Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 1, 1995 TAG: 9506020004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HILLEL ITALIE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
``This is a good time for me. There's no doubt about it,'' says the center of all this attention, 31-year-old Michael Chabon. ``I just don't want to jinx it.''
Chabon is a Los Angeles resident and the author of three works of fiction, most recently the novel ``Wonder Boys.'' Right now, he is eating lunch in his Manhattan hotel room, sitting just a few feet away from the crib of his 6-month-old daughter, Sophie.
To call him an acclaimed author would be like identifying Donald Trump as a well-to-do businessman. Reviewing ``Wonder Boys,'' The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani praised Chabon as a ``prodigously gifted young writer'' of ``astonishing poise and control.'' In The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley went even further, crowning him ``the young star of American letters.''
If such admiration makes Chabon sound like an Orson Welles for the publishing industry, that's why the author reacts to it with more than a little superstition. Like Welles, he knows what can go wrong after people call you a genius the first time around.
In 1988, the then-24-year-old author debuted with ``The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,'' a bittersweet novel about a gangster's son trapped in the middle of a romantic triangle (with both a man and a woman).
Bringing Chabon a six-figure advance, ``Mysteries'' became a critical favorite and national best seller. The book was translated into more than a dozen languages, likened both to ``The Great Gatsby'' and ``Catcher in the Rye'' and it established the writer as a literary ``wonder boy.''
Then, like so many other successful first-time authors, from Joseph Heller to Ralph Ellison to Frank Conroy, Chabon got stuck. His problem wasn't ``writer's block,'' but being utterly unblocked, pouring out hundreds of pages for a novel, ``Fountain City,'' that never neared completion.
``I definitely learned something from it. If I hadn't learned something from it, I would look at it as five completely wasted years of my life,'' said Chabon, who did manage to put out a book of short stories, ``A Model World,'' in 1991.
``When something's going well, I know it, even if I have bad days, which I did on this book. Plenty of times I felt I was losing the thread of it, but I never did feel it wasn't the right thing to do, and that's something I never felt writing `Fountain City.' I was always struggling with it. There was never any day at the computer that was fun.''
So when you hear Chabon's new novel is called ``Wonder Boys,'' you know he's making a joke at his own expense. This is a book inspired by failure. It's the story of a middle-aged professor, Grady Tripp, a one-time literary prodigy who has been working for 15 years on a massive, unwieldy novel called, ironically, ``Wonder Boys.''
Grady, lucky fellow, is Chabon's anti-ego, hopeless as a writer and no prize winner in his personal life. His third wife has left him, and his mistress, the chancellor of his college, is carrying his baby. Not only that, he's hooked on pot, suffers from dizzy spells and one of his students has shot and killed the chancellor's blind dog.
``I really think I was trying to measure the distance between me and that guy,'' said Chabon, himself now married for the second time. ``It was almost an attempt to reassure myself that that wasn't going to happen to me.
``Before I knew it, it all coalesced into this character, Grady Tripp, who then, to my surprise, I found myself completely enamored of. I loved being Grady Tripp and talking in his voice and telling his story as his own.''
Beyond the actual story, Chabon brings a great sense of playfulness, even wizardry, to his writing. He loves words for their own sake, slipping in such obscurities as ``contumelious'' (humiliating) and ``ranunculus'' (a type of buttercup). He also loves information: One character in ``Wonder Boys'' not only has compiled a mental checklist of movie stars who committed suicide, but can recite the names alphabetically.
In person, Chabon is, appropriately, a rather princely figure, with his large head and slender build, his pale blue eyes and wavy dark hair. He seems a rather mischievous prince. At his reading, for instance, he was given to occasional nervous glances to the side, as if the real ``Michael Chabon'' had been abducted and the man behind the lectern was an imposter.
The writer was born in 1963 in Washington, D.C., and majored in English at the University of Pittsburgh. As you might guess from his fiction, he likes baseball and movies and his father made him memorize all the presidents of the United States, in order.
Chabon's books also allude to more unfortunate details. When he was in his early teens, his parents divorced, an event that still helps shape his work. As Chabon observed in the short story ``The Little Knife,'' he has long been vulnerable to the ``hazardous radiations of adulthood, of knowledge, of failure itself.''
``It would be inaccurate to say I feel like a failure ... but I have a very keen sense of what failure feels like,'' Chabon said. ``I can see it in its many guises in the people I know, and in myself.
``I've always had sympathy for losers, and people who try and failed. When I was a kid I was always fascinated by the idea of Ferdinand Magellan sailing around the distance of the world, getting killed by those tribesman [in the Philippines].... That to me is the most interesting story.''
by CNB