For a long time, I thought of myself as the kind of Michael Chabon completist whose personal and familial story could be told through my “Chabon shelf.” A cousin gifted me Chabon’s nonfiction collection Maps and Legends as a college graduation gift. My twenties are pretty tidily summarized by where I bought his novels–the Pulitzer-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Squirrel Hill Barnes and Nobles), The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (The Strand Annex in the Financial District), Telegraph Avenue (Powell’s). My nine-year-old son recently and correctly identified the Chabon-written Spiderman 2 as “the best of them, easily.” My brother was an extra in the film adaptation of The Wonder Boys. I could go on.
Chabon’s output has continued to go on, too, quite a bit, to the point that I now question whether it’s possible to be a Chabon completist. His writerly projects have sprouted higher and wider than the family tree of this lapsed Irish-Catholic Pittsburgher. There are comics and young-adult novels, songs and Substacks. If there is a forum for words, Chabon will give it a go.
Unsurprisingly, in each project, he’s a pretty good giver of go’s.
Chabon will appear in Pittsburgh on May 11th with the Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures Series. We recently spent time discussing memes from The Pitt, the degree to which he’s like David Bowie, and whether the world finally has its eyes fully open about the Israeli occupation in Gaza.
This interview has been edited lightly in the way that interviews tend to be edited.
__________________________________________________________________
McGinty: I don’t know to what extent you realize what a long cultural shelf life The Mysteries of Pittsburgh has in this city. There are still people I know who give it as a graduation gift.
Chabon: I have heard that over the years.
McGinty: I still teach it now again, and my own theory for its staying power is that it almost reads like speculative fiction to my students in this really fun way–they get to imagine being a recent grad with these huge emotions and aspirations, but everyone around them is detached from the internet, and so every action they take has to create this big memory and bond that can live beyond the summer and do so without any digital aid. Do you have any personal theories as to why this book of yours has had this incredibly long-lasting appeal?
Chabon: It’s really gratifying. I remember when the book first came out and I went to Pittsburgh to do promotional stuff, and people in the Q and A would say, “Why would you want to set a book in Pittsburgh?” Nobody ever asked me that anywhere else, even Philadelphia.
It’s always like that a little bit in any kind of city that’s not in the limelight all that often, or is beloved by the people who live there but has a reputation they don’t deserve, and then something comes along that showcases it. I see it happening right now on Instagram with The Pitt and Pittsburghers. I see all these videos–if there were an actual yinzer working in that ER, that kind of thing. It helps that both [my book and the show] have the name in the title. Pittsburgh is right there in the title, and I think that meant something and continues to mean something to Pittsburghers. But there was also this incredulity about it—sorry you made this dumb choice to set your book in Pittsburgh and even title it, because nobody outside of Pittsburgh is ever going to want to read this book!
From my point of view, I never hesitated, never doubted for a second that Pittsburgh was a good town to set a book and that it should be in the title.
McGinty: Just to confirm–The Pitt’s rabid online local fandom has reached you? It has crossed your screens?
Chabon: I get a lot of Pittsburgh-related stuff–footage of Pittsburgh in the 40s or 60s or 70s, clips of riding through various neighborhoods, archival kinds of channels. I feel like I’m always being shown a certain amount of Pittsburgh videos in my diet.
McGinty: There’s a number of themes that get ascribed to your work, but to me, I’ve always viewed you, first and foremost, as a stylist. I fell in love with the sentences, which is a nice way of saying I flailed about trying to emulate them for many years. So if you’ll permit me a nerdy writerly question, what’s your relationship like with the sentence these days? Still chasing new ones and surprising yourself? You got old mugs in the cupboard that still do the job?
Chabon: The older I get and the longer I do this–not just as a writer, but as a reader, too–it’s all about the sentences. The pleasure of reading lies in the sentences for me. If they aren’t there for me as a reader, I stop reading. I can’t. I don’t read anything anymore that doesn’t meet whatever my personal standard of a good sentence is, and I have pretty diverse taste. I’ll tolerate and be able to enjoy a lot of different kinds of sentences, from the most sort of ornamented and bejeweled if I feel like it’s being done in a way that’s making the words mean more than they ordinarily mean, but also, I can really love a plain, simple style.
For instance, I’ve been rereading a lot of Elmore Leonard. He is both extremely simple–his sentence structures are very simple and unadorned; very famously, he loathed adverbs–but the sentences are incredibly stylish at the same time. He gets the most impact out of the rather minimal palette that he uses by capturing the flavor of everyday speech in a written sentence that isn’t dialogue by using the gerund form of verbs without bothering to conjugate the verb with the subject. John sitting on his car, looking up at the moon–that’s the entire sentence. So my taste in sentences and style is pretty varied.
When it comes to writing, I just try to stay within the sentence, and have that sentence do all the things it needs to do within the framework or context of a piece of prose fiction. I am telling a story. There needs to be a certain amount of plot, and I’m trying to keep things moving, and there need to be dramatized scenes. I’m definitely a believer in classic scene construction in fiction, and the way that I instrumentalize all of my concerns with point of view and character and plot and setting is through the sentence. The sentence is a kind of fractal of the whole so that every sentence ideally contains, in some way, the novel that I’m writing in so far as it contains the tone, the atmosphere, the emotion.
Beyond that, I’m constantly on cliche patrol, because cliche is dead language, or it’s language used in a dead way. So I don’t have any death in my sentences. I’m not gonna let there be any dead spots. You have to constantly be interrogating them, although at this point, it’s so not a conscious process. You have to be interrogating every word that shows up and reports for duty in a sentence, and you have to look it over and say “your shoes are untied” or “you missed a button.” Every word has to pass review and justify its presence, and not only belong on a semantic level to help the meaning but also to wake up all the other words around it. The words have to be in relation to each other in some way is…it doesn’t have to be totally unexpected–that’s probably impossible, you’d have complete semantic nonsense. But all the words have to be in relation to each other in a way that is somehow asking each of them to do a little more than they might ordinarily be asked to do.
McGinty: I love the phrase “wake up all the words around it.” And yes, Elmore Leonard does just that in a way that’s very different from you or me. I was recently at a book event in Cleveland, and I asked the owner what she had that was random or new or something related to our conversation. She knew I was a union leader and so she handed me Leonard’s never-before-published Picket Line. There’s a word in every sparse sentence that’s waking up the others–a distinct bit of style in every little line.
Chabon: Yes, ultimately, it is conscious. You do learn how to do it. The way you learn how to do it is by writing and reading, which is the necessary practice for writing, but on some level, with Elmore Leonard, he was born with it. There’s just no doubt that he was born with an ear for language–whatever that word ‘ear’ means. It’s a sense of the cadence of words. As soon as you start trying to describe it, it’s so hard, it’s so slippery. There’s a couple of good attempts–Ursula K. Leguin tried over the years to write about cadence and what that means and how she uses it. It’s a thing like having perfect pitch. You start out with a sort of predisposition to notice words that strike you and sort of stick in your mind. You might find yourself thinking about a word all day long after you hear it for the first time. You maybe become interested in etymologies, in regional differences, in the way people use words differently in different parts of the country. There’s a certain kind of mind that is structured from the beginning to learn to write with all this in mind.
McGinty: You spoke earlier of having diverse taste. You’ve also worked in a remarkably diverse range of genres and forms. You’re sort of constantly branching out. In an attempt to more fully embody my Rust Belt Appalachian self, I’m trying to learn how to fish, so I’ve been reading lots of Thomas McGuane—
Chabon: Oh I love him. He’s such a good stylist.
McGinty: Yeah, it’s out of fucking control–the intro to The Longest Silence is probably the best thing I’ve read this year. McGuane has this line about how fishing isn’t about gear and trophy fish and stupid selfies on the water; he says that a true angler just wants to deepen the experience– to stay a little longer, try a different method, ask a different question to a different person. I think one of the biggest compliments I can pay you is that across your career, you really seem to be attempting to deepen the experience of being a writer, whether via songwriting, screenwriting, of course novels, which I guess are home base…
What spurs you into these different projects? What are you finding in the depths of these new forms?
Chabon: There’s multiple components. For one thing, if you’re interested in words and language, and what happens when you put words in a certain order and not some other order, and how different effects are accomplished by different writers through words, then then you start to pay attention wherever that process may be going on around you–not just in the pages of books.
For me, it relates to piece I recently wrote about my teacher, the late Ed Ochester at Pitt. As soon as I started listening to A.M. Top 40 radio, around the age of eight, nine, ten years old, I was paying attention to the lyrics as much as the music, and puzzling over the lyrics, trying to figure them out. Initially, because I was a kid and listening to songs about “adult” concerns, I didn’t really understand what it meant when he says it never rains in Southern California–does he really mean it never rains in Southern California, or is this hyperbole?
So then lyrics became a mode of instruction. You can learn a lot from the lyrics to “The Flight Tonight” by Joni Mitchell–she’s using description. She’s using simile. She’s characterizing people by the way they talk and what they say to each other. She’s speaking a scene. There’s an economy that is forced upon a song lyricist by the relative brevity of a pop song. Or a line like “little old lady got mutilated late last night”–that line from “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon is funny, it’s descriptive, it’s helping tell the story of the song, which is that there’s a werewolf on the rampage in London, and it also is incredibly, beautifully alliterative, and has assonance as well.
So wherever you look, you start noticing poetic effect. You start looking for it because you’re curious to educate yourself and see how all the people who are really good at it get the effects that they get. You can see it in a lot of music–Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis, who started out in a jazz context, but can play classical too, because they needed to, because it’s a whole other way of approaching a language that they already know how to speak a dialect of, and once you learn how to speak one dialect, you keep going and learn other languages and other dialects. I think it’s hard to stop.
McGinty: You’re reminding me that I went to a Wynton Marsalis talk when I was in college, and this this was a time where I was relentlessly imitating the sentences of you and Wallace and other stylists, and [Marsalis] was talking about composition, and flow, and structure, and a whole range of artistic containers far beyond the sentence, and I thought: oh [expletive], I need to do more than just write sentences. There’s more to build even inside a book full of sentences, which I probably could have learned from your books, but I needed to hear it from elsewhere.
Chabon: Once you start learning and seeing the connections, it’s really hard to stop. I think of still photographers who become film directors–like Kubrick. Or the painter David Hockney, who is such a great example. He’s this incredible set designer, and it’s a very different thing to be standing in your studio painting a canvas, versus working in a theatrical production or opera or ballet, standing with hundreds of craftspeople all around you, all the time, and you’re just getting orders and implementing your designs. It’s a very different experience, but it’s allowing you to use your experience and your knowledge in a different way. I think it’s important to keep trying new things. The best way to not get stuck is to not give people the opportunity to stick you somewhere and leave you there. Find a new thing. Be willing to fail.
McGinty: A certain lovely rite of passage for writers in this region is to get compared to you. I’m wondering if there’s any comparisons that still light you up.
Chabon: It’d probably be getting compared to somebody who’s not a writer, or at least not a fiction writer–like being compared to a musician that I admire, or an athlete. When someone reaches outside of writing to describe how they responded to something I’ve written, that’s always pretty satisfying.
I always remember this pretty negative review of my first short story collection, A Model World. I think it was in Time Magazine, Newsweek, one of those. It was not a long review, and it was fairly tepid to negative, but he liked one story in the book–a story called “Smoke” that is actually set in Pittsburgh, and it’s about a funeral of a Pittsburgh Pirates player. Other players are at the funeral, and it’s from the point of view of a journeyman pitcher for the team. The reviewer liked that story and then said something like “this is where he’s showing what he might be able to do. Smoke indeed, from a fireballing young phenomena.” And I loved that actually, just the use of that baseball imagery.
Another time, someone was talking about how I’ve written in all these different genres–science fiction and crime fiction and children’s fiction, historical adventure, blah blah blah–and he compared me to David Bowie moving from glam to electronic to the plastic soul period.
McGinty: That’s one you take.
Chabon: Yes, very gratifying to be compared to David Bowie.
McGinty: I don’t see much point asking your thoughts on Palestine, because you’ve been quite publicly against the Israeli occupation in Gaza for over a decade. I’m more wondering what it feels like to have a personal advocacy issue gradually take up more space in the discourse, which, in theory, is a progression that advocates of all kinds aspire toward. But I imagine it’s a mixture of deep sorrow and anger. Perhaps a stray touch of “see, I told you it was this bad” personal vindication. Frustration at others for failing to listen. Frustration with yourself for not trying different methods earlier. I wouldn’t know how it feels in 2026 to see this cultural and political shift after years of op-eds and collections. You would.
Chabon: Among the least useful, least helpful stances is to say I told you so. To say yeah, I knew it, this is what I’ve been saying for years.
It’s a horrible feeling. It doesn’t feel good to me. There’s no weird satisfaction in it. I hate it.
I really do believe that many people whose eyes were shut–who either willfully closed their eyes or had their eyes closed for them by a mass media propaganda campaign that’s been going on, depending how you view it, since as far back as the early 1920’s, early 1930’s–have opened their eyes or had their eyes opened for them. Even if they won’t say it publicly yet, they are starting to acknowledge it to themselves and are willing to acknowledge it in their very small circles of people. The mask is off. People see what Israel is doing, what they’ve been doing. They see the complicity of the government, of course, and the complicity of the voting public who have kept a series of regimes–not just the Netanyahu regime, but in some respect, all the preceding regimes as well have participated in this massive land grab.
I hate that it has taken this horrendous, appalling, scandalous disaster that has killed so many innocent people. I hate that it has taken that to open people’s eyes. But I do believe that it has. I do believe the eyes once open won’t be able to be shut again.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Lee.
