Michael Chabon - Maps and Legends

Maps and Legends
by Michael Chabon
250pp, Fourth Estate Ltd, £8.99

Olivia Laing
The Observer
Sunday 11 April 2010

The novelist Michael Chabon loves comics. He loves Sherlock Holmes, young adult fiction and those classic ghost stories of the kind produced by MR James. He is also painfully aware that genre fictions such as these are not generally considered current reading material for upstanding intellectual adults. His sense of defensive outrage on the part of such books, so influential on his own work, has fuelled this cri de coeur, an eloquent if decidedly partisan plea for the definition of what constitutes decent literature to be expanded and made more elastic.

Chabon's theory is that the prime function of writing should be to entertain the reader. He is also sure that writers used to be considerably less snooty about providing this essential service, and that it is only recently that the notion of entertaining has become so devalued. His defence is witty, original and only slightly marred by the fact that most of the 16 essays contained in this collection were originally written for quite different purposes. Many were initially reviews and some – such as the detailed and faintly carping account of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy* – do not add much to his central thesis, which is that edgy and compelling books frequently arise from the borderlands of fiction.

His take on Sherlock Holmes is particularly convincing, revealing far more complexity and skill in the workings than one is accustomed to seeing. But for all his gleaming acuity as a critic, Chabon is at his strongest here as a memoirist, and the two standout pieces both concern his own development as a writer. The first, "Maps and Legends", records his boyhood in the partially built utopian city of Columbia, which was constructed according to ideals that it couldn't possibly live up to. The second, "Golems I Have Known", is a strange, circling essay that charts Chabon's own shifting sense of himself as a writer and a Jew by telling a linked set of stories about golems, those clay men of Jewish mythology.

Both pieces are charged with an infectious excitement about the possibilities of writing, but only one is true. The other is a false memoir, a self-conscious lie, and it serves to underline Chabon's brilliant, heartening sense of the writer as swashbuckler, advancing into unmapped territory in search of, if not the truth, at the very least a whopping story.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/11/maps-and-legends-michael-chabon

* Chabon was lucky to get away with this because the slightest criticism of Pullman is a no-no in the pages of the Guardian and the Observer, where, ironically, he has taken on a somewhat saintly status alongside the likes of Jay-Z and Sam Taylor-Wood...