Michael Chabon is serious about genre
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author says serious writing takes many forms.
MICHAEL CHABON, the author of novels such as the exuberant, Pulitzer-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," an alternate-universe story that recently won the Nebula Award, has long harbored 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 the opening essay of his new collection "Maps and Legends," called "Trickster in a Suit of Lights." "Serious people learn to mistrust and even revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights."
We spoke to Chabon, 45, from his home in Berkeley about his crusade to save comics, science fiction, fantasy, horror and detective fiction from condescension.
Let's 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 are 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 crap. It's impossible to ignore that. But the vast preponderance of work written as literary art is high-toned crap. The proportion may settle down in the neighborhood of 90/10 -- Sturgeon's Law said that 90% of everything is crud.
Let's talk about this in a specific instance -- Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" and its reception.
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's 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 caliber.
In terms of the vision it was presenting, it was notable only for the intense, McCarthy severity.
