Michael Chabon Interview
In 2008, Michael Chabon was awarded the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus magazine and the Sidewise Awards for Best Novel, for his book The Yiddish Policemans Union
Can you talk about the challenges of creating worlds that might, if not fully realized and artfully rendered, perhaps sound ridiculous or offensive?
I guess I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about whether the worlds I try to create might offend or invite ridicule. Not, at least, while I’m actually engaged in creating them. The “world-building” is not an orderly and logical process where I, say, begin with research, then extrapolate and propose general principles from the research, then apply those principles, then test the results against my research and my proposals, or against my anxieties about being offensive or ridiculous. For YPU I did a fair amount of research, and prepared all kinds of charts, diagrams, chronologies and maps. But most of that was done, like the writing itself, on an ad hoc basis, as the need arose at the site of writing. Mostly it’s a process of sitting down and just imagining, seeing, hearing, smelling, etc., my characters and the world they’re moving through; and then kind of allowing the result of that act of imagining to flow into the shapely vessels known as “sentences” that mysteriously appear, preconfigured and shaped by some unknown potter, right when I need them. Often if I get something wrong, a balloon of dread inflates in my belly, to let me know I’ve gone astray.
I hate to have it sound so nebulous and intuitive. Of course I do a lot of thinking and reflection, revision and correction, and I often break my brain. And when I’m not writing, I devote more than adequate time to worrying about the reception that might greet the work. But ultimately the writing itself, while hardly “automatic,” exceeds the power of anxiety and doubt to hold it back.
You said in another interview your were moved by the spirit of Ahf zu lochis (Yiddish for an impulse to make others angry.) Is The Yiddish Policemans Union
Go to hell!
Just kidding.
Uh, no, I don’t actually think I’m really all that filled with anger. But I can imagine being filled with anger, and if there’s a little gap implied by that act of imagination, maybe humor is what fills it.
What issues do you consciously explore in your work, and is everything fair game?
In all honesty I am not conscious of exploring any issues when I’m writing, only of exploring the world of my story and the language I have for telling it.
What would not be fair game? Stuff that embarrasses others or myself? Family secrets? Pathologies, neuroses, dirty linen, shame, weakness, unspeakable crimes, antisocial feelings? Losing all that doesn’t leave you a whole lot to work with.
One surprise of the novel is the way the shadow of the Holocaust remains in the background instead of the forefront the characters’ lives. How do you find hope in the stories of Jewish history and do you worry about honoring the past through your invention of alternate history?
I don’t actually find hope in the stories of Jewish history, particularly. Only comfort. I take a lot of comfort in human history, generally, because reading it reminds me of how lousy things have always been.
Your writing frequently explores the gulf between father and son as well as man and woman. What do you hope the reader understands about the world through these relationships?
I guess the whole business of reading and writing boils down, for me, to this gulf that separates each of us and the irrepressible desire we all have to bridge it. To this extent (and it’s a great extent) all literature is speculative fiction, because it obliges both the reader and the writer to pose the question, What if? What if I were someone else, living someone else’s life? Or: what if my own life, or that of another, were explicable, narratable, a story? What if I could bridge the gulf by telling a story? What kind of story would I tell? What if reading this novel could help me, for an hour or two, to slip the confines of this prison cell called myself?
Would you talk about the reactions you’ve gotten from Survivors? From religious believers, Jew and Christian? From Science Fiction fans? From Native Americans? From Alaskans?
No, not really. It would either sound like whining or like boasting.
Who were some of the greatest influences on your work, and would that list of writers differ from the authors of your favorite books?
Conan Doyle, Poe, Le Guin, Susan Cooper, Bradbury, Crichton, L. Niven, Moorcock, Leiber, Chandler, Henry Miller, Perelman, Nabokov, Cheever, Fitzgerald, P. Roth, Proust, Hawthorne, Ballard, Calvino, Borges, Welty, Melville, Garcia-Marquez…
What’s your favorite piece of writing and is it different than what you think of as your strongest?
My favorite among my books, largely for sentimental reasons, is Wonder Boys
Why is it important for genre writing to be accepted into the canon of literature? Do genre readers accord appropriate respect to the literary canon?
So-called genre writing is, in fact, the foundation of the canon. Most of the great works of Western literature up to about 1875 or so can be read profitably as works of genre fiction (adventure, mystery, romance, supernatural, horror, sf, fantasy). If we label the kind of fiction that arose toward the end of the nineteenth century, with its overwhelming emphasis on “realism” (and I think Modernism in literature is only a form of realism), a genre, and why shouldn’t we, it’s as rife with conventions and marketplace strategies as any other, then we don’t have to worry so much about this question.
I think “genre readers” (your term) are in the aggregate probably no more or less guilty of maintaining poor reading habits than any other group of representative humans.
What are you working on now and what can we expect to see soon?
A novel. And what, three books in a year isn’t good enough for you?
MICHAEL CHABON is the bestselling author The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
LESLIE WHAT’s new collection, Crazy Love
1. Stephanie Juarez on 07th September 2008 at 9:24 pm
What perceptive questions and fascinating interview.