Where to Start with Michael Chabon: A Reading Guide

Michael Chabon (born 1963) is the American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a sprawling, exuberant novel about the Golden Age of American comic books and the Jewish experience of the twentieth century. He is known for his genre-defying approach — his novels incorporate the structures and pleasures of detective fiction, adventure, and alternative history within a prose of extraordinary richness and wit — and for his advocacy of ‘entertainment’ as a legitimate literary ambition. His fiction is simultaneously intellectually serious and enormously pleasurable to read.

Where to Start: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)

The essential Chabon — and one of the great American novels of its decade. Joe Kavalier escapes Prague in 1939, hidden inside a coffin containing a famous golem. In New York, he teams up with his cousin Sammy Clay to create comic book superheroes. Their creation, the Escapist — a superhero who fights tyranny and oppression — becomes one of the bestselling comics of the Golden Age, and the novel traces the full arc of their partnership, their loves, their ambitions, and the fates of the people left behind in Europe.

The novel is about escape — physical, artistic, psychological — and about the deep connection between the Jewish experience of persecution and displacement and the superhero genre that emerged from the Jewish immigrant communities of New York in the 1930s. Chabon’s prose is exuberant and inventive; the novel is long (nearly 700 pages) and every page is worth reading.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)

Chabon’s genre novel — and his most technically accomplished work of plot. In an alternative history, Jewish refugees established a temporary homeland in Sitka, Alaska, after the Second World War; the novel is set as the homeland’s sixty-year federal charter approaches expiration. Detective Meyer Landsman, a detective of the Sitka Homicide Department, investigates the murder of a man in his residential hotel who turns out to have been identified by some as the potential Messiah. The investigation leads to a conspiracy involving ultra-orthodox Jewish mobsters, the US government, and a plot with implications for the Middle East.

The novel is hard-boiled detective fiction in the tradition of Chandler and Hammett, written in a prose inflected with Yiddish idiom and set in a world of extraordinary richness. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards — the first novel ever to win both.

Wonder Boys (1995)

Chabon’s campus novel — set at a Pittsburgh literary college during a writers’ conference weekend, following Grady Tripp, an English professor whose second novel has been expanding for seven years (to 2,600 pages and counting) and whose life is simultaneously dissolving: his wife has left him, his editor is demanding the manuscript, his student is dangerously unstable, and his college’s chancellor (with whom he is having an affair) has just told him she is pregnant. The novel is a comedy of literary failure and middle-aged chaos, wickedly observed and very funny.

His most accessible novel and the best starting point for readers who want something less demanding than Kavalier and Clay.

Reading Michael Chabon

Chabon’s fiction is distinguished by its ambition — the willingness to attempt large subjects (the Golden Age of comics, alternative Jewish history, the nature of literary failure) — and by the quality of its prose, which is simultaneously elegant and exuberant, capable of sustaining a seven-hundred-page comic-book history and a tightly plotted Yiddish detective novel with equal assurance. He is the best demonstration that there is no necessary conflict between literary seriousness and narrative pleasure. Begin with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for the most essential and the most exuberant; read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union for the most purely genre-sophisticated; try Wonder Boys for the most immediately funny.