Kavalier and Clay impressed me right away, even before I ever even held a copy in my hand, because for a year or so after it came out, I kept seeing people reading it. In the subway, in the park, everywhere. This was a book that people really wanted to read. So I bought it and read it and was duly impressed. It’s a great book: DeLillo without the irony, if you will. The book Don DeLillo might have written had he been Michael Chabon and had the interests Chabon had instead of the interests that DeLillo has. Whatever.
More recently, I read (most of) Chabon’s first book of stories, A Model World. I was into it for about a story and a half, and then I realized that these were all John Updike stories. Don’t get me wrong here–Updike is my hero, and it’s pretty impressive to me that he continues to write stories even after he’s no longer around. And i don’t really hold it against him (Updike) that he, like Gore Vidal, couldn’t come up with good book titles. Chabon, though, he’s a good titler. But I couldn’t get into his book. It was just too weird that he was writing Updike stories.
But then I read Chabon’s second book of stories, Werewolves in their Youth. Much better. Good to see someone getting better at what he does.
Chabon admits as much about his early stuff, describing those stories as "plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew." Look for an essay that introduced one of the McSweeney's Thrilling Tales anthologies, also available in his collection Maps and Legends.
Try this link, too.
If you think you saw a lot of people reading Kav and Clay when it first came out in Columbia, just triple that for what San Francisco looked like. Chabon is Berkeley's boy wonder, and I lived in SF when that book was released. Those were beautiful days. It's one of my favorite books.
Perhaps strangely, I also quite like The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It has the distinct flavor of a Raymond Chandler novel, but all the love inherent in Chabon's work.
That reminds me, somehow . . . I really hated Jonathan Lethem's first novel. I have nothing more to say about this, I just wanted to get that off my chest. Aahhh, I feel better already.
I freely admit to being a Chabon fanboy– I have read every book and collection he has written, excluding his recent essays on being a husband, father and son. Even so, I know what you mean about his early work being Updike-like, or as Matt Frost quotes, "plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew." Luckily, his writing has developed beautify through the years. I adore K&C and have thoroughly enjoyed his subsequent work, fiction or nonfiction, though if you are not fond of ghettoized genres and their homage, they may miss the mark for you (this is a too quick reduction, but a useful one, nonetheless).
Regarding Lethem, he is hit and miss for me. I am fond of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and some of his short stories, but otherwise he tends to leave me cold. Couldn't say exactly why.
I feel compelled to confess that I have read K & C
around the time my wife was giving birth to our first kid. And, obvious distractions notwithstanding, I sailed through it during maybe some of the more intense two days of my life. That's how good I think it is. I also liked a lot Wonder Boys (movie too!) but that's because I am a sucker when it comes to colorful descriptions of academic life.