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Some people would call it a charmed life anyway. Chabon has been a published novelist almost from the moment he completed the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine. The manuscript he produced for his master's degree was passed along by his thesis adviser to an agent. Eventually it became The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the 1988 book that got him noticed immediately as a young writer on the rise. "I've been very lucky all my life," he says. "You can't help but feel that you don't deserve it. You're an impostor, impersonating a successful person."
Chabon's rise stalled for a while as he spent nearly five years on an ever enlarging but never completed novel. In time he put the ballooning manuscript aside and started a new novel about a pot-smoking college professor with his own long-unfinished novel. Wonder Boys was a wry 1995 book that became a witty movie last year with Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr. But it was Kavalier & Clay that made the superabundance of Chabon's gifts superapparent. The story of two boys who invent a Nazi-bashing comic-book hero during World War II, it is an irresistible tale of a lost New York City that is also a superb coming-of-age story. Chabon has just completed the screenplay for a forthcoming film version to be produced by Scott Rudin, who also produced Wonder Boys.
For any of the many writers going to kids' books these days, the Harry pot of gold may be reason enough to go. But children's literature, with its freedom from the constraints of reality, was a natural place for Chabon to turn. Tom Wolfe may think that the 19th century social novel is the only true model for fiction these days, but Chabon has other ideas. For one thing, he wants literary fiction to enjoy the liberties of fantasy genres like science fiction or horror. His next novel will be about a detective in an alternative present day in which the Jewish state is not the Israel we know but a Yiddish-speaking homeland carved out of Alaska.
"I am not going to become a fantasy writer or a writer of science fiction," he says. "But I'm going to ignore the conventions of literary fiction as much as I can. And whatever kind of fiction comes out of that, I'm just going to hope I can bring readers along with me." They can start the trip at Summerland.