Michael Chabon

I attended a reading by Michael Chabon on Saturday as part of last weeks Virginia Festival of Books, and it was quite a delight. Having already read Wonder Boys (and seen the movie many times), it was particularly fun to see Chabon in a book festival setting. Just seemed fitting, like Grady Tripp and James Lear were lurking somewhere in the back of the room.

Chabon was much more soft-spoken than I had expected. I somehow envisioned a boomy bass-filled voice, but was instead greeted by a somewhat dimunitive man with a somewhat diminutive voice. He read a deleted chapter from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I've not yet gotten around to, even though I bought it as soon as it made it to paperback. Though I thus did not have a very good sense of who the characters were, it was not at all difficult to detect Chabon's devotion to detail, the way he immerses himself in the world that he creates. After the reading, he talked about this at length, the division of his life between the fantasy world of his novels and the more mundane world that he really lives in, and how it was largely this dichotomy that he was trying to explore in Kavalier and Clay.

I thought this jived with the intuition I've previously expressed about a reader becoming a part of the world of the books he reads. It can, of course, only be that much more powerful for someone who is actually creating the world. Chabon, for example, said he spent four and a half years writing Kavalier and Clay. Imagine four years of sitting down in front of the computer, creating and crafting and sculpting in this fictional land, and then having to take the kids to soccer practice, pick up the dry cleaning, take out the garbage, and so on. I mean, I feel that disconnect after spending a few days reading a book. I can hardly imagine how an author must feel. I guess that's yet another reason to start Kavalier and Clay. I think I'm going to read his first novel before that, however. It might be nice to have read that and Wonder Boys before starting on his latest work. It's much shorter, as well, so it fits better into my currently hectic schedule.