Tikkun Magazine, July/August 2009

MAPS AND LEGENDS
by Michael Chabon
McSweeney's Books, 2008
Harper Perennial (paperback), 2009

Review by Michael Lukas

In the spring of 2005, Michael Chabon sparked a minor literary scandal -- a brushfire compared with the Oprah-fueled James Frey inferno that would follow, but a scandal nevertheless -- with a lecture he delivered a few times in Seattle and Washington, D.C. The lecture, entitled "Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Eldest Son's Name is Napoleon," was reprinted recently in Maps and Legends, a collection of Chabon's nonfiction put out by McSweeney's. It is an oblique and ruminative piece, touching variously upon lying, marriage, and golems, those legendary clay automatons made famous by Prague Rabbi Judah Loew, who in the sixteenth century was said to have created one to protect the Jewish ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks. Much of the lecture focuses on Chabon's childhood relationship with an elderly neighbor, a kind old man who turns out to be a former Nazi. It's an amazing story. But, as it turns out, most of it is fiction.

In essence the scandal was a question of genre and interpretation. Those who were upset by the piece read it as nonfiction, while Chabon's defenders framed the lecture as a meditation on the nature of storytelling. Although Chabon himself refrained from commenting at the time, his postscript in Maps and Legends mounts a spirited defense of his genre-bending tricksterism. "The possibility that somebody would believe or even half believe the semi-preposterous tale never occurred to me," it says. The point was to give the audience "some of the excitement that comes from handling the raw materials of golem-craft, of bringing inanimate facts of clay, through imagination and invention, to a fabulous kind of life."

As a fiction writer, handling the raw materials of golem-craft is Michael Chabon's job. And there are few more imaginative or inventive. He writes plot like a whip, blending an almost tactile realism with a touch of the fantastic. And his prose ranks up there with that of the best living American writers. To read any of his major novels -- The Mysteries of Pittsburg, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, or The Yiddish Policemen's Union -- is to be at once transported and transformed. Upon emerging from the page, we pinch the backs of our hands and blink, believing, or at least wanting to believe, that the worlds he created are real.

Of course, the raw materials of nonfiction are of a less malleable nature than the slippery river clay from which fiction is formed. And so, although the artist is the same, the end product looks somewhat different. Located near the intersection of Nabokov and Benjamin, Chabon's nonfiction addresses a startlingly wide range of topics with curiosity and wisdom. His essays are a joy to read. And more importantly, at least to those Chabon admirers in the audience, they give us a peek under the hood at the whirring machinery that makes this author tick.

The opening essay in Maps and Legends is a passionate and lucid defense of literature as entertainment. Built on the chassis of Chabon's much chattered-about introduction to Issue 10 of McSweeney's Quarterly, the essay proposes an aesthetic theory that encompasses "everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature." This idea of literature as entertainment, as a vehicle of pleasure judged only on its ability to stir the reader's soul, is the steel cord running through the foundation of the book, underpinning Chabon's literary criticism as well as his more personal essays.

As a critic, Chabon cuts right to the heart of the matter, dissecting plot and theme like John Madden tracing the shuffle step of a fullback in motion across the screen. He sees fiction with the dispassionate yet sympathetic eye of a fellow traveler, boiling entire oeuvres down to a single idea and plucking out details others may not catch. Comparing Cormac McCarthy to Jack London, Chabon argues convincingly that The Road should be read as an adventure novel. And in a piece on Sherlock Holmes, he contends that Conan Doyle invented the detective story by re-engineering the relationship between fabula (story) and syuzhet (plot). But he puts it much better than that: "Like the builder of Skidbladnir, the sailing ship of the Norse gods that could be folded up to fit into your pocket, or an engineer packing an extra million transistors onto a 3 mm chip, Conan Doyle found a way to fold several stories, and the proper means of telling them, over and over into a tightly compacted frame."

While the essays in the first half of Maps and Legends depict Chabon the reader, the second half of the book allows us a sustained look at Chabon the writer. Describing the 64KB Osborne 1a computer and plywood workbench on which he wrote his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburg, he nails the emotional state of the artist as a young man, the brash and insecure ambition of a twenty-two-year-old on the verge of greatness. In "Diving in the Wreck," he depicts in excruciating detail the five years he spent writing his unpublished second novel Fountain City, a process he compares to the voyage of Lewis and Clark.

Whatever his subject, Chabon advances with care, compassion, and hunger for a truth that goes beyond fiction and nonfiction. His approach to writing, in any genre, is perhaps best articulated in his own words, from the essay "Recipe for Life":

The adept handles the rich material, the rank river clay, and diligently intones his alphabetical spells, knowing full well the history of golems: how they break free of their creators, grow to unmanageable size and power, refuse to be controlled. In the same way, the writer shapes his story, flecked like river clay with the grit of experience and rank with the smell of human life, heedless of the danger to himself, eager to show his powers, to celebrate his mastery, to bring into being a little world that, like God's, is at once terribly imperfect and filled with astonishing life.

And we, like the golem, feel a stirring in cold clay hearts.

Michael Lukas's writing has appeared in VQR, Slate, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is currently finishing a novel about a young girl who becomes an adviser to the Ottoman Sultan and changes the course of history.