Book Review: Maps and Legends

Book Review: Maps and Legends

It’s very likely that you don’t need me to tell you that Michael Chabon is one of the truly great writers alive today. But just in case you do: Michael Chabon is one of the truly great writers alive today. I’ve had the pleasure of not only reading some (but still not all, darn it) of his books, but also seeing him in person a few times on speaking tours and author events. He is as erudite and compelling in person as he is on the page.

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands collects a number of miscellaneous essays of Chabon’s, and it is entertaining as any of his fiction. In an interview, Chabon explained that it doesn’t matter what he’s writing–even an email to his child’s teacher–he agonizes over each and every sentence. His agony is your gain in Maps and Legends.

I almost wanted to title this "Chabon and Me" because so many of the things he writes about in this book are things that I have written about, or topics that I have discussed among friends. Reading it, for me, was like talking with an extremely intelligent (astonishingly well-spoken) friend. For example, like me, Chabon hates the term "guilty pleasure" as it applies to favorite books, movies, and so on. Why should we feel guilty about what we like. In his essay, Trickster in a Suit of Lights, he makes the point that there’s really no difference between the motives for reading say, Shakespeare and Sandman. Kafka or Conan. In each case, you’re reading for pleasure. As he puts it, "Entertainment has a bad name." The idea that you’d read (or write) something "only" as entertainment doesn’t diminish the value of the activity. Entertainment is important. As another example, in On Daemons and Dust, he questions why Philip Pullman’s series His Dark Materials is classified as children’s literature, and uses it as a springboard for exploring what defines "children’s" or "young adult" literature. (To be fair, this is only one many great insights he has about the series. He also writes a compelling analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a book I also greatly respect, as does Chabon.) A comic book fan, he writes about comic book legend Will Eisner as well as writer Howard Chaykin, and about the comic book industry in general.

In one of my favorite essays, Chabon writes about the horror writer M.R. James and his influence on more familiar writers like Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, and how his ghost stories can be compared with any short fiction in terms of sophistication and complexity. He makes a good case for "Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad" as being one of the finest short stories ever written.

In another favorite, Golems I Have Known, Chabon weaves a semi-fictional semi-autobiographical tale of his various encounters with the story of the golem story as an interesting metaphor for creation and creative work in general. As this was originally a speech that he gave (which I had the luck of hearing a few years ago), he also writes a postscript regarding those who heard him tell the story and took it all seriously and literally, believing that Chabon had seen an actual golem not once but twice.
 
The art of the essay, I think, was rescued from nigh obscurity by the Internet and blogging, although 99.99% of blogs are not actually essays. That said, Chabon’s work harkens back to an earlier time, when a well-crafted essay was as wonderful as a work of fiction or a scholarly paper. Whether you’re looking to be exposed to some good ideas or just want to revel in good writing (and to be sure, even if the topics he covers do not interest you or even if you disagree with his premises, his writing makes it worth reading), Maps and Legends simply does not disappoint.