Maps of Misreading

Michael Chabon fills in the blank spaces

By Anthony Miller

A number of writers have begun to exult in print about the uncanny realms where the influences of pulp and pop (comic books, science fiction and fantasy, mysteries, rock & roll) meld with those "higher" and more established echelons of literature. Michael Chabon, the author of Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, relishes secret transactions between authors and their readers. When I realized that the two Japanese students Takeshi and Ichizo in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh bore the same names as the kamikaze pilots in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the shock of recognition ushered me into yet another story. Here was one lesson about how one kind of fiction could subtly and surprisingly infiltrate another.

Maps and Legends (McSweeney's, $24), Chabon's first essay collection, unearths some of the author's source texts and offers his exuberant ruminations on the role of the writer as protector and defender of artistic ancestors. His intention to cast us out and off into alternate worlds is made clear from the outset with a deft touch to the book's epigraph, transforming the way we read a Melville quotation about those who have written about whaling before him merely by appending the mischievously explanatory phrase "on the writing of fan fiction." Chabon's 16 essays ponder those landscapes, whether mythological, alternate-historical, or post-apocalyptic, where entertainers and tricksters, ghosts and golems dwell. He is an exacting cartographer of those speculative spaces where only the genre of nurse romances (like Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N.) was allowed to flourish or where one might catch a glimpse of a zeppelin ("that colophon of alternate-world fiction from Ada to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen") screaming across the sky.

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