Whiz-bang!

April 8, 2010 • 4:22 pm • POSTED BY anna hartley

I have a theory that books find you when they’re supposed to—even if you’re a little behind the curve of, say, society as a whole. I guess this is what happened to me a few months ago when I first picked up Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, an epic story that tells the story of two cousins who take the 1940s comic book world by storm. It may have been published a good nine years ago, but I first read Chapter One just this past Christmas, during a snowy afternoon spent in downtown Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore. Chabon’s one of those novelists who writes in a way that makes you imagine characters living in an augmented, Technicolor reality. The one that we all secretly wish we lived in.

I didn’t get the book that day (big mistake), and consequently spent the next few weeks mulling over the imagery burned into my mind by that initial 20 pages. So after finally buying and consuming Kav & Clay in a flurried week of midnight oil, I proceeded to do what I always do with a favorite new writer: binge on everything he or she has ever written.

Next on my list was Maps and Legends, a book of essays (and easily the most beautiful book jacket I’ve ever seen—thanks McSweeney’s) in which Chabon defends the idea that literature should actually be entertaining.  Strange as it may sound, Chabon’s decidedly comic book-inspired style is something of an anomaly in the literary world, where writers are often bogged down by self-importance, or lack the kind of imaginative freewheeling that makes Chabon so exhilarating to read. He proves that pop-culture and literary clout can coexist.

Particularly interesting is Chabon’s belief in the roles that risk-taking and magic-seeking should play in writing:

“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed… If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”

In a sense, he simply articulates what it is that gives words—just an assortment of letters on a blank page—any sort of power over human emotions.

This week I finished The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and Wonder Boys is next. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.