Michael Chabon is a storyteller on a mission. He is a man who has brought literary respectability to subjects as varied as bisexuality, baseball, pot-smoking professors and comic books. Name it. He’s got it.
At 8 p.m. on March 2, Chabon, the 39-year-old father of three and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” will be doing a question-and-answer followed by a book-signing at Royce Hall. On the agenda: childhood creativity, the culture of comics and the vanishing sense of adventure he laments in the lives of American children today.
None of these topics stray far from his recent writing, including the 500-page young-adult novel, “Summerland.”
“The idea for ‘Summerland’ is an idea I had when I was a kid, and I never forgot that idea, I just revived it,” Chabon said in a recent phone interview from his home in Berkeley, Calif.
“Summerland” tells the story of an uninspired little leaguer, Ethan Feld, drafted to save the world from the devilish Coyote. The novel’s title comes from the one sunny area of Ethan’s home on Clam Island. Along the way, Ethan and his sidekicks encounter several characters from America’s tall tales.
This novel’s integration of baseball with both traditional American folklore and figures from Native American tales, reflects Chabon’s dedication to his keen interest in restructuring American myth.
“There was an era where American history was an unexamined idea, and part of that imposed, shared understanding of American history included folklore like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill,” he said. “I think we have a more fragmented and hopefully more nuanced view of history and folklore that both pushes those figures a little more to the margin of things, but also makes room for figures like La Llorona (the weeping banshee from Southwestern folklore).”
This type of complexity, woven neatly into something as seemingly basic as a children’s tale, is the backbone of Chabon’s style. In “Kavalier and Clay,” a book which took four years to research, much of which was carried out at UCLA’s College Library, he successfully mixed Superman and Jewish mysticism, while his comic book writing heroes rewrote history.
Yet, the failure of many writers and readers to appreciate the importance of combining style and storytelling is something that frustrates Chabon.
“I think part of the problem is the idea that writing stories that really tell stories has been tarnished with the notion that it’s somehow inseparable from writing badly,” he said.
It was for this reason that Chabon recently acted as guest editor of the most current issue of author Dave Eggers’ literary journal, McSweeney’s. Although the special pulp format recalls Chabon’s own influences, he insists he was more invested in gathering the cast of contributors (from Stephen King and Michael Crichton to Nick Hornby and Chabon himself).
“The pulp was the most visually familiar way to communicate the kind of fiction that I was trying to revive,” he said. “I was more interested in the idea of the short stories that have plots, that come out of different genres that pre-existed pulps.”
Chabon is not one to preach without practice. He has been wildly successful with his own ability to tell exciting stories without forsaking style, and his McSweeney’s effort, “The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance” continues in the same vein.
Chabon’s previous novels have all been both critical and financial successes, and he is a hit in Hollywood, as well. His novel, “Wonder Boys,” was also an award-winning film starring Michael Douglas, and featured the Grammy-winning Bob Dylan tune, “Things Have Changed.” Most recently he completed the script for “Kavalier and Clay.”
“There’s been a lot of talk about getting Jude Law to play the Joe Kavalier part. If that happens, that would be wonderful,” he said.
While the Hollywood-types figure out how to translate Chabon’s vision onto the screen, the author is already at work on another novel, suggestively taking up history at the end of World War II where the comic boys left off. Inspired by FDR’s idea to grant a part of Alaska to the displaced Jewish peoples of Europe, “Hatzeplatz,” a thriller set in a Yiddish-speaking Jewish state in Alaska, continues Chabon’s attempt to recompose 20th-century history.
Where does he get this uncanny knack to make the fragments of yesterday the myths of today? His kids, of course.
“The whole idea of sampling is the overarching metaphor for pretty much everything. My kids are samplers,” he said. “They make these weird hybrids in their own imagination out of bits and pieces of my childhood, and their own childhood, and the backs of cereal boxes, and who knows what.”
Michael Chabon will speak at Royce Hall, 8 p.m. on Sunday, March 2. Tickets are available for $35, $30 and $25. There will be Q & A and a book signing following the event.