From research

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

By Phyllis Turtle

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Michael Chabon will be the next celebrated author to walk “from page to podium” as part of the Teton County Library’s distinguished writers program of the same name.

Chabon’s best-selling novels include The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He entered the young adult market with the well-received Summerland, and delivered a literary one-two punch this year with publication of the The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and his latest book, Gentlemen of the Road, originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine. The New York Times just named The Yiddish Policemen’s Union one of its 100 Notable Books of 2007.

Chabon will speak at 7 p.m. on Thursday in the Cottonwood Ballroom at the Four Seasons Resort in Teton Village. The library started handing out free tickets for the event on Nov. 1 and has long since run out, so keep an eye and ear out for extras floating around town.

Planet Jackson Hole spoke with Chabon earlier this month in a joint interview with the Jackson Hole News & Guide (pick up this week’s N&G for Katy Niner’s take on the discussion). From Pittsburgh to Prague, Sitka to Khazaria, Chabon’s novels and short stories display an extraordinary dexterity with language – English and otherwise – to tell unfailingly inventive and richly detailed stories. Often referred to as a “Jewish writer,” Chabon populates his fiction with Jewish characters and Jewish life but doesn’t feel that his writing falls under just one label.

“Labels often come on after the fact,” he said, “and they often take me by surprise, in a way, because I wasn’t thinking about what labels will be put on. I’m caught up in the story, in the world. I write the things I want to write . … I follow the path that my writing and my reading seems to set for me.”
Still, Jewish writer is the label most often applied.

“It’s obvious why,” he said. “I’m a writer and I write about Jews, so it’s the label I would most welcome . …  It doesn’t really define my approach to my writing anymore than saying, ‘I’m a Jew, so when I go into the kitchen to cook something, I’m gonna think, “Can I actually make gnocchi? I’m a Jew, is that something that a Jewish cook would make?”’ You think what you want to eat and you ask yourself what you and the people around you feel like eating and that’s what you do, you don’t stop to think if you have the proper credentials.”

The stories in Chabon’s novels often move along with a seeming avalanche of research.
“When I contemplate working on a novel … one of the things I’m thinking about is how much fun it’s going to be … to do research into whatever subject seems like it might come up in the course of writing a particular book. I love reading, spending time in libraries, poking around on the web . … That’s all great and a really important part of the process of writing a book that I look forward to.”

But research and history are only the groundwork for his novels. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, for example, gives us a history lesson about the comic book industry as it details the rise of two young Jewish men who create a comic book empire. Chabon is quick to note that he doesn’t always let the truth stand in the way of his storytelling.

“Ultimately, writing the novel is about making stuff up,” he said. “It’s always important to remember that your job as a novelist is to make it up – telling lies, basically.”
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a detective novel based on the premise that the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland failed. Instead, Jews immigrated to Sitka, Alaska, following World War II and created a society where Yiddish is the native language. Accordingly, Yiddish is used liberally in the novel. The “frozen chosen” in Sitka allow Chabon to introduce or re-introduce this beloved and seemingly fading language to readers.

Gentlemen of the Road, which takes place more than a thousand years ago in Khazaria, a Jewish kingdom between the Caspian and the Black seas, uses more exotic vocabulary. A self-avowed lover of words, Chabon sees no downside for the reader who is confronted with this linguistic challenge.

“It’s like reading any novel that is [set in] a place where they speak a different language,” he said. “If you read some of the great Anglo-Indian novels – there are writers today setting their novels in Mumbai or Delhi and places like that – they’re written in English, but you’ll come across lots of words in Hindu or Urdu and names of food that you won’t recognize and garments that you’re not quite sure what they are …  and that’s part of the experience of being in another place and another culture. It’s pretty routine for the average reader …

“In fact,” he continued, “it seemed the people that we’re most concerned about the Jewishness or the Yiddishness [of the language in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union] were Jews who worried that ‘who else but me is going to understand this?’”
Some controversy erupted after that book’s publication when the New York Post labeled him as anti-Semitic. Chabon dismisses the charge as gossip and claims he didn’t hear much more on the subject.

“There were one or two bad reviews from reviewers who were complaining about it being somehow, I don’t know, anti-Israel. Glorifying Jewish powerlessness or something like that.”
But Chabon doesn’t worry about reviews.

“They all contradict each other so much it’s kind of a big wash,” he said. “One review says that the beginning is slow but speeds up, the other review says the end slows down. One says it’s anti-Israel, one says it’s pro-Israel – in the end, you end up with the book itself and they all cancel each other out.”

Besides writing novels, Chabon is an essayist, a screenwriter (credits include Spiderman 2), a short story writer and a columnist. He was most animated when discussing his enthusiasm for his work.

“It’s the most fun I can have,” he said. “Most of the time, it feels good. When it’s not going well, not so much. Fortunately, every so often, it goes really well.”

Photo by Stephanie Rausser
Michael Chabon

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