Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Michael Chabon: Bad for Michael Chabon?
Monday, April 30, 2007

Writing is rewriting. The old adage takes on new meaning with Michael Chabon's new book. The WSJ reports on the near-death catastrophe of Chabon's first book since his Pulitzer.

"I shudder now when I think that I would have published the old draft," says Mr. Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." Instead, after consultations with his editor, he spent about eight months reworking the entire book -- a murder mystery set in a fictional Yiddish-speaking Jewish homeland in Alaska. He added a flashback structure and pared down the language into a hard-boiled, Yiddish-inflected patois. "I felt like I had to invent a whole new dialect of English to finish it," he says.

Next week, after five years, four drafts, two trips to Alaska and a title change, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," will arrive in stores. While long gestation periods and multiple drafts aren't unusual in the publishing industry, the time and effort expended on behalf of Mr. Chabon's vision are illustrations of the book's importance to HarperCollins, which won it in a four-way, seven-figure auction in 2002, when it was little more than a one-and-a-half-page proposal. Now the company has again bet big, printing 200,000 copies of the finished product, Mr. Chabon's first full-length adult novel since winning the Pulitzer in 2001. "The stakes are high," says Jonathan Burnham, HarperCollins's publisher, "for Michael and all of us."

Everything about this story makes me happy, especially that Michael (whom I met briefly and had dinner with more than a decade ago but have had no contact with since) is willing to discuss this process openly. It makes me admire him even more, and I deeply admire Kavalier & Klay (even with the overwrought last third). I hope writing teachers teach this article in their schools and I hope the many writers out there who contact me will listen to the honesty in this piece. Old adages aside, one adage I preach a lot is that a writer has to learn to be a good reader of his own material. Maybe this self-honesty (even his point about being defensive at first) is why Michael Chabon is a great writer.

Labels: Books, Judaism

Posted by B Feiler at 8:01 AM
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