Two Michaels -- Chabon and Ondaatjee -- in San Francisco

On consecutive days, I heard two authors surnamed Michael whose body of work I have followed from their first novels, both of whom I have heard in person before more than once. I purchased multiple copies both of Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh and of Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and gave them away. I was definitely not the only one to discover the writings of either, and each went on to win a big award: Chabon the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Ondaatje the Man Booker Prize for The Englilsh Patient (which also became a multiple award-winning film; alas the film of Kavalier and Clay that was set to be directed by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours), starring Tobey Maguire has not gone into production, and the film of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- with Peter Sarsgaard, Nick Nolte, Jon Foster, and Mena Suvari -- which was shown at Sundance this year, does not yet have a distributor and is reputedly not very good).

Rather than the standard issue book appearance all-black wardrobe, Michael Chabon was wearing a pink shirt and blue jeans. He has the wispy goatee of the author photo for Gentlemen of the Road.

Chabon read part of the introduction to Maps and Legends and "Diving into the wreck," his memoir (reprinted in that book) of giving up on ever being able to pull together a sci-fi opus titled Fountain City and beginning what became Wonder Boys in his apartment on 29th Street (between Sanchez and Noe) in San Francisco, while his wife prepared to take the California bar exam.

Before taking questions, Chabon reeled off his FAQ answers. The updates on screen adaptation sof his novels, I've already related. The favorite writers he mentioned were Edgar Allen Poe, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, and a fourth I've forgotten. In the opening chatper to Maps and Legends those he mentioned as providing entertainment included Flaubert, Henry James, Kafka, Melville, and Proust -- rather undercutting the entertainment/high literature distinction, or at least moving some literary heavyweights into the colum of insurgents, though it there was ever a priest of literature it was Flaubert...

A few months back (behind the same lectern) , I heard Oakley Hall, who had been head of the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine say that he had taught Chabon nothing, that Chabon was such a good writer when he arrived that he stimulated the rest of his class/cohort to do better work than they likely would otherwise have done.

Chabon recalled the opportunity to work on his writing that the MFA program allowed as crucial. He also related that when he took in the manuscript of what would become The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Hall encouraged him, but asked many searching and specific "Why is this here?" questions. Chabon recalled that in his first draft he added several new characters in each chapter who then did not appear again. Under Hall's guidance, he cut them. Chabon also recalled that Hall asked him what he meant in the manuscript by saying that the father of one of the two main young male characters "looked like a gangster" meant and then conveyed his disappointment when Chabon answered that it meant that the man was burly. Hall suggested that it would be interesting if the character was a gangster, and the suggestion was implemented (with excellent results IMO).

I think one can reconcile "I learned a lot" with "I taught nothing," in that the master did not tell the apprentice what to do (how to write a novel, what to put into a chapter), but through socratic dialogue led him to write a crisper novel.

Chabon recalls being inspired by both The Great Gatsby and Goodbye, Columbus to structure his first novel as the tale of a summer, in starting a draft before going to Irvine, very unsure that he could write a novel. (He also recalls being encouraged that neither one is very long.)

His advice for young writers is to experience the world (which need not involve travel) and to read. Writers of every age should read and younger writers these days often seem to want to be writers without having read much. Urging reading not just what one likes seems to me not to fit that well with his advocacy for entertainment, but I think that he has not broken loose very far from the valuation of Literature. There is also considerable irony in Chabon's impatience with what I see as the New Yorker story mold -- "contemporary, quotidian, plotless moment-of-truth revelations" -- in that he excels in production of such stories. I like his wilder Yiddish novels, but have been underwhelmed by his genre fiction (Summerland, The Final Solution, Gentlemen of the Road). I also think it odd that Chabon would have imbibed the condescension toward "genre fiction" entertainment in that Oakley Hall wrote acclaimed westerns and mystery novels (Warlock, the Bret Harte series).

An older woman asked if he picked out the shirt he was wearing or was dressed by his wife. He said he picked it out and asked if she liked it, then said that he's always liked pink and was amused that a woman in Berkeley (where he lives) stopped him on the street and told him he was brave. He was puzzled and she explained that he was brave to wear pink. In Berkeley! He did not think that was notably brave, but took the compliment.

---

Michael Ondaatje also broke the all-black costuming, wearing a light-blue shirt, dark gray slacks, a sweater-vest between dark blue and dark gray. Although he did not read in a monotone, I found his reading boring. (He did not look up often.) I thought he sounded Canadian and looked more Dutch than Sinhalese. He also seems to have aged more than I'd expect in the years since he was here with the paperback edition of Anil's Ghost. I hope that this is not an indication of physical maladies -- and not just because I am greedy for more Ondaatje novels!

He said that he begins with a few vague character and builds a story around them. I asked him what was the kernel of Divisadero, what of it he wrote first. He did not specify what he wrote first, but said that he wanted to write about a "nuclear family" that wasn't nuclear. He was interested in getting away from those with whom one grows up and then encountering them later (the return of Anil in Anil's Ghost seems to me also to address this, along with Ondaatje's own family memoir triggered by revisiting Sri Lanka, Running in the Family.

Asked if he could still write poems while working on a novel, Ondaatje said that he used to be able to do so, but can't now.

Asked if he works out or charts out the plot in advance of writing a novel, he exclaimed that if he knew what a book was about, where it was going, he wouldn't write it, that discovery is the main pleasure of writing a novel. He also said that he does research as he goes along, not wanting to be constrained in advance. Again the pleasures of discovery and not too much knowing. And he writes in longhand.

Asked why he set his most recent novel, Divisadero, in Northern California, he said that he was here (at Stanford) at the time and was and is very taken by the landscape "south of Petaluma" (I have no idea why that is the northern boundary and no one asked him.)

He claimed that he liked the San Francisco street name "Divisadero" in part because it has even more vowels than his last name. It seems magical to him. (When I lived west of it, I often found Divisadero the border between fog and sun, as if the fog was stopped by the name.)

The last person on whom he called inthe Q&A was a Chinese-American woman who instead of a question told him that The English Patient was the first novel she read in English. She had grown up during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and felt isolated in America and interpreted the marooned "English patient" as evidence that being displaced is a common human condition and was cheered by that. Hers seemed a quite handsome tribute and a very satisfying way to end the author-audience dialogue.

---

From having heard each Michael at least three times, I am sure that an event with Michael Chabon will be more entertaining than one with Michael Ondaatje. Chabon has an exuberance that is cheering and has the timing of a first-rate stand-up comic. Not that Ondaatje lacks a sense of irony, but he is less ingratiating. Moreover, Ondatjee's fiction is consistently great, whereas Chabon's is uneven in my estimation. Both are very gifted writers whose work is well worth buying and reading IMO.