Nick's Café Canadien

This week’s selection: Wonder Boys (1995) by Michael Chabon.

In brief: Chabon’s sophomore novel is the literary equivalent of a warm bath. A comic contemporary adventure about the existential crises of novelists, it fits snugly in the naturalistic mould of modern literature about the here and now, albeit with a few extra helpings of wackiness. It meanders here and there, and its lightheartedness assures you that none of the characters are ever in much danger; however, Chabon’s lucid style keeps the story at least as fluid as his recent dips into genre, if not more so. It’s not high-concept, but it’s fun.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Wonder Boys, keep reading below.)

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Michael Chabon enthusiasts have had plenty to be excited about of late. Not long ago, Chabon became the rarest of authors to be nominated for a Nebula, a Hugo and an Edgar for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union—a book that I didn’t find as sweeping as his magnum opus, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but stands nonetheless as the apotheosis of his recent efforts to tear down the walls of Genre like it’s ’89 in Berlin (as well as a thumping good detective thriller sprinkled with a healthy metaphoric dose of chess). Then it was announced that the film adaptation is in the hands of none other than the Brothers Coen, a dream pairing of filmmakers and source material if I ever saw one. And then the the draft screenplay that Chabon wrote for Spider-Man 2 hit the Web, finally revealing the extent of his contributions to the film, which were largely what I thought they were (Peter Parker the struggling pizza delivery boy—that sort of thing).

As I write this, I’m leafing through the newly released Maps and Legends, the first collection of Chabon’s literary essays in book form. (The bookshop stocked it in a shrinkwrap to protect Jordan Crane’s ornate three-piece jacket design—a boon for people like me who prefer to keep their books in impeccable condition, but perhaps unsuitable for browsing purposes.) Some of it is familiar to me: among the selections are his Eisner Awards keynote about the decline of children’s comics, his reflections on writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and my favourite, an expanded version of his 1997 essay on a bafflingly anachronistic Yiddish phrasebook that not only provided the inspiration for the contemporary Jewish Sitka of TYPU‘s alternate universe, but (hitherto unbeknownst to me) generated a stir of controversy on a Yiddish-language mailing list.

The other selections are quite refreshing; thankfully, they offer a lot more variety than a simple retread of Chabon’s position that serious fiction has dug itself into a hole as a consequence of relegating “entertaining” genres into other holes—though that, too, gets plenty of attention in the opening essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”. There is an excursion into one of the iconic moments of Chabon’s personal mythos (the abandonment of his would-be second novel, Fountain City), a piece that exalts Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his mastery of nesting lies within lies along Holmes’ pursuit of the truth, and many a word about the storyteller as both Golem-maker and trickster figure (or Coyote, if you will). The connections to Chabon’s fiction should be obvious to those familiar with his works (respectively, in the preceding sentence: Wonder Boys, The Final Solution, Kavalier & Clay, Summerland), though I imagine the essays stand alone quite admirably. I haven’t read the whole collection, mind you: I deliberately skipped the piece on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as McCarthy’s jaunt into the well-travelled post-apocalypse resides high on my reading list untouched.

I was immediately drawn, as I would be, to Chabon’s essay on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Before I proceed, I should say that the very thought of Chabon writing about Pullman is almost as exciting to me as Watterson writing about Schulz, which, if you’ll remember, I favourably compared to Beethoven writing about Bach. That said, I come not to praise Chabon (I swear!), though I’m not exactly going to bury him, either.

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The hardcover edition of Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon’s serial novel for The New York Times (working title: Jews With Swords), closes with a provocative afterword in which Chabon reflects on his turn from the paradigm of “late-century naturalism”—contemporary stories about “divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce”—to a tale about, well, Jews… with swords.

To longtime Chabon readers such as myself, his position on genre literature is well known, and in large part responsible for his appeal; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is as seminal a defence of escapism as one is likely to find anywhere. I have long been suspicious of the privilege the literary establishment confers on “serious” literature; in the dominant paradigm, there’s a critical undercurrent that believes literature can’t serve its socially transgressive purpose (a broad assertion of a mission statement in its own right) if you are having fun, or if you dare to edge closer to the mythic than the workaday. Oh, sure, they don’t mind the odd sparkle of magic realism, but if swashes and buckles are involved? That’s second-class.

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One of the films I will mention in my forthcoming mega-post on the films to watch out for in 2005 – when it comes – is the adaptation of the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. If you have never read the original work, I highly recommend that you do so. While it’s no Watchmen – and let’s be honest, what comic book is? – it’s definitely a cut above the norm, and deviates enough from the typical Orwellian future-fascist clichés to be interesting. It has, with good reason, inspired many a serious academic study of its aesthetic and literary content – here, for instance, or here.

As much of a neat little gimmick as it is to target the release of the film for the weekend of Guy Fawkes Day (“Remember, remember the Fifth of November”), I do wonder if it is really that wise an idea to rush the production schedule to meet it. It has a lineup to dream of, with Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond and James McTeigue in the director’s chair. McTeigue is untried, but given his background as an Assistant Director under both the Wachowskis in The Matrix and George Lucas in the Prequels, I have faith in the guy, so long as he doesn’t let too many Wachowski fingerprints get all over his work. That is appropriate for some dystopian movies about post-apocalyptic fascists that rule over a complacent populace, but it would not necessarily be a good fit here.

My big concern – and the major question mark that hovers over the otherwise perfect casting of Natalie Portman – is that the film may lose some of the Britishness of the original source, which I think needs to be retained. Alan Moore is arguably the best living scriptwriter in the comics business, and his work is long overdue for some cinematic respect, especially after the disaster that was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Hopefully the film captures some of the more ingenious motifs, both visual and poetic, that lie in Moore’s book. The commodification of Fate and Justice as artificial feminine personifications that cheat on society and the powers that be is of particular note, as is the marvelous sequence in the third act when V, the anarchistic Guy Fawkes figure around whom the story revolves, conducts the destruction of the fascist regime’s power structures to the cannon-fire of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. As Robert Rodriguez will hopefully demonstrate with Sin City, which looks incredible, why reinvent the wheel when the original comic has already provided so much in the way of aesthetic guidance?

On the other side of the literary world lies Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is an almost entirely linguistic experience aside from the great Helquist illustrations and the tag that follows every book offering clues as to the next one. I have now finished all eleven published books, and the series is due to conclude in the thirteenth volume. My original impression after reading the first three, if you will recollect, was that this was a series that dropped plot and story in favour of being very clever about the telling thereof. Well, that changes quite significantly as one progresses, and from about the fifth or sixth volume onwards, it becomes masterful episodic fiction in the serial tradition, with each successive adventure posing riddles that are answered with even more baffling oddities in the next one, capitalizing on everything that has come before. Even given how the author continues to unify each book with a set of idioms or literary devices that he deconstructs with scalpel precision, the series has shifted to the point where the unanswered mysteries in the plot are what generate anticipation for the next entry to come.

I must also admit a total agreement with the axis of good and evil that emerges as the series progresses. Every book has a library motif, and one of the characters in The Slippery Slope (whose identity I will not reveal) comes right out and says that well-read individuals are bound to be the good guys. All the decent people in the books respect knowledge, and amidst all the sobering melancholy in the series, one that explicitly deals with terrible things happening to undeserving innocent children, we see the promotion of what I think is a critical, yet oft-ignored value.

The antithesis of the printed page, and the mark of the enemy, is fire. When the villains employ fire, the tragic loss is always not so much material as it is a loss of knowledge. It’s an axis of conflict you don’t see every day, and certainly not in something promoted as children’s fiction.

Fiction is created, marketed and sold in a way that is completely different from the movie business. Book launches, Harry Potter aside, don’t have anything approaching the opening-weekend culture of movies that saw a revival after The Phantom Menace and reached its peak in the summer of 2001. It should really come as no surprise, then, that my most anticipated works of fiction to be published this calendar year are almost entirely sequels. Couple that with the fact that I have enough classic literature from years past to discover, and this list pales in comparison to what I can say about movies.

With that said, I want to make special mention of the four books coming out in 2005 that I intend to buy the moment they hit stores. Book the Twelfth of the Lemony Snicket series is one. Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception, which arrives 3 May, is another; I much enjoyed the first three, and this one promises to build on the dangling threads of the second whilst balancing them with the bittersweet ending of the third. Then there’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and its inclusion here should be obvious.

Not so obvious is the one non-sequel I already have marked down on my calendar, even considering that it does not have a hard release date beyond a vague promise of delivery in October (though its Amazon.co.uk entry now indicates a delay until 6 March, 2006). This would be Michael Chabon’s next novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, his first big piece since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay after having taken a break with the children’s baseball fantasy Summerland and the Sherlock Holmes tribute The Final Solution.

Chabon, as longtime devotees of this journal should be aware, is a literary wunderkind and one of my favourite novelists of all time. Not only does he write prose that can only be described as beautiful, he somehow never manages to let it overpower the stories underneath; and oh, what amazing stories he tells. All I know about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that it is apparently an alternate-history novel about a Jewish state established in what we know as Alaska, and I’m already dying to see where he goes with this.

I will finish this post with yet another empty promise of a detailed, extended orgasmic reaction to the new footage of Revenge of the Sith, and pop in an unrelated link or two. The first is an excellent Jim Hill feature article on Eric Idle’s new Broadway production, Spamalot. The second is an obscure, but surreal recording that fittingly, you can only order on the Internet; you know the sort. Or do you? I speak, after all, of The Rap Canterbury Tales. Its inclusion in one of my classes today made that particular course (English 300, “Social and Cultural History of the English Language”) all the more fun in a strange, delightful way. It is, after all, the same course where a recommended reading for an upcoming paper is Going Nucular, a book by Geoff Nunberg of Language Log fame.

If you are still engaged in the holiday ritual known as Christmas shopping, here’s the perfect gift for literary types: Michael Chabon’s freshly-released novella, The Final Solution. It’s a quick read, spanning a mere 131 pages, but boy, is it ever nice to get Chabon’s words in a package that can be digested in a sitting or two.

If The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was at its core a tribute to Jack Kirby, then in The Final Solution, Chabon pays his respects to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Set in 1944 wartime England, it follows an eighty-nine-year-old former sleuth that has retired into beekeeping as his powers of deduction are enlisted for one last case involving a mute Jewish refugee boy from Nazi Germany and his parrot, Bruno. The protagonist is only ever identified metonymically as “the old man,” but he is clearly implied to be Sherlock Holmes in his twilight years. In this respect the premise is similar to Unforgiven, where Clint Eastwood’s William Munny is an obvious throwback to the Man With No Name he played in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, only here in Chabon’s book, the decay explored is intellectual rather than moral.

The mystery itself, on the plot-summary surface, is fairly standard, and befits the complexity of a short story. The twists lie not in the deductive process of revelation, but in the solution at which we finally arrive. Where Chabon excels, as he always does, is in his total mastery of the language.

Today’s literary environment exhibits a widening division between serious art literature that you read for the majesty of the words, and non-serious escapist literature that you read for fun regardless of how it’s written. Michael Chabon bridges the chasm like nobody else (as if that purpose, the celebration of escapism, were not already the explicit theme of Kavalier & Clay). For those who care about good writing, you can bathe in his words and yet derive a sense of dream fulfilment from his romantic fantasy backdrops. For those who dabble in comic books, Baker Street investigations or (in the case of Summerland) a union of Norse mythology, Native American folklore and sandlot baseball, you have the rare privilege of lauding the storyteller not just for the story, but also for the telling.

In The Final Solution, this is very much the case. It’s a simple, perhaps even unremarkable Sherlock Holmes story to begin with, but it’s the telling that makes it all worthwhile. If we recognize that Chabon has already mounted the summit of the fun, artsy novel, here he conquers the fun, artsy novella. He does some remarkable things with his prose; an exquisitely detailed scene of the old man working the hives, his first sight of a war-torn London, a climactic chapter written entirely from the perspective of a parrot – a dazzling feat of animal personification, even by the high standards of someone who has read William Horwood’s Duncton Wood.

But that’s already saying too much. This holiday season, give the gift of a good book.

Leaving for a weekend means there is a lot of catching up to do in terms of current events, happenings that had or will have a dramatic impact on the world.

When the dramatic impact I speak of is possessed of a physicality like the flurry of Wong Fei-Hung’s legendary No-Shadow Kick, you have Yuen Wo-Ping to thank for that. As every martial arts aficionado knows, Yuen is possibly the greatest fight choreographer in cinematic history. Over the past few years he has finally gotten more attention in North America, thanks to his work in The Matrix and Kill Bill as well as the overwhelming success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at the domestic box office. Well, it looks like he’s about to make his English-language directorial debut in the Disney-financed Snow and the Seven, which is reportedly an iteration of Snow White featuring seven Shaolin monks and set in late-nineteenth-century China, a setting that immediately brings the braided hairstyles of the period to mind.

Unfortunately, whenever the best in Asian film come do a stateside project, studio pressures and fundamental misunderstandings of how Hong Kong cinema works the way it does impede their movies from ever being nearly as good as one would expect. Once Upon A Time In China director Tsui Hark has since been damned (or rather, van Dammed) to B-movie hell; Jackie Chan’s career has been limited to buddy-cop culture-clashes and inexplicably, Passepartout; and someone should tell Revolution Studios that Jet Li and DMX aren’t exactly Freddy and Ginger. There’s a lot of talent going to waste here. Hopefully Yuen Wo-Ping is given the directorial freedom he needs, and moreover, a good writer.

But if you read that story to which I linked, you’ll see that the “good writer” part has already been covered. They’ve signed none other than Michael Chabon, whom I never hesitate to identify as the best American novelist this generation. As such, there is plenty of reason to be optimistic about how this will turn out.

Speaking of Chabon, I never ended up ordering my Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #3 and #4. I’ll get on it, unless I spot it at a local retailer first.

Ken Jennings update: Not only has he won twenty-six consecutive episodes of Jeopardy!, tonight he swept the “Marvel Comics Heroes” category. I am suitably impressed.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have plenty of time to mull over all the facets of Spider-Man 2 in terms of its content, since the ever-shortening summer movie season is effectively over barring a surprise success on the part of I, Robot. Today, I will instead act like a Comic Book Guy poseur and talk about a few of the mice and men behind the movie.

First of all, Apple has a fantastic article featuring Nels Israelson, a professional one-sheet photographer (“poster boy”?) who designed the outstanding promotional material for the movie. A must-read for any photography buffs out there, it covers how he creates and shoots the superhero poses in a digital format. Naturally, he uses a Macintosh.

Those of you who have seen the film will remember the stunning opening credits sequence, which re-created memorable images from the first Spider-Man (such as its most iconic moment, the upside-down kiss) in dynamic comic-book panels. The art in those panels was by award-winning painter Alex Ross, who rose to fame in the mid-nineties with his distinct romantic-yet-realist tapestries of costumed superheroes in two all-star graphic novels. The first was the Marvel project Marvels, written by Kurt Busiek, which re-created select famous events in the Marvel universe in the eyes of an ordinary civilian, which was a pretty decent concept, but was better as an Alex Ross art book than it was a story, especially to this here reader who was only casually acquainted with such calamitous crises as Gwen Stacy being dropped off a bridge after having seen it happen to Mary-Jane Watson in the movie. (I still don’t know what all that hocus-pocus about the Sentinel robots in that X-Men chapter was about.) His second big hit was a project for DC Comics entitled Kingdom Come, which took your Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Flash, Sandman and a few hundred others, aged them a few decades and made them fight each other. Again, I imagine it would be more fun for seasoned comics fans who actually recognize all the cameos, but the painting was great. All in all, though, while you will never find as detailed and lifelike portrayals of your favourite superheroes as those in the Alex Ross portfolio, I find his art to be much better suited for stand-alone epic imagery than sequential storytelling. In the opening credits to the Spider-Man sequel, however, it is a perfect fit.

Novelist Michael Chabon receives partial credit for the screenplay to Spider-Man 2, which was a significant improvement over Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp’s work on its predecessor. It is hard to discern the extent to which Chabon’s contribution remains in the final cut, but holistically speaking, the impact is noticeable.

Michael Chabon, as I continually inform anyone who will listen, is the guy who got me interested in comic books. (Note that by comic books I don’t mean comic strips – I was weaned on Peanuts from birth – but full-fledged comics, often of the superhero variety, sometimes not; graphic novels and their shorter, monthly kin.) The culprit is that Pulitzer-winner of his, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is a tremendously enjoyable read and alongside J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, my favourite work of literature published in recent years. It is indeed a rarity to find a writer of his calibre who respects the mythology of comics the way he does. If you turn at the last chapter of Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and examine Bill’s monologue about Superman’s critique of the human condition, you can see just what an impact comics had on Quentin Tarantino, and how he longed to express it to a larger audience in a medium that was more firmly entrenched in the mainstream – in his case, film. With Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon pulls off an equivalent in print, weaving a six-hundred-page adventure full of that same reverence for superhero mythology, that same implicit desire to share it with everyone else.

It so happens that back in 1996, before he really exploded on the scene with the likes of Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon was one of many writers approached to tackle the then-in-development-hell X-Men film. His (rejected) proposal, which can be found on his website, is not just your run-of-the-mill screen story treatment; it begins with a full-blown treatise that delineates the appeal of the X-Men into four elements – I particularly like the last one: “Stuff exploding, wild technology, cool powers, fighting. I have this stuff too.” Now that X-Men has actually been made into a film by which I was generally unimpressed, but spawned a surprisingly exhilirating sequel, one looks back and imagines what might have been – but considering that he went on to give us Kavalier & Clay instead, who am I to complain? Happily, it all worked out in the end, and he got to pen a little bit of Marvel’s other A-list franchise, and with admirable results.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay itself spawned a byproduct in the form of a quarterly eighty-page comic paperback, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist – a realization of the fictitious comic that our titular heroes Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay create in Chabon’s novel. Those of you with long memories or a predilection for digging around in the archives may recall that one of this weblog’s first posts was about that very announcement. After months of hunting around comic book retailers in Alberta in vain, I ordered the first two issues from Things From Another World a little while ago; they arrived at the end of May, but other circumstances have precluded me from reviewing them in full… until now.

To be honest, after the trials and tribulations of publication delays and the small problem of retailers not stocking the series, all the hype for Escapist #1 culminated in a bit of a letdown, perhaps because it was almost too conventional. The book is an anthology of six stories, with a few written segments of invented history interspersed throughout to continue the masquerade that the Escapist is or ever was a real comic book hero that has now been rediscovered by the “history” recounted in Kavalier & Clay. The first one, “The Passing of the Key”, is an origin story that faithfully visualizes Part I, Chapter 8 of the novel – one of the best parts of the original text, a breathtaking encapsulation of comic book panels in the power of prose written in the present tense, a passage that made one wish the comic was real. Well, now the comic is real, and this may sound harsher than I intend, but the book was better.

Make no mistake – the story as it unfolds in twenty pages of full colour is still a fun read – but the scene that stood as originally written in words and words alone made you believe that the art, the story, and the sheer thrill of escapism in that twenty pages were revolutionary. Perhaps this is a consequence of being desensitized to the present-day quality of comic book art now that every budding penciller has had ample time to idolize the visionary Jack Kirby, but the one thing the Escapist cannot escape here is the feeling of being a little ordinary. Part of it is that outside the context of the novel, the thematic significance of various elements are lost – Tom Mayflower’s crutch an expression of Sammy’s battle with polio, the entire concept of the character founded on Joe’s escape artistry and flight from the Nazis, the very idea of escapism as a human necessity.

See, this is what happens when the first two comic books you ever read are Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which are generally agreed to be the two greatest works of comic art of all time and all time yet to come (a claim that, in my brief experience with comics, remains to my knowledge entirely true): you set your standards too high.

Also in Escapist #1 are “Reckonings”, a very contemporary-style and almost dialogue-free retelling of Luna Moth’s own origin story; “Sequestered”, a lighthearted read where the Escapist fights for justice in the form of jury duty, and the best entry in the volume; “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…”, a mediocre allegory of Joseph McCarthy that never quite connects; “The Escapegoat”, an interesting two-page foray into kids’ comics by way of animal personification; and “Prison Break”, a darker sort of story where the Escapist goes undercover in a maximum-security prison, which features the Saboteur, another character from the novel. The entire project is an enjoyable adaptation, but is unlikely to entice anyone who has not read Chabon’s magnum opus. Of course, in my humble opinion, anyone who has not read Chabon’s magnum opus should remedy that with the utmost immediacy.

The big payoff, however, is in Escapist #2. Part of the original concept of the Escapist comic anthologies was to parallel the evolution of the comic as depicted in Kavalier & Clay, and thus capture a stylistic history of comic books in general. While the first volume hints at this – “The Passing of the Key” has the angular simplicity of the 1930s, the cornball atmosphere in “Sequestered” is reminiscent of the ’60s Batman television series starring Adam West, and “The Escapegoat” is a conceptual children’s work – it is in Escapist #2 that we really see the art branch out into wildly divergent aesthetics, a postmodern collage that finally distinguishes this series from the other comics on the market. The quality of the stories also shows improvement, some of them tackling the motives of heroes and villains in the same abstract, conceptual fashion as the symbolic conflicts in the book.

This collection begins with a Luna Moth story, “The Mechanist!”, the highlight of which is the chaotic pencil work by Bill Sienkiewicz, partially sprayed with colours that run all over the place. The approach is fresh, unconventional, and welcome. But what follows it is the best story in either Escapist volume, “The Lady or the Tiger”, by Glen David Gold (who authored the immensely entertaining novel Carter Beats The Devil). With fine pencilling by Gene Colan underlining a dark and solemn colour palette, it is a moody superhero love story that touches on many of the same ideas of personal desires and responsibility that we see in the two Spider-Man films. The writing is characteristic of an established and respected author, whose one novel to date has very similar appeal to Chabon’s own work.

Then comes “Divine Wind”, a story done in Japanese manga, which is by itself fairly standard but a decent take on the cultural cross-pollination we have already seen with Japanese comics, and which is still quite relevant considering projects such as the Indian Spider-Man. “300 Fathoms Down”, in the style of the Modern Era, brings an aging Escapist out of retirement for a Cold War mission; it is the most conventional of the lot. Escapist #2 concludes with “Old Flame”, a Luna Moth story that does the most we have yet seen with her out-of-costume alter-ego, the librarian Judy Dark.

On the strength of the second volume, I will very likely order The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #3 when it is released next week. This one features the cover art that is a source of controversy and a key element in the novel, the Joe Kavalier drawing of the Escapist decking Adolf Hitler – only drawn by Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy. Hopefully it exhibits the same kind of creative daring that made Escapist #2 worthwhile; of all the styles of sequential art out there, many have yet to be explored.

Oh, right… Spider-Man 2. Next post, I promise.