NOVELBUILDER

THE BALTIMORE SUN

NEW YORK

All the seats are taken half an hour before he is due to arrive. Green velvet ropes hold back all the throngs who will have to stand. Two NYPD cruisers are parked out front for security. Men with walkie-talkies track his every move.

It is a few minutes after 7, on a chilly night in early May, when Michael Chabon steps off an escalator onto the fourth floor of the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. At the first sight of his unruly brown hair, the crowd of 600 erupts in whistles and applause.

Striding to the podium with a sheepish, astonished grin on his face, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has been called the pre-eminent novelist of his generation responds with child-like wonder: "Wow."

Only a handful of writers of literary fiction in the country can generate such rock-star electricity. That Michael Chabon is one of them -- that he has reached the height of American literature and commands seven-figure book deals and the respect of the fiercest critics -- is a direct result, he says, of a childhood spent in a nowhereland between Baltimore and Washington.

That would be Columbia, Md., a town most would consider placid, even boring, but where Chabon learned how visions become real. His family moved to the planned community in 1970, and the 7-year-old Chabon was given a map of what Columbia was to be. As he grew up, through middle school and high school, he watched a town take shape from nothing -- a phenomenon that had a profound impact on him as a writer.

"It was just this incredibly powerful demonstration of what an imagination could accomplish in the real world," he says over a recent breakfast (doughnuts, plain) at the Red Flame diner in midtown Manhattan. He's writer-chic in a pink striped shirt, designer jeans and gray-rimmed glasses.

Chabon (pronounced SHAY-bon) tacked the Columbia map on his bedroom wall and consulted it every morning. In the afternoons, he and his friends would ride bikes over the clay from which homes would grow and explore the giant holes excavated in the earth that would become basements and swimming pools.

"It was like an act of magic," he says. "It was like somebody saying abracadabra. And here, in this place where there was nothing, there is now a house and a shopping center and a pool."

He remembers seeing the trucks drive up, after a series of houses was completed, with their rolls of sod and tiny trees with burlap sacks tied around their roots, and suddenly there would be grass and trees. And it was all on the master plan. The plan said something was going to happen, and then it did.

"It made this powerful, magical impression on me that you could say you were going to do something and, in a way, all you needed to do was name it," he says, recalling the names of his own childhood -- a street called Eliot Oaks, a neighborhood called Longfellow, a village called Harper's Choice. "By naming streets, by naming villages, by naming neighborhoods ... by doing that, you could cause things to come into existence."

Imagining survivors

In a way, that's what Chabon, 43, has done with The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a murder mystery set in a world that doesn't exist but almost did. He supposes that a plan actually proposed by the U.S. Department of the Interior during the Second World War -- to create a Jewish homeland in Alaska -- had come to be, and that the Holocaust had claimed the lives of 2 million Jews, not 6 million.

Those 4 million who survived, in Chabon's world, brought the Yiddish language, culture and traditions to this new home. Chabon creates for them a rich cityscape filled with chess halls, doughnut shops, greasy diners, Jewish mobsters and fleabag hotels. The streets, the buildings, the history -- it is all imagined by Chabon from the ground up.

"I'm doing in this book, on paper, what James Rouse and the Working Group did in the early 1960s," he says. "I stopped short of actual construction."

Creating the book took almost as long as the building of Columbia itself. Chabon's last major novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, was published in 2000. While he has worked on other projects since then, the new novel still took five years and four drafts. At one point, he switched the narration from first-person to third-person, prompting a major rewrite.

"It doesn't all come easily and it's not just me sitting down and writing these beautiful sentences and then I'm done and it gets published," he says. He has been particularly open about the difficulties of writing -- he once threw out a 600-page novel he couldn't get to work -- because, he says, "I hate mystification."

Before his reading at the Barnes & Noble, he encouraged the audience to ask him about anything -- "relationships, dating advice, investment strategies." Mostly, though, they were there to adore him. Many brought multiple books, and he signed for 2 1 / 2 hours, until closing time.

Chabon has become a literary celebrity in a digital world, bridging the gulf between high and low culture, bringing together in one place -- like the Barnes & Noble the other night -- the young and the old, gay and straight, downtown scenesters and uptown socialites, brown, black and white. Somehow, they are all his people.

'Dances with words'

It can be surprising, and liberating, to hear of Chabon's struggles, because the breadth of his work can give a different impression. He writes comic books. He writes children's books. He writes about literary fiction for the New York Review of Books. He writes about handbags for Details. He writes essays. He writes screenplays. He writes detective stories. And he writes novels -- sprawling, epic novels that are, sometimes all at once, tender, heartbreaking and hilarious.

"I've always felt that Michael sort of dances with words where other people wrestle with them," says Steve Kloves, who adapted Chabon's Wonder Boys (1995) for film and wrote the first four Harry Potter screenplays. "Some of his sentences go on as long as a football field, but you always know where you are. You're never confused."

Readers have rewarded him. His publisher said the new novel will make its debut at No. 2 on next week's New York Times best-seller list and has an initial print run of 200,000 copies -- huge for a literary fiction title. HarperCollins won the book in a reported four-way, seven-figure bidding war.

Despite all this, Chabon remains endearingly modest about his obvious talents. At breakfast, he pulled out a copy of that day's New York Times and opened it to a full-page color ad promoting his new book. "Look at this!" he said, astonished that anyone makes such a fuss over him. In writing his monthly column for Details, he gets worried if he doesn't get feedback within a day or two of filing.

"He'll actually be a little concerned about if he did something wrong with it," says Details editor Dan Peres. "I'll get such a kick out of it because there's this neurosis that just stands in juxtaposition to his talent."

In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Chabon's delight in the language is on full display. He spares no detail in sketching even the most ancillary characters, and he uses similes like bakers use flour.

A few examples: "Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire." "Bina looks like hell, only hotter." A person on the street is "beardless and wearing a straw boater more scandalous than any French novel." A pair of black and brushed-steel Italian spectacles looks like "the kind worn in thoughtful interviews by aging British rock guitarists."

And this, describing a man's despair after the death of his brother: "the dwindling contents of a bottle of slivovitz on the kitchen table beside him marking like a barometer the plummeting atmosphere of his grief."

Learning his culture

Chabon's protagonist, Detective Meyer Landsman, is a cynic and a disbeliever. "To Landsman," Chabon writes, "heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery."

But the author himself is less absolute. He was raised a practicing Jew and now considers himself agnostic. He doesn't keep kosher and says he's "not religious at all" but "it's important to me to try to integrate what I can -- the parts of it that make sense to me or feel useful to me."

He says he thinks about what it means to atone at Yom Kippur, for instance, not for its religious significance but because the reflection is meaningful to him. "It's important to me because it is my heritage and I just feel the weight of those 6,000 years of history and tradition and I'm proud to be Jewish."

But The Yiddish Policemen's Union is not intended as a comment on current Middle East politics. Chabon says he was more concerned with the loss of Yiddish culture than with the question of Israel itself. (Indeed, a major source of tension in the book is the coming "Reversion," when the Jewish district in Alaska will be returned to U.S. control and many of its residents forced to leave.)

"There might be something almost pathetic in a book like Yiddish Policemen's Union in that it didn't happen," Chabon says. "It's not like that, and most people did die and Yiddish is gravely wounded and the world of Yiddish is just gone basically -- Yiddish cinema, Yiddish poetry, Yiddish literary and scientific journals. All that stuff that once was is gone."

Chabon, though, has managed to create a wholly believable world in which all that stuff did survive. Part of his motivation for writing the book was simply to educate himself on Yiddish culture, and he spent days holed up in libraries doing research. He had felt ashamed, he says, to know so little about his heritage.

But after so much research, the time came to allow his vibrant imagination to take over. And it was then, he says, returning to the lessons of his childhood, that the idea of Columbia and of invention guided him. He moved away from Columbia in 1981 after graduating from Howard High School. He went to college in Pittsburgh and graduate school in California.

His family eventually left, too, and Chabon has rarely returned. When he does, though, the experience is intensely moving.

"I remember it so raw and tiny," he says at the end of the interview. "We were talking about those trees that came off the trucks and were this big" -- he cups his hands -- "and now they're these huge, monster trees. It's just a really powerful thing for me to see."

The small town that fired a boy's imagination has changed. But for a writer who creates new worlds for a living, it continues to inspire.

stephen.kiehl@baltsun.com

To hear an interview with Michael Chabon and read an excerpt from his new novel, go to www.baltimoresun.com / Chabon.

An excerpt from "The Yiddish Policemen's Union"

The men standing around in front of the Shpilman house have been muttering and commenting and critiquing the performance, but everybody shuts up. Life wheezes in and out of the lungs of the men standing around, rattles in the snot of their noses. The heat of the lantern vaporizes the snow. The air seems to shatter like a world of tiny windows with a tinkling sound. And Landsman feels something that makes him want to put a hand to the back of his neck. He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery. But in the three-second lull that follows Zimbalist's crying out the name of the rebbe's lost son, Landsman has the feeling that something comes fluttering among them. Dipping down over the crowd of men, brushing them with its wing. Maybe it's just the knowledge, leaping from man to man, of why these two homicide detectives must have come at this hour. Or maybe it's the old power to conjure a name in which their fondest hope once resided. Or maybe Landsman just needs a good night's sleep in a hotel with no dead Jews in it.

Michael Chabon

Born:

May 24, 1963, Washington

Moved to Columbia:

1970

Education:

Bachelor's degree in English, University of Pittsburgh; Master of Fine Arts degree, University of California, Irvine

Resides:

Berkeley, Calif.

Family:

Wife Ayelet Waldman; four children, Sophie, 12, Zeke, 9, Ida-Rose, 5, and Abraham, 4

Novels:

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), Wonder Boys (1995), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)

On growing up in Columbia:

"There was nothing there. There was just a map. There were just these lines on paper and streets with names, all of them drawn from works of American literature. And I remember ... being fascinated by this map and looking around and realizing none of it is there yet and moving there and watching as little by little it all came into being."

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