteen, he had given up the world of comics, science fiction, and fantasy for more adult, literary fiction, "the stuff my parents would recommend to me that they were enjoying," he told Tobias.

Graduating from high school, Chabon attended the University of Pittsburgh where he earned his undergraduate degree, and then attended the University of California—Irvine, ultimately earning a master's degree in creative writing. During his college years, Chabon expanded on his literally encyclopedic reading. The author has noted that as a child he read the dictionary and encyclopedia for fun; later, he adopted a disparate collection of favorite authors, from Thomas Pynchon to Herman Melville. Writing on his Web site, Chabon lists the writers and works that changed his life, including Jorge Luis Borges and his Labyrinths, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his Love in the Time of Cholera, John Cheever's collected stories, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Pale Fire, Robert Stone's Children of the Light, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, among fiction works, and nonfiction works such as Robert Graves's The White Goddess and Jan Morris's Among the Cities. All of these writers have influenced Chabon in a style of writing that avoids popular minimalism. With more similarity to Marcel Proust than Ernest Hemingway, Chabon has developed a writing style at once expansive and lyric. As he explained to Goodman, "I'll start writing a sentence with a general idea. I want to say x about this character, and before I know it, it's 135 words long, and I've broken it up with a few parentheticals and something between dashes, and it just happens that way."

Chabon's first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was actually his master's thesis at the University of California—Irvine. Not only did the novel earn him his degree, but also his instructor thought highly enough of it to send the manuscript to his own agent, who quickly found a publisher for it. Upon the publication of the coming-of-age novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in 1988, Chabon earned recognition as a promising young fiction writer. The story centers on Art Bechstein, who has recently graduated from college and is about to experience what he perceives as the last summer of his youth.

Chabon followed The Mysteries of Pittsburgh with A Model World, and Other Stories, which includes tales previously published in the New Yorker. Many of the stories in this collection involve unrequited love, and five of the tales—collectively termed "The Lost World"—chart the angst of adolescent Nathan Shapiro as he grows from age ten to sixteen. Among these chronicles is "The Little Knife," showing Nathan agonizing over both his parents' antagonistic relationship and the Washington Senators' imminent demise from major-league baseball. In "More Than Human," another tale focusing on Shapiro, the boy must come to terms with his shattered family after his father leaves home. Another story in A Model World, "Blumenthal on the Air," centers on an American narrator who marries an Iranian woman simply to provide her with United States citizenship, then finds himself falling in love with her.

In her New York Times Book Review appraisal of A Model World, Elizabeth Benedict noted that Chabon sometimes uses his polished style as a means of remaining emotionally aloof from his material. "All too often he keeps his distance," she alleged, but she added that even in tales where Chabon remains reserved, he nonetheless manages to produce "fluent, astonishingly vivid prose." Benedict was particularly impressed with "The Lost World" stories, which she lauded for their "breathtaking" descriptive passages. Other tales in the volume, Benedict noted, recalled The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Such stories, the critic affirmed, "have a kaleidoscopic beauty."

Chabon experienced considerable difficulty in following up the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World. While living on a large advance from his publisher, he wrote 1,500 pages of what he intended to be his second novel, Fountain City. It was, Chabon told Los Angeles Times contributor Erik Himmelsbach, "sort of a map of my brain," and in it, he attempted to express his love for Paris, architecture, baseball, Florida, and more. After four-and-a-half years and four drafts, however, Chabon admitted to himself that he was never going to be able to craft Fountain City into a readable book. He explained to Himmelsbach, "Because I had taken that [advance] money, I felt like I couldn't dump the project, even when it was fairly clear to me that it wasn't working."

The Fountain City experience was demoralizing, but Chabon eventually turned it to his advantage. In early 1993, he began work on Wonder Boys and in less than a year had finished his second novel. Wonder Boys is a fast-paced, comic romp that chronicles one long, disastrous weekend in the life of Grady Tripp, a once-lauded writer now burdened with a 2,000-page manuscript he cannot finish. Joseph P. Kahn of the Boston Globe called Tripp "an instant classic … part Ginger Man, part Garp and altogether brilliantly original." Chabon confided to Lisa See in Publishers Weekly that until his wife read the manuscript of Wonder Boys and he heard her laughing as she turned the pages, he had no idea that he was writing a comic novel. "To me, Grady has a wry tone, but I felt sad writing about him. In a lot of ways, he is a projection of my worst fears of what I was going to become if I kept working on Fountain City." He continued: "To me, the book is about the disappointment of getting older and growing up and not measuring up to what you thought, and the world and the people in it not being what you expected. It's about disillusionment and acceptance." Wonder Boys was adapted for a movie starring Michael Douglas as the burnt-out writer.

Library Journal reviewer Joanna M. Burkhardt called the stories in Chabon's 1999 collection Werewolves in Their Youth "remarkably crafted." "Brief synopses can't begin to convey the rich texture of Chabon's involved tales," added Donna Seaman in Booklist. Failed relationships serve as the recurring theme in the collection's nine stories, all set in the Pacific Northwest. The title story is of two eleven-year-old boys whose games turn extreme. In "The Harris Fetko Story," Harris is a football player in a failing football venture. His father, Norm, a coach who groomed his son to be an athlete, is now selling cars, but dreams of a new sport called "Powerball" that will revive his career. Although father and son have not spoken for years, Norm calls on Harris to be his main attraction. "When faced with difficult family relations, the protagonists in Michael Chabon's new stories, man and boy alike, harden their hearts and draw into their shells," noted Randall Holdridge in the Tucson Weekly. "But vulnerability in these male carapaces, a softness in their hearts, yields compassion at moments of crisis. Usually they pay a high cost in self-sacrifice, but they're rewarded by transfiguring new esteem."

Chabon's next tale, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, takes readers into the pulp world of the 1930s and 1940s through the experiences of two Jewish cousins. American Sammy Klayman is an opportunistic young fellow with a real knack for plotting pulp fiction, while Josef Kavalier, a Czech who has fled the Nazis, complements this storytelling talent with his own rare, bold drawing style. Together they create a Harry Houdini-like comic character in a series called The Escapist, a superhero who battles World War II enemies on the pages of the comic. Quickly, the cartooning duo become a phenomenal success, but Joe continues to be plagued by guilt and grief over the loss of his family. Finally, he leaves Sammy and his lover to join the Navy. Exploring themes from escapist literature to Golems and beyond, Chabon created, during four years of writing, a huge manuscript that he pared down by two hundred pages before publication. The book became the publishing sensation of the 2000 season.

Reviewing the novel in Commentary, John Podhoretz noted that it "combines fable, magical realism, boy's adventure storytelling, Horatio Alger, and mordant humor in an exhilarating stew that also attempts something entirely new in the depiction of the European Jewish catastrophe and the guilt suffered by those who succeeded in escaping it." Podhoretz ultimately felt, however, that while The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was a "wonderful book," it was still, "despite its scope, a small one." Most other critics offered different opinions. Booklist's Seaman thought that Chabon was "equally adept at atmosphere, action, dialogue, and cultural commentary," plumbing the "depths of the human heart" and celebrating "the healing properties of escapism … with exuberance and wisdom." Writing in the World and I, Tom Deignan called The Amazing Adventures a "slam-bang accomplishment, dazzling and profound, cerebral yet wonderfully touching," and went on to proclaim, "Chabon has produced a great and very American novel, which feels both intimate and worldly."

Troy Patterson of Entertainment Weekly added to the chorus of praise, noting that Chabon's novel is "a long, lyrical one that's exquisitely patterned rather than grandly plotted, composed with detailed scenes, and spotted with some rapturous passages of analysis." Patterson concluded, "It's like a graphic novel inked in words and starring the author himself in the lead role: Wonder Boy." "Chabon has pulled off another great feat," wrote Susanna Meadows in Newsweek, while Time critic R.Z. Sheppard characterized the novel as one written with "much imagination, verve and affection." Roberts concluded his review in Insight on the News by commenting, "With Amazing Adventures, Chabon lives up to his early accolades, and takes a soaring leap into the literary stratosphere." Awards committees offered similar response, as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was nominated for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction before it took the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001.

With his 2002 novel, Summerland, Chabon extended his literary ambitions to the world of young-adult literature. The inspiration for this book came from a couple of sources. "It originated in part," Chabon explained to a contributor for Library Journal, "with the experience of reading to my kids…. A big turning point for me was rereading Charlotte's Web and just being blown away again by how beautiful that book is." Combined with this was a youthful ambition he had had to write about American folklore in the same manner as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had used British folklore as "the backdrops for their works."

Chabon was one of several well-known adult writers to turn his hand to children's books in 2002, and for this "complex, wildly ambitious novel," as Booklist's Brian Wilson described the book, Chabon uses baseball as a symbol or metaphor for life. Eleven-year-old Ethan Feld is perhaps the world's worst baseball player, at least the worst in Clam Island, Washington, where he makes his home. But he and best friends tomboy Jennifer T. Rideout, a Native-American pitcher, and Thor Wignutt, are pressed into service one summer by the sports-loving faeries, the ferishers, to save the world. Coyote, the Native-American trickster, is out to create "Ragged Rock," or the destruction of the world. To this end, he kidnaps Ethan's father, who has invented a mysterious substance that is a universal solvent; Coyote plans to dissolve the world away. Ethan—whose mother has died of cancer—along with Jennifer, Thor, and the ferishers, set off on a mission to rescue Ethan's father and secure the fate of the universe. The family Saab—held aloft by a blimp—becomes their ship as they sail through various worlds on their rescue mission. These worlds include Winterland, Summerland, the Middling, and the Gleaming. They play baseball in Summerland and are joined by an unlikely cast of characters, including a talking rat, a former ball player from the Negro leagues, and a Sasquatch named Taffy whom they also rescue. In the end, the fate of the world depends on a baseball game between the villains and this bizarre cast of good guys and girls.

Chabon's first venture into children's books was widely reviewed. A contributor for Publishers Weekly felt that Chabon "hits a high-flying home run, creating a vivid fantasy where baseball is king." The same critic further commented that the author "unspools an elaborate yarn in a style that frequently crackles with color and surprise." Similarly, Kimberly L. Paone, writing in School Library Journal, thought that Chabon's debut foray into juvenile literature "will enchant its audience." Troy Patterson, writing in Entertainment Weekly, noted that Chabon's book "is a baseball novel that gives new meaning to the words fantasy league." Yet Patterson also wondered if Summerland were really a children's book. "By calling it such," Patterson observed, "Cha-bon gives himself prosaic license to indulge in open-hearted hokeyness and reflexive nostalgic revelry."

Laura Miller, writing for Salon.com, noted that while Summerland "is meant for kids,… it's just as rangy, eccentric, dreamy, and funky as [Chabon's] books for adults." However, some other reviewers also noted that the contents of the book might go over the heads of young readers. Booklist's Bill Ott felt that even "committed fantasy buffs … will have to bring their A-games if they expect to digest this ingredient-rich plot." Robert Lipsyte, writing in the New York Times Book Review, felt that "Chabon drops the ball by giving us a nerdy hero who wins a baseball game in a derivative fantasy world." Horn Book's Peter D. Sieruta also mentioned the "diffuse, somewhat baroque plot," but also went on to observe that "much of the prose is beautifully descriptive as Chabon navigates vividly imagined other worlds and offers up some timeless themes."

James Sullivan, reviewing the novel in Book, likewise wrote, "Certainly young readers will delight in the author's masterful use of imagery, whatever they make of the story." A critic for Kirkus Reviews had less guarded praise for the book, however, declaring that "this raucous, exhilarating, joyful, and above all, fun offering displays an enormous respect for the tradition of great fantasies that come before it."

The versatile Chabon might have a sequel to Summerland up his creative sleeve, and most definitely intends to expand his award-winning writing into new directions. As Richard Lacayo noted in Time magazine, Chabon wants "literary fiction to enjoy the liberties of fantasy genres like science fiction and horror." Chabon told Lacayo, "I'm not going to become a fantasy writer or a writer of science fiction. But I'm going to ignore the conventions of literary fiction as much as I can. And whatever kind of fiction comes out of that, I'm just going to hope I can bring readers along with me."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 55, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 278: American Novelists since World War II, Seventh Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2003, pp. 81-90.

Newsmakers, Issue 1, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, December 19, 2000, p. 62.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 2, 1995, p. M12.

Book, November, 2000, James Sullivan, review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, p. 66; September-October, 2002, James Sullivan, review of Summerland, p. 73; November-December, 2002, "Best Children's Book," p. 58.

Booklist, December 15, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Werewolves in Their Youth, p. 726; August, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, p. 2074; August, 2002, Bill Ott, review of Summerland, p. 1884; February 1, 2003, Brian Wilson, review of Summerland (audiobook), p. 1006.

Boston Globe, May 14, 1995, Joseph P. Kahn, review of Wonder Boys, p. 50; May 22, 1995, p. 30.

Chicago Tribune, April 2, 1995, sec. 14, p. 5.

Commentary, June, 2001, John Podhoretz, review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, p. 68; June, 2003, Sam Munson, "Slices of Life," review of McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, p. 67.

Entertainment Weekly, April 14, 1995, p. 61; September 29, 2000, Troy Patterson, "Comic Genius," p. 123; October 4, 2002, Troy Patterson, "The Natural," p. 146; April 11, 2003, Carina Chocano, "Monster's Ball: Michael Chabon Guest-Edits Dave Eggers' McSweeney's, Producing a Mixed-Bag of Genre Tales," review of McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, p. 80.

Gentlemen's Quarterly, March, 1995, p. 118.

Horn Book, November-December, 2002, Peter D. Sieruta, review of Summerland, p. 751.

Insight on the News, February 12, 2001, Rex Roberts, review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, p. 26.

Interview, March, 1988, p. 48.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1998, review of Werewolves in Their Youth; September 1, 2002, review of Summerland, p. 1305.

Library Journal, January, 1999, Joanna M. Burkhardt, review of Werewolves in Their Youth, p. 161; October 15, 2000, p. 100; September 1, 2002, "Ten Books for Fall," pp. 48-52.

Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1988; April 27, 1995, Erik Himmelsbach, "A Life of Wonder and Awe," p. E1; April 17, 2001, p. A16.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 17, 1988, Brett Lott, review of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, pp. 1, 11; March 26, 1995, p. 3.

New Republic, June 26, 1995, p. 40.

New Statesman, May 13, 1988, M. George Stevenson, review of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, pp. 34-35.

New Statesman and Society, June 9, 1995, Roz Kaveney, review of Wonder Boys, p. 38.

Newsweek, April 10, 1995, pp. 76-77; September 25, 2000, Susannah Meadows, "Golems and Superhe-roes," p. 69.

New York, April 3, 1988, p. 7; May 2, 1988, p. 30; April 1, 1991, p. 63.

New York Times, March 17, 1995, p. C28; September 21, 2000, p. B10.

New York Times Book Review, April 3, 1988, Alice McDermott, review of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, p. 7; May 26, 1991, Elizabeth Benedict, review of A Model World, and Other Stories, p. 7; April 9, 1995, Robert Ward, review of Wonder Boys, p. 7; January 31, 1999, p. 10; September 24, 2000, pp. 8, 9; November 17, 2002, Robert Lipsyte, review of Summerland, p. 24.

People Weekly, May 1, 1995, p. 32; June 26, 1995, pp. 63-64; October 14, 2002, Francine Prose, review of Summerland, p. 53; December 16, 2002, Galina Espinoza, "Author, Author: She Writes. He Writes. And Both Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon Raise the Kids," p. 151.

Publishers Weekly, April 10, 1995, Lisa See, "Michael Chabon: Wonder Boy in Transition," pp. 44-45; November 6, 1995, p. 58; November 23, 1998, review of Werewolves in Their Youth, p. 57; August 21, 2000, review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, pp. 44, 45; October 9, 2000, p. 22; June 24, 2002, review of Summerland, p. 57; February 24, 2003, review of McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, p. 51.

School Library Journal, Kimberly L. Paone, review of Summerland, p. 159.

Time, May 16, 1988, p. 95; April 8, 1991, p. 77; April 10, 1995, John Skow, review of Wonder Boys, p. 87; September 25, 2000, R.Z. Sheppard, "Biff! Boom! A Super Novel about the Golden Age of Comics," p. 103; September 23, 2002, Richard Lacayo, "Kids Are Us!," p. 68.

Times Literary Supplement, June 17, 1988, p. 680.

U.S. News and World Report, September 25, 2000, Holly J. Morris, "Smells Like Teen Comics," p. 74.

Village Voice, April 19, 1988, p. 60.

Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2000, p. W13.

Washington Post, June 9, 1995, p. B1.

Washington Post Book World, April 24, 1988, p. 5; April 26, 1991, p. 20; March 19, 1995, p. 3; September 17, 2000, p. X15.

World and I, February, 2001, Tom Deignan, "Playing with Kiddie Dynamite," p. 220.

Writer, August, 2001, p. 15; April, 2002, Kelly Nickell, "The WD Interview: Michael Chabon," pp. 20-21.