Interview: Mr. Chabon's Own Amazing Adventures

For nationally renowned Berkeley author Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize, which he won in 2001 for "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," has been more than a source of prestige-it's been a soap box. While others might focus on the pressure imposed by such recognition, Chabon has used the attention as an excuse to engage in some rather unconventional work.

His latest work is "The Final Solution: A Story of Detec-tion," a novella originally published last year in The Paris Review and winner of their 2004 Aga Khan award. The novella was published as a stand-alone edition at the beginning of the month, with new illustrations by concert poster designer Jay Ryan.

The work follows an 89-year-old beekeeping Sherlock Holmes wielding an existentialist looking glass, with World War II raging in the background.

"The first thing I remember writing was a Sherlock Holmes story when I was 10," Chabon said in an interview with The Daily Californian. Although leading off from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's monumental pop fiction library, Chabon's work stands on its own, exploring issues of decay, suffering, and ultimate meaninglessness. A hodgepodge of colorful ideas, the book "emerged in a somewhat mystical fashion as a whole," according to Chabon.

"I imagine the novella to be a kind of sherbet course (between larger meals)," said Chabon. The book is joined this month by the publication of "McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories," a collection of genre fiction edited by Chabon and drawn from a number of authors who straddle the ever-fading line between high- and low-brow.

Both fit quite nicely in the work he's been up to since winning the Pulitzer. This includes "Summerland," a children's novel, as well as his masterminding of "The Escapist," a serialized comics digest based on a superhero from "Kavalier & Clay." Despite the preponderance of pulp, Chabon says he "takes it on a case by case basis-I don't have an overarching agenda."

"The Escapist" has been one of the foremost forums for the mingling of literature and comics. This has allowed mainstream creators like Brian K. Vaughan and John Cassaday, alternative cartoonists such as Chris Ware and Paul Hornschemeier, and writers like Glen David Gold, Jonathan Lethem, and Dave Eggers to all come together under a single title. While still getting its feet off of the ground, "The Escapist" will soon be shifting from short story format into a longer story arc.

In prose, Chabon has lately been reading established American popular fiction writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It makes sense, then, that he is one of the figureheads of the new American literature, writing eminently modern works without the pretentious air of the stereotypical author, expertly lampooned by Chabon in "Wonder Boys."

"There's always been a pulp element to my stuff. There were gangsters and a jewel thief in ‘Mysteries of Pittsburgh,' and a horror writer figured prominently into ‘Wonder Boys,'" he says. "I think the day (of comics and literature intermingling) is upon us-distinctions are constantly being broken."

The author is currently working on his next major novel, "The Yiddish Policeman's Brigade." Another detective story, taking place in an alternative world in which Alaska was chosen as the Jewish state, Chabon hopes the book will reach print sometime next year.

Tags: