A heimische lunch with Michael Chabon

Mixing genres, and moving between high and low culture, are at the heart of Chabon’s fiction. It’s what he does better than anyone. “I really believe genre fiction is as capable of accomplishing artistic and emotional power as much as so-called serious literary fiction,” he says. By genre fiction he means detective novels, fantasy fiction, science fiction. All of these “ought to be able to take on big, important subjects just as well as mainstream fiction does.”

Chabon acknowledges that “crime or fantasy fiction have not overtly addressed Jewish subjects, even though much of the best fantasy fiction has been written by Jewish writers.” But they never foregrounded their Jewishness. Moonglow is an adventure story but the Jewishness is there in big capitals. There’s lots of Yiddish, the hero retires to Florida in his leisure-wear, and it addresses war crimes involving Jewish slave labour.

Chabon is in his early fifties, bearded, glasses, a head of thick silver hair the colour of his suit. He’s trim, in good shape for someone who knows his way round a latke. He was born in Washington DC in 1963 and, like the narrator of his latest novel, he was “a boy of the 1970s.”

How was he influenced by that decade? “It made me,” he says. “It shaped me. It’s like saying water is close to a fish’s heart.”

He was part of the first generation that grew up with the Holocaust. “The Holocaust didn’t become The Holocaust until the ’70s, square in the middle of my childhood.” It’s hardly surprising, then, that it became one of his central subjects.

Another crucial influence was popular culture. At one point in Moonglow, the narrator describes going to the movies with his grandmother, “one of the interminable candy-coloured epics of the day: Doctor Dolittle, The Gnome-Mobile, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” The awfulness of the films he lists, the wonderful phrase, “candy-coloured”, both absolutely capture the time of his childhood. Chabon has perfect pitch when it comes to popular culture, as Bellow did for divorced middle-aged men, and he is happy to mix references to movies and records of the time with quotes from Pynchon and Salinger or historical details about Alger Hiss. The central character’s best friend calls him “Rico” after Cagney’s gangster hero in The Public Enemy. The two men share a room in wartime London. One returns. “He was whistling ‘Moonglow’”.

Moonglow is a hugely ambitious book. It takes on big, dark subjects: madness, slave labour, war. But what makes the book so readable is not just the superb storytelling which makes you want to keep turning the pages, but the light touch that comes with all this popular culture, the food and clothes of the time, the TV programmes and movies. That and the quirky details. There’s a German sniper using a bow and arrow, a snake-hunt in Florida and some useful advice on what to use when you want to garrotte your boss.

Talking to Chabon is like reading his books. The sentences pour out, long and clever, fizzing with life and energy. But he can be pithy too. A neat turn of phrase captures a character or a moment.

He went to college in the early 1980s, married, divorced and, in between, wrote his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh for which he received a huge advance. In the 1990s, came his second novel, Wonder Boys. It was later filmed with Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr. As Chabon has said, “It’s best known as the film where Spider-Man (also played by Maguire) sleeps with Iron Man (later played by Downey Jr).” Did I mention that Chabon loves popular culture?

Chabon is prolific. Eight novels, two books of short stories, two essay collections, articles everywhere from The New York Review of Books to GQ and McSweeney’s.

In The New York Review of Books, recent subjects include Obama, Pynchon and the film-maker, Wes Anderson. Chabon wrote the lyrics for Mark Ronson’s 2014 album Uptown Special. Every song except Uptown Funk — “the one that made all the money.” He’s also written on Dylan. Should Dylan have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Chabon was asked recently. He hesitated for a millionth of a second. “Of course! Why not? They gave it to Pearl S Buck!”

He’s also written film scripts. A draft of Spider-Man 2. More recently, John Carter. There have been rumours circulating for years that Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union were going to be filmed. The Coen Brothers have been linked with the latter. “Don’t hold your breath,” he says. “Nothing’s happening with any of my books.”

TV? He and his wife, the lawyer and writer, Ayelet Waldman, are working on a script that they hope will become an eight-part series for Netflix. It’s about a young woman who claims she’s been raped but no one, not even her two foster mothers, believe her. Yes, but what’s it really about? The latke and salt beef are slowing him down. This reply takes as much as a hundredth of a second: “Belief and disbelief. Guilt and innocence.”

Chabon used to write mainly about men. Sherlock Holmes, Kavalier and Clay, the hard-drinking detective in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. You could now add Grandfather, the extraordinary central character in Moonglow. You could, except from her first appearance Grandmother takes the novel by storm. She and the heroine and women detectives in the hoped-for Netflix series seem to mark a turn, the feminisation of Michael Chabon.

Writing novels is a famously lonely business. What’s it like writing scripts for TV executives? “It’s rarely satisfying because it’s so fear-driven. The impulse that’s driving the creative decisions is: What’s going to get me in the least trouble?” He says this with a twinkle in his eye, the look of someone who can write a line like, “You’ve been looking for trouble all your life.”

Chabon loves playing with time and history. Moonglow starts with a bang in 1957. The narrator’s grandfather tries to kill his boss when he loses his job to Alger Hiss. By page five we are in 1989. The Berlin Wall is coming down and Grandfather has cancer. Two pages later, we are in the 1920s.

But it’s the 1940s and ’50s that really bring the novel to life. “From my earliest childhood, I’ve always been especially interested in the decades before I was born.”

He remembers going to a Mexican restaurant with his parents, looking at the candy bars and glass cigar case by the cash register. “And I thought this is old-fashioned. It was like a glass case full of the past.”

There are key moments in Moonglow when the narrator comes across some precious thing form the past. A box of objects, long lost, hidden away, scary. A photo album where the key photos are missing. These are moments of extraordinary power in the novel. Moments when the past explodes into life.

He is fascinated by “the chance survival of a stray object that communicates the past in an unexpected way.” For example? “I love it when they tear down a building and its absence reveals a perfectly preserved advertising poster.” In Moonglow, the grandfather is hunting for Nazi war criminals and a coffin is dug up, full of treasures, a bottle of cognac from 1870, an old Bible, a telescope. Grandfather is a passionate amateur astronomer. He wants to fly to the moon. So does Werner von Braun, war criminal and the mastermind behind the American bid to land a man on the moon, the man Grandfather’s hunting.

Chabon pauses to check his phone. Moonglow has just been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award (Kavalier and Clay was shortlisted in 2000). It deserves the prize, and many more.

 

Michael Chabon’s ‘Moonglow’ is published by 4th Estate. It will be reviewed in next week’s JC