Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon

The thing that taught me most about literature as a kid was the study of essays, a form of literature that seems to have disappeared from the 21st century classroom. I remember greeting a lesson involving essays with sheer delight. Here was an opportunity to analyse, to look at structure and language, to argue a case.

So I was pleased to buy a copy of this new book from Michael Chabon, which is a series of essays about reading and writing. I’ve read only one, with a pencil in hand and joy in my heart. It’s like sitting down to a great meal. Yum yum.

The argument, much of it verbatim, presented in Trickster in a Suit of Lights is:

Entertainment has a bad name – it means junk and too much junk is bad for you according to clever people.

But maybe these intelligent serious people are wrong. Maybe the problem with entertainment is that we have accepted such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment and as a result mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained.

He also says entertainment gets a bad rap: because it’s pleasurable it’s somehow tacky. This hasn’t been helped by mass production of entertainment leading to shoddy products.

Chabon wants to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.

He thinks it’s time writers reclaimed the role as entertainers and suggests short story as an ideal way to do this.

Short stories, though, suffer from a sort of constipation of form that results from the abandonment of genres – rather than writing things like horror, science fiction, fantasy and other genre pieces in their short stories, writers are focusing instead on the trendy and overworked ‘moment of truth’ story. Readers are dying of boredom because every story is the same.

Genre he says is regarded as unworthy of a serious reader’s attention because it implies formulaic writing. He says much of this emphasis on the formulaic and conventional stems from the approach of publishers and booksellers who use genre largely as a marketing tool, complete with trashy covers and standardized imagery. Some mainstream writers do occasionally break out and write something with a suspiciously genre-like focus but the publishers treat these books differently and they never appear as, say, science fiction because they are presented and located as literature. He would like to see all fiction set on shelves together.

Chabon goes on to say that accomplished writers who do work in the genres use the formulae and rules as the basis for playing, as an opportunity to flout, invert, break or ignore the rules.

Developing this theme of mockery and inversion, he moves to discuss the Trickster in literature, a character who appears in a multitude of literary traditions and who is always associated with borders and crossroads. Trickster goes where the action is; indeed many writers also ply their trade there, in the no mans land between genres, the land the Trickster inhabits, stirring things up, breaking the conventions, undoing history and challenging the nature of art. And here at last we have entertaining and interesting writing.

A satisfying exercise. I look forward to the rest of the book.