Michael Chabon Is An Underdog On Top Of The World

When the author Michael Chabon was 11 years old, two events occurred that would have outsized influence on his life and work: His parents separated, and only one person showed up to the first and only meeting of the Columbia Comic Book Club. Chabon, who by then was living with his mother in Columbia, Maryland, had taken out an ad in the local paper inviting people to a multipurpose room at a local mall, where he intended to charge attendees $1 for membership. At the mall, his mother left him to run errands, while Chabon waited for others to arrive. Finally, one young boy around his age showed up with his mother — and promptly left, telling Chabon that the dollar was too steep an admission fee.

Today, Chabon is 53 and one of the most venerated and successful living writers in America, a brilliant storyteller with a litany of nerdy interests (comics, rockets, science fiction) that he weaves into his books in a manner that seems effortless. He wrote his first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, while in the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine; his professor, the late author MacDonald Harris, sent it to his agent, who promptly sold it, and it became a bestseller. Chabon was 24. His second novel, Wonder Boys, was made into a critically acclaimed (if commercially underperforming) 2000 film by Curtis Hanson. In 2001, at the age of 37, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a book about superheroes and comics that is credited with bringing a literary sensibility to genre fiction. He has written comics, children’s books, essays, musicals, song lyrics, and a viral GQ essay about taking his 13-year-old son to Paris Men’s Fashion Week; he is the chairman of the board of the MacDowell Colony, an artists' colony in New Hampshire. His new novel, Moonglow — a fictional memoir about Chabon's family — has already been nominated for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence, and was called "elegiac and deeply poignant" in Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review. He has four children and a happy marriage and a beautiful Craftsman home in Berkeley, California, and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. You kind of want to hate him.

He is a true, unrepentant nerd, who has only ever been looking for his people.

But it is hard to hate him. On a sunny morning in October, Chabon and his wife, novelist and memoirist Ayelet Waldman, pulled up to the Brown Sugar Kitchen, a popular soul food restaurant in West Oakland known for its cornmeal waffles, in a tiny sky-blue Fiat. That was the first clue that he might be achingly unhateable, because driving a Fiat when you are a world-famous author proclaims, I am not one of those guys who is obsessed with a fast, status-y car. That is a thing that a macho guy with something to prove would be into, not Michael Chabon. Instead, Michael Chabon is a guy who hasn’t gotten over the Comic Book Club meeting — he is a true, unrepentant nerd, who has only ever been looking for his people. Of that ill-fated club meeting, Chabon has written, “In my heart, to this day, I am always sitting at a big table in a roomful of chairs, behind a pile of errors, lies, and exclamation points, watching an empty doorway. My story and my stories are all, in one way or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat.”

Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon at an event at Strand Books in New York in April 2014

Strand Books

Waldman — who is tiny, with curly auburn hair piled on top of her head, and glowing skin — introduced herself and said she’d be sitting at the nearby counter doing work. Chabon — taller, and wearing a blue-and-white flowered shirt, dark jeans, black leather boots, and black-frame glasses — has a friendly, down-to-earth charm. After we were led to our table, he gave the owner, Tanya Holland, who he has been friends with for years, a hug. (Chabon wrote the introduction to the restaurant’s cookbook, which was published in 2014.) A resident of neighboring Berkeley, Chabon is a longtime Oakland booster — his 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue takes place mostly in the city — and as we waited to place our order, Chabon gave me a brief history of the neighborhood. “This is still so…” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely around his head.

“Industrial?” I suggested. The restaurant is on a busy main street lined with junkyards and auto body shops, though I'd spotted a couple of telltale signs of gentrification on my way over — a coffee shop, twentysomethings on fancy bicycles.

“Mmhmm,” he said. West Oakland was bifurcated by the construction of the nearby freeway, and in the grand, sad urban tradition of neighborhoods being decimated by highway construction, it never really recovered. “It ripped out the neighborhood part of it and left this part,” Chabon said. “So now if you live here, you have to drive so far to get groceries and all that kind of stuff.”

It's not surprising that Chabon would feel a strong connection to Oakland — he's a champion of the underdog, of the misunderstood, of the neurotic. And Oakland is an underdog city, a place that hasn't quite gotten its fair shake. Perhaps that is part of the reason why, in a moment when the white novelist seems no longer quite so ascendant, he has avoided the smugness of Jonathan Franzen or the clueless bluster of Lionel Shriver in a sombrero. That said, his sole effort at a truly multicultural Great American Novel, 2012's Telegraph Avenue — a sprawling story about a black record store owner in Oakland and his wife, a very pregnant midwife — did not resonate with readers in the same way his previous work has. In Slate, Troy Patterson wrote that "Chabon has often been a softie; here, his chin-up optimism about the human race proves mostly ingratiating and totally unsupportable in light of what we know about real-life humans. His heart bleeds where you might want him to get some bile up; the man is too nice to attempt anything on the order of social satire."

He's a champion of the underdog, of the misunderstood, of the neurotic.

Moonglow, Chabon’s 13th book (in addition to novels, his works include a comics anthology, a serialized novel, a book of short stories, and an essay collection), is an epic family saga framed as the life story of Chabon's grandfather, as told to him via a series of deathbed conversations in the last week of his life. It is also Chabon’s first novel in nearly 20 years to be written in the first person. (He wrote a draft of 2007’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in the first person, but abandoned it.) And in the same way that he’s played with genre in his previous work — The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was inspired in part by his love of hardboiled detective novels — Chabon sees Moonglow as a way to challenge received wisdom about memoir. The idea for the book was sparked by the discovery, in an old issue of Esquire magazine, of an ad for a missile made by the Chabon Scientific Company, whose headquarters were at 60 E. 42nd Street in New York. Chabon tried to learn more about this company, which did not seem to actually be connected to anyone in his family, but came up short, save for finding a defunct phone number for it in an old Yellow Pages.

In Moonglow’s author’s note, he writes, “In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.”

It’s probably safe to say that many people who read that author’s note will assume that Chabon’s story is more or less true. But it is not, at least by a standard definition of “facts” — but Chabon argues that by being almost completely fiction, the book manages to get at essential truths about himself that memoir would not have been able to access.

“Most memoirs are scrupulous and careful and really are trying to just remember what they did and said and heard and felt. They're confined and they're limited in a way and nothing like what I'm talking about, I don't think, can ever emerge,” he said. He put one of his poached eggs over the cornmeal waffle, and took a bite. “When you're creating something totally fictional, avowedly fictional, you end up creating something that has a life of its own in a way that you never could have anticipated or planned for.”

“When you're creating something totally fictional, avowedly fictional, you end up creating something that has a life of its own in a way that you never could have anticipated or planned for.”

In some ways, then, Moonglow is a return to Chabon’s roots as a writer; his first two novels, the coming-of-age Mysteries of Pittsburgh and his second novel, Wonder Boys, are both semi-autobiographical and told in the first person. After Wonder Boys was published in 1995, a review by longtime Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley would change the course of Chabon’s career. The review, which was effusive in its praise for Chabon, nonetheless concluded with a warning: “Though Chabon has demonstrated a keen understanding of other people's minds and lives, thus far his preoccupation has been with fictional explorations of his own. It is time for him to move on, to break away from the first person and explore larger worlds. His apprenticeship is done; it has been brilliant, but the books as yet unwritten are the ones in which we will learn just how far this singular writer can go.”

Chabon has said that this review pushed him to think bigger, to challenge himself — and write in the third person. Previously, he felt that genre writing was too limiting. In a 2005 New York Review of Books essay, “On The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” Chabon wrote of struggling to reconcile wanting to write science fiction with wanting to write something “with reach”: “Welty and Faulkner started and ended in small towns in Mississippi but somehow managed to plant flags at the end of time and in the minds of readers around the world. A good science fiction novel appeared to have an infinite reach — it could take you to the place where the universe bent back on itself — but somehow, in the end, it ended up being the shared passion of just you and that guy at the Record Graveyard on Forbes Avenue who was really into Hawkwind.”

But after Yardley took him to task for limiting his scope, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was born, in part, out of this desire to show that he could write a book that felt like he could combine his love of comics and fantasy with his literary sensibilities. “He really scorched the earth for a long time,” Chabon said of Yardley. By writing Moonglow as a novel in the style of a memoir, he said, “I’m kind of flipping the bird to that, again. You want autobiographical, I’ll give you autobiographical! This is first person.”

The grandfather in Moonglow — who is only ever referred to as “my grandfather” — is the protagonist of the book, even though it’s told in first person through the eyes of his grandson, Mike, who is putatively Chabon. Although, of course, not.

“In a weird way, it's a memoir of not my life, but my imaginative life, like a history of my imagination and also my experience of marriage and family, having children, even though the marriage in the book's not like my marriage, and the parent–child relationship, that's a stepdaughter and a stepfather,” he said. “Yet, still, I felt so much. I was reading it to submit it for the last time, and Ayelet was reading the last time, too, and we just started talking about, like, it's weird how it feels like that grandfather's really me in a lot of ways.”

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After we left the restaurant, Chabon and Waldman drove home together in their Fiat, and I followed. When I got to their rambling Craftsman, Chabon was outside with their five-month-old black Labradoodle, Agnes. He suggested we go for a walk.

Every few yards, Chabon would find a stick, put it in Agnes’s mouth, and watch as she blithely let each one clatter to the ground. “Can you please just hold on to that? You're supposedly part retriever,” he said. “What's your problem?” Agnes wagged her tail.

Soon, we approached a small, wooded island with a poop bag dispenser attached to a tree. Chabon seemed hopeful that here, amongst the leaves and the branches and the dogginess of the area, Agnes would finally fulfill her destiny. Briefly, she seemed interested in a piece of wood on the ground, and Chabon was heartened.

We stood in the clearing for a few moments. “I'm wondering if I can take this leash off here or if you're going to be a bad girl and run away.” Finally, he sighed. “I don't want you to get hit by a car like your predecessor.” In the end, he did not remove the leash, and we made our way back to the house.

In the kitchen, Waldman was walking around with a kind of neck brace with ice packs in it. "I was getting frustrated with Gmail, so I put this on," she said. "This is a cognitive behavioral technique where you bring down your body temperature when you feel like you're going to throw your computer across the room."

"Did it work?" Chabon asked.

"Yeah, it actually did," Waldman said.

In Moonglow, when the grandfather first meets his future wife — a refugee from Europe whose entire immediate family, except for her 5-year-old illegitimate daughter, was killed by the Nazis — he is captivated, and puzzled. Their initial encounter takes place at a casino night at their synagogue. When they meet, she zips up his fly, in an act that is tantalizingly taboo. When he sees her a week and a half later, at a dinner at the home of a prominent member of the synagogue, that version of the grandmother — flirtatious, reckless — is nowhere to be found:

“My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of her self? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the ‘truth.’ Maybe ‘self’ was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe every time you met her, she would be somebody else.”

It turns out that the grandmother (as she is referred to throughout the book) is a deeply troubled woman who is institutionalized for part of the narrator’s mother’s childhood; his mother is sent to live with an uncle. The grandmother’s mental illness seems to stem in part from losing her entire family in the Holocaust, but the rest of the family struggles to survive in the face of her incapacitation. The obvious parallel — particularly if Chabon sees himself not, in fact, as the narrator of the book, but as the grandfather — is to Waldman, who has written publicly about her struggles with bipolar disorder.

“She’s a lot crazier than I am, let’s be clear,” Waldman said. “I am not that crazy, but I am mentally ill. I have a mood disorder. Being married to me is hard. Being married to a woman with mental illness is really challenging, and it’s been a challenge for Michael for the past 23 years.”

Chabon’s longtime friend, Lemony Snicket author and fellow San Francisco writer Daniel Handler, said that "he’s kind of trafficking into deeper emotional territory" in Moonglow. "It’s very vulnerable.”

Typically, no one in the family asks permission to write about another member of the family.

According to Waldman, the grandmother’s character evolved as Chabon revised the book. In the first draft, “he just kind of glanced on it. Then he did this incredible rewrite where he was just like, ‘Who is this woman, and why am I writing about her?’" When Waldman read the next draft, it all clicked. Chabon asked her if it was okay for him to be writing a character loosely based on her. Typically, no one in the family asks permission to write about another member of the family. “We don’t ask that question. Our attitude always is, ‘You get what you get.’ That’s what it means to be the child, spouse, parent of a writer. But he asked me, which he’s never done before, and I think if I had said to him, ‘I can’t be exposed like that’ then he could have changed it, but of course I didn’t.”

“I think it’s definitely part of what drove him to write this book,” Waldman said. “Or at least what made it terrifying and juicy and important is that he needed a place to express what it’s been like for him all these years to be married to someone like me.”

Chabon seemed uncomfortable with this characterization. "I don't think anything really drove me to write the book," he said. "I mean, unconsciously — I mean possibly. But that's the thing about unconscious impulses. They're kind of mysterious." Still, he admitted that he used own marriage for inspiration. "When I was trying to depict the marriage between these two people, and in particular how the grandfather contended with it and felt about it, I unquestionably drew on my own experience. Whether that was why I wanted to do it or whether that drove me to do it, I couldn't really say."

Chabon's home office

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