Here.
I finished Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends yesterday. The physical book is absolutly gorgeous. It's published by McSweeney's. And, whatever you think about the actual content that they publish, you can't deny that they have a beautiful aesthetic. The dust jacket is three carefully sculpted and intricately drawn pages, layered together. There's a gap in the center of all three of them that reveals a shaky saref: MAPS AND LEGENDS. Next time your at a bookstore (I don't know that they're selling this one at Barnes & Noble, etc.. At least, I picked it up at my local bookstore, and I haven't seen it at any of the big chains... McSweeney's, you know...) it's worth picking up and looking over, even if you don't buy it.
But moving away the physical book and onto the actual book. It sits in the borderland between book and essay collection, in that no-man's-land, disjointed, but somehow strung together. Reading it might best be described as walking through unfamiliar woods, and wondering, the whole time, if the trail your in is really a trail at all, or just something you've imagined.
You have to exert yourself, reading this book. To put it into Franzen's termonology, you have to scale the thing at times. It's dense, with those sentences, in true Chabon style, that seem to have clause after clause, leaving you wondering, "is this the end," or "where was that subject," and so on and so forth. But it's worth it--the climb, that is.
It explores those canonical questions of this cultural epoch. It strikes me now, and this is all quite parenthetical, that I really have no idea what the "canonical questions of this cultural epoch" are, for two reasons: (1) that phrasing is rife with undergrad, liberal-arts ego, and, as such, is both opaque and more useless than it looks; and (2) I haven't taken any serious lit crit classes in, oh, ever, and, as such, I have no idea if what I perceive to be important questions about contemporary writing are, in fact important questions; this is to say, I have about as much expertise in lit crit as, say, John McCain does on the economy. End parenthetical shit. There's the talk about genre ghettoizing: what is low-brow? what is high-brow? where does sci-fi/fantasy fit it? how about comics?
"A bookstore," Chabon writes, "is a ghetto."
From time to time, some writer, throug a canny shift in subject matter or focus, or through the coming to literary power of his or her lifelong fans, or through sheer, undeniable literary chops, manages to break out. New subteler covers are placed on these writers' books, with elegent serif typefaces. In the public libraries, the little blue circle with the rocket ship or the magnifying glass is withheld from the spine. This book, the argument goes, has been widely praised by mainstream critics, adopted for discussion by book clubs, chosen by the Today show. Hence it cannot be science fiction.
This is an argument that, at least in my case, has been going of for years and years. I argued, for a long time, that specific genres--and, indeed, specific mediums--deserved to be ghettoized, that they were somehow unfit to deliver whatever that je ne sais quoi that one finds in Faulkner, Joyce, or Pynchon, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, or Updike. After discovering just how difficult it is to get through these authors' works (I've been reading Gravity's Rainbow for about four or five years now), I changed the argument to Plessy v. Furgison: Sci-fi is good, in a way incomparable with literary fiction. So, we should ghettoize it. I've already had to reverse my opinion on media work, admitting, for example, that comics have real literary value. I don't know where this road is going to end.
At any rate, Chabon's obsession with the borderlands (his term) of genre is particularly fitting, as maps and legends more engrossing--maliciously interesting--than any work of fiction I've read from him. It's the kind of book you ought not read before bed. Particularly not with a pot of coffee or a kettle of tea brewing. It's insidious, ensnaring.
That idea of borderlands so central to Maps (he holds up Pullman's His Dark Material--interestingly and correctly--as an premier example of this kind of work, by the by) is also central to his other work, at least the stuff I've read and am reading: The Final Solution, his novella in the style of Sir Doyle (sort of). His short stories: A Model World, some kind of cross between Borges and Chandler.
There's something to Chabon's work, something that manages to capture the vivaciousness and accessability of genre work while holding firm to the tropes and depth of its more literary cousins. And, of course, it helps that, odd syntax aside, he's about 100 times less pompous than some of the other contemporary novelists doing similar work today (cough Franken, cough).
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