Michael Chabon, the author of novels including the exuberant, Pulitzer prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, an alternative-universe story that recently won the Nebula Award, has long harboured a passion: to make the literary world safe for genre fiction and to expand the notion of what a serious work of fiction can be.
“Entertainment has a bad name,” begins Trickster in a Suit of Lights, the opening essay of his new collection, Maps and Legends.
“Serious people learn to mistrust and even revile it. The word wears Spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights.”
Chabon, 45, spoke about his crusade to save comics, science fiction, fantasy, horror and detective fiction from looming condescension.
Let us start with some of the pulp or genre writers who have spoken to you over the years and perhaps inspired your own books.
There are so many. Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Ross Thomas, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kirby, Steve Gerber, Alan Moore.
And there is a whole list of borderland writers — John Crowley, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen Millhauser, Thomas Pynchon — writers who can dwell between worlds.
Where did this bias against work created for a popular audience come from?
In all fairness, it came from the fact that the vast preponderance of art created for a mass audience is [nonsense].
But the vast preponderance of work written as literary art is high-toned [nonsense]. The proportion may settle down in the neighbourhood of 90/10 — Sturgeon’s Law said that 90 per cent of everything is crud.
Let us talk about this in a specific instance — Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” and the reception it got.
I thought it was an excellent novel.
The least interesting thing to me as a reader was that it was science fiction. It presented a very pure example of post-apocalyptic literature, pared down to the essentials of a post-apocalyptic vision.
But it is nothing that anybody reading science fiction over the last 60 or 70 years hasn’t seen done many, many times before — maybe not by writers of McCarthy’s calibre.
In terms of the vision it was presenting, it was notable only for the intense, McCarthy severity.
In fact, I responded to it much more as a work of horror fiction. But the response you saw out there generally was the sort of oh-my-God isn’t this incredible, Cormac McCarthy has written a science fiction novel!
Sometimes a little bit of a panic sets in, where critics aren’t sure what to do or say about it.
And when this happens, when a writer of unassailable literary reputation, such as McCarthy, does produce a work of genre fiction, under his own name, unlike say John Banville, the critical machine prints out and issues a pass to a writer: “This isn’t science fiction, because it was written by Cormac McCarthy.”
Or, “We think all science fiction is bad, unless it’s written by a Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy.”
The conventional argument is that the literary writer’s work is well imagined, well written, and the genre author can’t write.
Every so often a writer hacks and crawls out of the brambles of genre. Somebody such as Philip K. Dick clearly began in the pulps, writing mass commercial fiction.
Dick made that transition in a big way. He had intelligence, vision and so on — without ever becoming a good writer.
He wrote much too quickly, there’s no doubt about that. The pressure to write quickly is not good for any writer, no matter how gifted and intelligent, and it wasn’t good for him.
I wonder if Philip Pullman’s tendency to fall between categories with the “His Dark Materials” books — they’re kind of kids’ books, kind of for adults, kind of fantasy, kind of literary — made it hard for the movie of “The Golden Compass” to find an audience.
Maybe, but maybe it’s that the movie wasn’t that great. To me that’s what makes a writer interesting: When a writer is sort of like a ball bearing caught between the magnetic fields, all positioned just right so the ball bearing floats in the air, wobbling because it’s in this highly excited position, barely holding its place. You see that in Pullman at his best.
It seems like behind your essays is this larger argument about childhood, which you seem to think our culture has misunderstood in some ways.
Childhood is a subject I talk about a lot. I haven’t thought it through to know how much it has to do with what I’m saying about fiction and the short story.
But there is unquestionably a connection for me between the maps I encountered as a young reader — the endpaper maps — and the maps I created for myself, both literally drew myself, of imaginary lands I was trying to bring into existence, and the internal maps I was creating of the world that I lived in, the world that I played in — the neighbourhood. ... Where the mean dogs were, where the mean dads were, where the bad kids hung out.
All of that was intimately connected in my mind with what I was reading.
In some ways the traditional highbrow argument can seem rather silly: “If we don’t privilege and protect certain kind of work, it’ll all be `American Idol’ all the time.”
Unquestionably — it’s not just futile, it’s ultimately destructive to try to fence things in that way. Robert Frost said: “Something there is that does not love a wall.”
