BOOKS: Gentlemen of the Road: Michael Chabon

Mar. 6—What are we to make of Michael Chabon?

Some have described Chabon as part of the great voices of a now aging new generation of writers; Chabon is often named with Jonathan Franzen of "The Corrections" fame.

Chabon wrote the wonderful "Wonder Boys" and won the Pulitzer for his epic "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay."

But what to make of his subject matter? "Wonder Boys" and his debut novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," follow the expected plots of angst and life in the latter years of the 20th century.

But "Kavalier and Clay" followed the lives of magicians and comic book creators, three-dimensional characters who escaped the Holocaust to create escapist fare of two-dimensional superheroes.

Chabon's "The Final Solution" is a tale of what might be an aged Sherlock Holmes employed in a Holocaust-era case of detection.

Chabon penned the acclaimed "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," a curious blend of noir crime pulp and what-if fantasy with its setting of a Jewish state positioned in the frozen tundra of Alaska after World War II rather than Israel in the Middle East.

With "Gentlemen of the Road," Chabon tackles a completely different genre, possibly the most unexpected. With "Gentlemen of the Road," Chabon writes "a tale of adventure," with sword play, colorful characters of titanic melancholies, sacked cities, marauding armies and sprawling landscapes.

The novel is more the stuff of pulp legend Robert E. Howard than the expected work of an expected titan of modern letters. More power to Michael Chabon.

"Gentlemen of the Road" is a beautifully written book. It has the full flavor of an adventure novel with marvelous literary twists and turns that are reminiscent of the best Neil Gaiman ideas.

It also adheres to Chabon's Jewish themes; this novel, he says in an Afterword, had the working title of "Jews with Swords." The Afterword also allows Chabon to tackle the subject of why he has taken such an unexpected literary swerve.

"If this impulse seems an incongruous thing in a writer of the ('serious,' 'literary') kind of which I had for a long time hoped to be taken, it might be explained — as I think the enduring popularity of all adventure fiction might be explained — with simple reference to the kind of person I am."

As he continues, Chabon has never wielded a sword, infiltrated a palace, nor has he experienced many of the experiences of his characters in "Gentlemen of the Road" but he, and readers, can experience these events vicariously through writing and reading adventure stories.

Robert E. Howard remains a master of the genre, but Michael Chabon brings a breath of fresh air to its conventions. Again, more power to him. Writers should write what they feel compelled to say, and there can only be so much to say about the modern literary convention of a disconsolate man with a complex inner life mired in the everyday struggles of contemporary living.

Bring on the adventure! Bring on the stories!