Costumed, comic-book adventure heroes in New York, a drunken rogue cop in a Jewish homeland in Alaska, inebriated Vikings and rampaging elephants in a Byzantine-era kingdom. Michael Chabon’s fictional landscapes are considerably more fictional and a lot wilder than those you will find in Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Philip Roth or any number of other celebrated novelists working in the American realist tradition. Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Chabon defies an easy categorization. He draws from and mixes popular and pulp sources, obscure corners of world history and his own Jewish roots in crafting his often comic and always engrossing literature.
His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was just 25. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that won him the Pulitzer. Other novels include Wonder Boys, the young adult novel Summerland, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and, most recently, Gentlemen of the Road, serialized in the New York Times. He has also authored two collections of short stories, A Model World and Other Stories and Werewolves in Their Youth.
Chabon will deliver a keynote address at the AAM Annual Meeting in Denver on April 30.
Museum Managing Editor Susan Breitkopf recently spoke with Chabon about his early experiences in museums, why you can’t go home again and where he’s going next.
Museum: It seems that your writing has a lot in common with what many museums do: there is an effort to interpret and analyze the past or even wildly recreate it. How have museums influenced you?
Michael Chabon: I don’t have any doubt that museums or my experience of museum-going—starting when I was a child—played a really powerful role in shaping my imagination and my sense of the past, certainly. And, you know, I grew up outside of Washington, D.C., and was a very frequent visitor to the Smithsonian and others, like the Ford’s Theatre museum. My entire sense of my history as an American was so overwhelmingly shaped by what I saw and heard in the museums in Washington. The whole city felt kind of like a combination of shrine and museum to a version of the American past. And when I was growing up in the late ’60s, early ’70s, there wasn’t a whole lot of revisionism going on then. It was more the old-fashioned physical history. It was very powerful narrative, and I think one that I feel very much engaged with in my work and my writing, especially when I was writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I think that is part of the relationship.
I also always respond to the image in both my imagination and my relatively more limited experience of the basements and storage areas of museums and the idea of a museum itself. It’s a sort of rummage sale or curiosity shop. There’s a kind of chaotic accumulation of symmetry that is buried beneath the museum or in its attic.
I had this very important experience in my life. At one time, when I was a kid, I was lost in the basement of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh with my brother. We were looking for a way out, and we kept going the wrong way; it’s become somewhat mythologized in my mind. But I remember looking into these rooms that we weren’t supposed to look into and seeing vast collections of what appeared to be discarded exhibits and/or things that were no longer being used. And I was feeling like I was at the bottom of the city of Pittsburgh looking at all of this stuff. It was really a powerful moment for me.
I don’t know exactly how this all ties together, but I guess it’s like there’s a metaphor for the imagination, a metaphor for the storytelling imagination in museums.
Museum people would be thrilled to hear that kind of interpretation. That’s what they’re shooting for. So do you do any research at museums now?
MC: When I was working on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I went to New York for a month and made a number of museum visits to the New-York Historical Society, the Tenement Museum, a lot of the museums on the history of New York City, as well as going back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art several times just because it was part of the whole world of New York that I was trying to immerse myself in.
Is your family originally from New York?
MC: Well, parts of them; parts of my family came through New York—originally they’re from Russia and Poland and Lithuania. And several branches ended up in New York before moving elsewhere, whereas others came through Philadelphia or other ports of entry.
It just seems that in Kavalier & Clay you built your characters and storylines on some sort of family experience.
MC: Absolutely. My dad grew up in Brooklyn in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, so my main portal to the path in New York City was through my dad and his stories, his memories of growing up there.
From what I read, the different types of popular cultures in your book, whether it’s Yiddish popular culture or other types, have made critics kind of crazy in terms in trying to fit your work into a genre. Where did those influences come from?
MC: Well, I think anybody who’s my age [44] or younger had no choice in the matter. We grew up in a world in which television was already very firmly established. I grew up in the ’60s when the whole pop art movement was working very hard to break down or erase the last of the remaining barriers between high art and low art.
I think it’s much more a reflection of the overall climate and culture of the time that I grew up in. And as I got older, I found myself living in a world in which mixing and matching, sampling, blending of genres was increasingly the norm in a lot of the art that I was being exposed to—whether in popular music or classical music or visual arts. It just seems inevitable and natural that that would emerge not only in my writing but in the writing of pretty much everyone who grew up in the same period or afterwards. It feels very natural. It feels very inevitable. It’s not a deliberate program or an agenda so much as just a natural approach.
What other kinds of things have influenced your work?
MC: I’m a huge movie fan. And my overall interest in the past and in history definitely forms part of my understanding of [current] movies and old movies. My favorite movies, once again, were the ones I watched with my dad—the experience of watching movies from his childhood, starting with a movie he remembered growing up with, silent films, to the movies he watched as a kid. That’s part of my standard diet.
What are your favorite museums? Which ones do you take your kids to?
MC: Well, whenever we’re in New York, we always have to go to the American Museum of Natural History. I guess the museum we’ve been to the most in the immediate past has been the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco because they’ve had a few shows there that we’ve all taken an interest in. They did this great show of Tezuka Osamu, the creator of a lot of Japanese comics, including Astro Boy. They did a fantastic show of lots of his original artwork and looked at his importance in Japanese popular culture. It was an exhibition that was well aimed at both kids and adults.
Given the experience you had going to museums growing up, are you trying to give your kids the same sort of thing?
MC: No knock on the museums that we have in San Francisco or the Bay Area, but growing up down the street from the Smithsonian, I took it for granted as a kid. I did not at all understand what an immense, almost in some ways overpowering kind of museum experience the Smithsonian was. I just sort of thought that was my neighborhood museum because we made so many trips both for school field trips and with my family. I can remember the incredible excitement I felt when the National Air and Space Museum opened. I was there opening week. At the time I was a huge space and science fiction aficionado, and I felt like that was my museum; it had been built for me and satisfied all my interests and desires. There’s not going to be any way to really replicate that.
When I was in high school, I started to get really interested in art and painting, especially modern paintings. And when the Hirshhorn opened, I can remember that very well, going there in its first weeks. And then the I. M. Pei galleries—that wing they added to the National Gallery—that was a really exciting moment for me because I was just at my peak of interest in 20th-century art and architecture. There was this sense as I was growing up that no matter what I was interested in, no matter at what level I wanted to approach art and culture through a museum, there was one there waiting for me already. And it wasn’t just any museum. It was a really great museum. I don’t quite feel like I can offer my kids the same.
So when you’ve visited Washington more recently, have you felt the same kind of magic that you did when you were a kid?
MC: The couple of times we’ve gone to D.C. with some or all of our children, we have taken them to various museums. And you have those powerful moments of reconnecting. There are certain bits and pieces that look the same or look as I remember them when walking into what was the Museum of Natural History or Air and Space Museum. Standing at that incredibly narrow, pointy corner of the East Wing of the National Gallery, where everyone goes and puts their hands on that jutting big old stone—I have these moments of reconnection. But when you’re experiencing something with your children, that only lasts a little while. And then pretty quickly your new experience that they’re going through with you supplants what you remember.
And you can’t go home again, I guess.
MC: Exactly. And they’ve all been changed so much. The last time I was in D.C. and I went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I had not been to before—it wasn’t there when I was growing up.
What was that experience like? How did that inform you?
MC: Well, it was pretty devastating. It’s beautiful, but it’s horrible. Though it was fantastically well designed. It was a powerful way to spend the hours. I didn’t gain any real additional knowledge or information. It was more of a gaining of experience. I think the thing that struck me most powerfully in there was that sense of how deeply rooted in time the Jewish communities of Europe were. You had towns where Jews had been living for a thousand years, and that really struck hard.
That brings me to the next question. What has been the reaction to the Jewish focus of your work? Your last three novels, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road, are heavily based on the experience of being Jewish and on Jewish culture. And with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it’s in the title; you can’t miss it. Has there been any pushback from editors or from agents?
MC: No, not at all. The reaction has been much too varied to really summarize. Even among Jewish readers, the reaction has been incredibly varied. Overwhelmingly positive, I would say. But people come at the material from so many different angles. I had people saying about Kavalier & Clay, “This brought back a whole world to me” or “This is just like my family.” And I also had people saying, “I’m Jewish and I never knew any of this, and I never thought about comic books as being part of my Jewish heritage.” Same thing with Yiddish Policemen’s Union. People come to it bringing a lot of Yiddish knowledge, and people come to it bringing no Yiddish knowledge at all. And then you have all the non-Jewish readers.
So there are points of accessibility for everyone?
MC: I hope so. I certainly hope so.
So where does this leave you for your next foray? Are you going to continue along with the sort of fanciful telling of Jewish history?
MC: No, I don’t think so. This next novel that I’m going to work on, at least at the moment, will be set in the present day, in the recognizable version of consensus reality. I would like to try to incorporate all the work I’ve done recently into my moving forward. I feel like I’ve been on this journey of rediscovery and reconnecting to my roots both as an American Jew and as a reader, and I’d like to try to reincorporate both kinds of heritage. With Yiddish Policemen’s Union, you have this strong immigrant, Yiddish-speaking background and this hard-boiled detective novel brought together, and it’s kind of the ultimate expression of that rediscovery and that reincorporation of roots. And having done that and at this point feeling quite reconnected to everything that I’ve ever been as an American, as a Jew, as a writer, as a reader, I feel like I’m going to move forward now and take on this world again, hopefully with a lot of the strength that I’ve derived from the work that I’ve been doing most recently.
