Ayelet Waldman, with whom he now has four children. They make their home
in Berkeley, California. Several of these biographical details are developed into
major themes in Chabon’s writing: divorce, abandonment, father/son relation-
ships, Jewish identity, and gay relationships.
After struggling with a long second novel, Chabon abandoned it and wrote
Wonder Boys (1995), in part about a novelist struggling with a manuscript that
has ballooned to thousands of pages. It received strong reviews and was made
into a movie starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Katie Holmes, and
Robert Downey Jr. (2000). He has also published two short-story collections,
A Model World and Other Stories (1991) and Werewolves in Their Youth (1999).
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) established him as a major
voice in contemporary fiction, winning the Pulitzer Prize for 2001. Since then,
his published fiction includes a children’s novel, Summerland (2002); a novella
based on an aged (although unnamed) Sherlock Holmes, The Final Solution
(2004); a murder mystery positing an alternate history Jewish community in
Alaska, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007); and an adventure novella, first
serialized in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Gentlemen of the Road
(2007).
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay marks two important turns in
Chabon’s writing. Beginning with it, his novels have moved from having some
Jewish elements to engaging themes often identified as Jewish. In addition, Kava-
lier and Clay marks the beginning of his full-fledged engagement with genre fic-
tion as both subject and style. Feeling that it is under-regarded, his ambition is to
use some of its conventions and topics with strong, careful prose in “real” novels.
This interest has seen fruition through the genre connections of the novels since
Kavalier and Clay and through his editorship of McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury
of Thrilling Tales (2003), McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories
(2004), and a limited series of comic books based on the superheroes created by
his Kavalier and Clay main characters.
Chabon and his wife, a novelist and former lawyer, each entered the discourse
surrounding gender roles and parenting in a major way in 2009. In May of that
year Waldman published Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor
Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. A frequent blogger, Waldman had
initiated a controversy in 2005 when she wrote in an essay that she loves her hus-
band more than her children and believes the relationship between husband and
wife should be primary and the relationship with children secondary. Bad Mother
revisits that controversy and expands on her beliefs that our culture constantly
places guilt on women, regardless of what they do as mothers. Chabon followed
in November with Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband,
Father, and Son. Its interlinked essays form an autobiography focused on the roles
enumerated in its title.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- The theme in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay that most promi-
nently announces itself from the beginning is, as the epigraph from Nathaniel