Salon.com > Michael Chabon

Google’s impossible plan to fix our broken world

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:06:00 +0000

During a "fireside chat" in Singapore on Friday, Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette described our existing world as "broken." Google, he said, wants to fix it.

It's not the first time Pichette has employed that exact rhetorical framing. Two years ago, in Australia, he told an interviewer that "Google is really an engineering company with all these computer scientists that see the world as a completely broken place. And so, if you see the world as a broken place, there's so many opportunities to actually solve problems."

To which, I must ask, is Google an engineering company overstocked with kabbalistic Jewish mystics?

Chabon on race, sex, Obama: “I never wanted to tell the story of two guys in a record store”

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:25:00 +0000

If you’ve ever lived in Berkeley, Calif., that much-ridiculed college town on the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay, or even visited the place, you probably have highly specific associations with Telegraph Avenue, a historic street of political protests and retail commerce (legal and otherwise) that dead-ends against the University of California campus at Sather Gate. Michael Chabon’s new novel is pointedly not about that Telegraph Avenue, and its characters have no relationship to the university campus or to the 1960s explosion of left-wing activism that made Berkeley internationally famous – and, briefly, in my childhood, the locus of martial law as ordered by the governor of California, Ronald Reagan.

Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue” calls our attention, literally and figuratively, to the other end of the street, where Telegraph crosses the city line and becomes the main drag of the Temescal district, a racially and economically mixed neighborhood in northwest Oakland. That’s where Archy Stallings, a 36-year-old African-American Gulf War vet who is the novel’s central character, and his Jewish partner Nat Jaffe (whose background resembles Chabon’s own) are not so slowly running a vintage vinyl emporium called Brokeland Records into the ground. It’s the summer of 2004, and a wealthy former NFL star and Oakland native, Gibson “G-Bad” Goode, is planning to open an immense new retail-entertainment complex – called, wonderfully, the “Dogpile Thang” – four blocks away, applying the coup de grace to Archy and Nat’s failing business.

Don’t sleep on the Hugo Awards

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:06:00 +0000

The World Science Fiction Convention convened yesterday in Chicago. Unlike San Diego's Comic-Con, Worldcon hasn't gone Hollywood just yet -- you're more likely to share an elevator with astronaut Story Musgrave than Seth MacFarlane. The big autograph sessions are with authors like John “Redshirts” Scalzi, and panels cover topics like “Anarchism in Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “Are You a Dickhead?” (a retrospective of author Philip K. Dick's work, of course).

Sunday evening, Scalzi will host the annual Hugo Awards, the event that makes Worldcon important to people who don't know urban fantasy from Urban Outfitters. Hugos cover a lot of science fiction, horror and fantasy ground (categories include film, podcasts and illustration, among others), but the novel and novella nominees are of particular interest to anyone who loves literature.

The amazing adventures of an aspiring grown-up

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:21:00 +0000

Though Michael Chabon's fixation with DC comics, bisexuality and pink Polo shirts is not exactly "manly," his life -- as evidenced by an endearing new collection of short essays -- has been a picture of modern American manhood. Whereas his last book, "Maps and Legends," mounted a scholarly defense of the genre fiction that formed his literary tastes, "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son" charts the landscapes of his childhood and adulthood in a frank, visceral style. To read it is to understand the open line of communication Chabon keeps with his younger self; he seems to recall exactly what it was like to be a kid. Yet, as a father of four and the husband of novelist Ayelet Waldman (a former columnist for Salon), Chabon displays a deep investment in his role as a family man. He has an instinct for good old-fashioned moral righteousness in the face of trouble and temptation.

Salon Book Awards 2007

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:24:00 +0000

It's been a tranquil year in the book industry: no big fabrication or plagiarism scandals, à la James Frey or Kaavya Viswanathan, and consequently no dramatic denunciations on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." O.J. Simpson's bizarre "hypothetical" confession, "If I Did It," was finally published after the copyright had been transferred to the family of Ronald Goldman; in the end, it achieved little more than the destruction of the career of one of publishing's premier carnival barkers, editor Judith Regan. (She's now suing her former employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.)

But if the book world provided relatively little tabloid fodder in 2007, that doesn't mean that graver problems aren't afoot. The National Endowment for the Arts just released another of its depressing surveys of American reading habits, revealing that one in four of our fellow citizens had not read a single book in the preceding year. Meanwhile, the National Book Critics Circle's Campaign to Save Book Reviews has been tirelessly documenting -- and protesting -- the withering away of book coverage in our magazines and newspapers.

Jews on ice

Fri, 04 May 2007 11:10:00 +0000

In an essay about the 1958 travel guide "Say It in Yiddish" in Civilization magazine, Michael Chabon contemplated a country where "I'd do well to have a copy of 'Say It in Yiddish' in my pocket." Of course, not only had Chabon not found such a place but, he pointed out, "I don't believe anyone has."

Chabon, it seems, couldn't get this phantom Yiddish-speaking nation out of his head, and now he's gone and created the place himself. Welcome to Sitka, Alaska, the setting for his new novel, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," where the only "American" spoken is swear words. In this imaginary world without Israel, Sitka plays temporary home to Big Macher department stores, a thriving Chassid mafia, and some 3 million very cold Jews.

The lost adventure of childhood

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 22:24:00 +0000

Michael Chabon's new novel, "Summerland," is meant for kids, but it's just as rangy, eccentric, dreamy and funky as his books for adults. Chabon, an avid reader in his own childhood of classic children's fantasy series by such authors as Susan Cooper and C.S. Lewis, decided he wanted to try his hand at the genre and bring to it a set of American mythic motifs. "Summerland" takes baseball as its theme, a game full of heroism, but one also redolent of nostalgia and the sting of inevitable failure. The novel's hero, Ethan Feld, is a reluctant player trying to please his baseball-smitten widower dad on a small island off the coast of Washington state. When he's enlisted by a supernatural scout to help rescue this world and the magical world called the Summerlands from the schemes of the trickster god Coyote, Ethan has to step up to the plate in more ways than one. He gathers the necessary entourage of friends and sidekicks and sets off on an epic journey across the Summerlands, encountering thunderbirds, giants, ferishers (a roughneck breed of fairies), Sasquatch and a half-dozen tall-tale folk heroes along the way.

Interview with Michael Chabon

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 18:47:00 +0000

The novel's hero, Ethan Feld, is a reluctant player trying to please his baseball-smitten widower dad on a small island off the coast of Washington state. When he's enlisted by a supernatural scout to help rescue this world and the magical world called the Summerlands from the schemes of the trickster god Coyote, Ethan has to step up to the plate in more ways than one. He gathers the necessary entourage of friends and sidekicks and sets off on an epic journey across the Summerlands, encountering thunderbirds, giants, ferishers (a roughneck breed of fairies), Sasquatch and a half-dozen tall-tale folk heroes along the way.

Kids lit grows up

Sat, 21 Sep 2002 15:49:00 +0000

When I was a kid, I was too busy reading grown-up books (mostly junk) to pay much attention to children's literature. I assumed that kids lit was what people wanted me to like rather than what I really did like. So by the time I reached my 20s, I had all sorts of treasures waiting for me. Among them were the books of Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Even if I had read children's literature as a child, Burnett's most famous novel, "The Secret Garden," was considered a girl's book and not something little boys read. When I finally got around to it in the late '80s, I loved it so much that when I finished, I immediately picked up a copy of Burnett's "A Little Princess." I was reading that on the bus one morning when I noticed a businessman in his 40s sitting beside me and eyeing the book. Finally, I nervously allowed my eyes to meet his only to hear him say, "It's a great book, isn't it?" He went on to praise Frances Hodgson Burnett's writing and told me how much he had enjoyed reading her books to his own daughter.

Wonderful movie

Fri, 10 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000

At a time when comedy rules the box office, the best comedy of the year opened in February, won rave reviews -- and disappeared. Its title is "Wonder Boys." Its story about a bumbling middle-aged author confronting and transcending faded glory gives the lie to the Fitzgerald quote "There are no second acts in American lives." In a rare move for a big studio, Paramount has given "Wonder Boys" a second act. The movie reopens in eight cities this week.

Curtis Hanson's first film since his much-honored "L.A. Confidential" is about lead characters who range in age from 20 to the mid-50s. But right now "Wonder Boys" is the most youthful comedy around. It's the most open in spirit, the most generous and bighearted.

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon

Thu, 28 Sep 2000 19:51:00 +0000

Despite its heft -- it weighs in at 639 pages -- Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" is a speedy, nearly effortless read. The action zooms along, with plot twists worthy of a pulp fiction potboiler and characters of delicious pumped-up proportions like the Mighty Molecule (a circus strongman), Tracy Bacon (a B-movie king with a lantern jaw and sonorous "string-bass" voice), Longman Harkoo (an art mogul) and the Saboteur (a sinister self-proclaimed Nazi guerrilla), delivered in Chabon's flawless musical prose and punctuated -- Bat! Bam! Bif! -- with feats of physical prowess and derring-do.

It would seem like a guilty gorgefest, a sugary pop concoction, if, like pop art itself, it weren't so heavily fortified with all the vitamins and minerals of true art.

A wizard of Hollywood

Thu, 24 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"I've never been involved with a picture that anyone was remotely interested in before I'd handed in the script," says screenwriter Steve Kloves. "Certainly not a picture that people are interested in doing articles on before I'm even finished with the polish on the first draft."

Kloves is talking to me on the phone from Los Angeles about the hottest property in Hollywood -- his adaptation of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," the first in the British children's fantasy series that has swept to the top of adult bestseller lists.

Werewolves In Their Youth

Mon, 22 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000

One complaint you can make about Michael Chabon is that the characters in his books always behave a bit too much like, well, characters in books. They smoke cigarettes with stylish aplomb, fall inconveniently in love, drink too much, nurse their melancholy too tenderly and too long. Their lives are a mess, but never so much that they can't be redeemed, on the last page, by one grand moment of heroism or epiphany.

So? Books are books, after all, and reality is reality, and instead of complaining when art fails to imitate life, it's more interesting to think about why life doesn't more often resemble art.

Chabon's acclaimed first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," inspired widespread comparisons to the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, although they had more to do with the gorgeousness of the characters and of the prose (and of the then 24-year-old author) than with the themes. In "Werewolves in Their Youth," Chabon's second collection of short stories, he moves deeper into genuine Fitzgerald territory -- that place where young married couples dance separately with strangers, where former football heroes stare down the dwindling time clock of youth, where the houses mock their inhabitants and every party is a disaster waiting to happen.