It’s official: I have a crush on Michael Chabon (say it: shay-bun). Not the hot-and-bothered kind, but the literary kind—which, while distinctively more chaste, is still a hell of a lot of fun. I just finished Maps & Legends, a collection of Chabon’s literary essays published by McSweeney’s, where Chabon speaks to the heart of my writing conundrum: how to marry my love of literature, my lust for wordplay and sparkling prose with my puerile need for mystical, magical, fantastical, horrifying, thrilling stories. See, I need both, because I read to be entertained, and when the writing’s good, and the story is thrilling, a book is one of the purest pleasures I know. Here’s what Chabon says about this, in prose that makes my heart want to split right open:
I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka’s formula: “A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.” I could go down to the café at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end—here’s my point—it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.
Maps & Legends was sitting in a stack on the counter at my local bookstore, where—if you can believe it—the proprietor has built a reputation for offering one of the finest selections of American literature in London. I picked it up, still wrapped in plastic, and asked if I could open it. It’s a sexy book. True to McSweeneys’ aesthetic proclivities, the cover is in three lovely pieces, each bearing a scene in a different monochromatic shade, each connected to and yet separate from the others. I had a stack of books already, but I flipped it open to the passage quoted above. At “suave henchman”, my tummy did a romantic flip; by the time I reached “the blade tolls like a bell for miles,” I was practically pre-orgasmic.
How could I not buy it?
Chabon’s beating his pet drum in the passage above, and his is a cause that, as a writer, is deeply personal for me. He’s talking about a rift in two schools of modern literature. See, some like to make a distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction, saying—too simplistically, I think—that literary fiction is driven by character and genre fiction is driven by plot. Personally, I don’t find these distinctions all that useful. Genre fiction has become a straw man in what is actually a conflict between between art and commerce. A more useful distinction, I think—is literary fiction versus commercial fiction.
Commercial fiction is corporate fiction, written to appeal to particular markets. To understand that a lot of genre fiction is written for commercial purposes you need only inspect the aisles of your local Barnes and Noble: rows and rows of cheap paperbacks labeled romance, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery. Splashy books written according to the formula of mass appeal and mass production. Read one and you hardly need read another; these are plug-n-play characters (the brilliant lawyer, the infallible super-spy, the hard-boiled detective, the stoic military leader) put through their paces solving the mystery, catching the killer, falling in love, or saving the universe. Fun, in their way—entertaining, even, but there’s nothing in these aisles likely to open your heart or to truly stimulate your hungry mind.
I’m not being entirely fair, I know, because some romances are inarguably literary. There’s Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Possession, The English Patient, and many, many others. Even science fiction can be literary—there’s Dune, and The Handmaid’s Tale, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and even horror gets the occasional literary pass with writers like Poe, or, according to Chabon, Cormac McCarthy.
In his essay, “Dark Adventure: On Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”, Chabon says “. . . ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood.” While reading The Road I often found myself holding the book at arm’s length, unable to put it down, yet practically reading out of one eye, cringing in anticipation of the next (spare, lyrical, beautiful) sentence. At the time I chalked my discomfort up to personal apocalyptic paranoia, but Chabon traces a chilly finger down my spine when he articulates what I think I actually found so deeply frightening about The Road:
The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world . . . the fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited.
Ultimately, the thrust of these essays is that Chabon wants to read and write in a world where genre fiction and literary fiction are not considered mutually exclusive. Where round characters are important, but where plot and character are understood to co-exist in a literary work.
It’s a great comfort to me to have the likes of Chabon, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, argue for the expansion of literature to include more fantastical works, because those are the sorts of stories I love to read, and the stories I most desperately want to write. As a reader I want to be transported by the imaginative use of language, by beautiful sentences and clever allusions—but I also I want to be transported by a good story. I want to inhabit, if only in my mind, worlds that aren’t possible here in my three-kids-and-husband-gotta-do-the dishes-and-buy-the-groceries life. I like a splash of the fantastic with my pretty words—you know: talking bears, little tiny people, time travel, some apocalypse, maybe a serial murderer or two.
Literary essays may not be for everyone, but Chabon’s collection has much to offer any discerning reader, and even more for readers who write. His writing vibrates with intelligence, passion and insight, and his book has three gorgeous interlocking book covers.
How could you not buy it?
