Michael Chabon's Imaginary Jews

Abstract

Michael Chabon's Imaginary Jews D. G. Myers (bio) After winning the Pulitzer Prize for 2001 and finding himself arrayed among the masters of modern Jewish literature, Michael Chabon took seven years and several false starts to produce a follow-up work to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, his extravagantly praised third novel. When it finally appeared, The Yiddish Policemen's Union proved (if nothing else) that Chabon's midcareer decision to reinvent himself as a Jewish novelist was no fluke. With the earlier novel he had fully intended to squeeze himself into the modern Jewish tradition of multilingual code-switching, intramural debate, and communal self-questioning—a literary tradition starting with the nineteenth-century Yiddish writers Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem and including Chabon's towering American predecessors Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick. That his latest novel should raise questions about whether Chabon has actually assimilated himself to this tradition or merely decked out his writing with bright Jewish feathers—should raise, in fact, questions about his seriousness—typifies the artistic and critical challenges faced by this immensely talented writer. I Chabon is just now entering his mid-forties, about the age at which Henry James was writing The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima. At the same point in his career James had nine novels behind him. With four on the shelf, plus a 500-page children's book, a novella, and a serialized adventure yarn, Chabon is not far behind. The son of a prominent physician, Chabon was born in May 1963 in Washington, D.C., and raised in Columbia, Maryland, the planned community outside Baltimore, where his father was on the staff of the town's first hospital. When the Chabons moved there two years after it opened in 1967, Columbia was still an "imaginary city"; he and his family were "immigrants [End Page 572] to a new land that as yet existed mostly on paper." In the title essay of Maps and Legends, Chabon describes how he tacked up the long-range plan of Columbia in which the names "referred to locations that did not exist." In time it was joined on his bedroom wall by a realm of his "own devising" called Davoria. Growing up in such a place with its early training in imagining a world—and his parents' divorce when he was eleven, which introduced him to the perishability of worlds—"made me into the writer that I am," he testifies. Chabon attended the University of Pittsburgh and was graduated in 1984. There he studied under Chuck Kinder, best known for Honeymooners (2001), a fictionalized account of his decades-long friendship with Raymond Carver. Like most young writers with literary ambitions who are unsure how to attain them, Chabon applied straightaway to a graduate writers' workshop. In his case the stratagem paid off. Fretting about all the talented people he was going to be surrounded by, he plunged into writing a novel in the short months before he enrolled at the University of California, Irvine. The completed manuscript, which he submitted as his master's thesis, greatly impressed his adviser, the novelist MacDonald Harris. Without Chabon's knowledge, Harris sent "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" to his own New York agent, who peddled it for $155,000 against royalties, reportedly the largest advance ever paid for a first novel, with a guaranteed paperback income of at least another $100,000 and sales to thirteen countries. Chabon was twenty-five-years old. "The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter," Scott Fitzgerald wrote, looking back upon the best seller that he had published at twenty-four. "In the best sense one stays young." Chabon's first novel not only established his reputation for romanticized excursions into homosexuality, but also laid down the pattern of his literary convictions for over a decade. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a coming-of-age novel as a coming-out story. In "that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer" after graduation from college, Art Bechstein loves and copulates by turns with a woman and a man, discovering in the closing pages of the novel that while he is capable...