E-mail a friendMichael Chabon
airdate October 19, 2009
Novelist Michael Chabon has been compared to everyone from Fitzgerald to DeLillo. Raised in Columbia, MD, he wrote his first short story at age 10, for a class assignment. His first novel was originally written for his master's thesis and became a New York Times best seller. His second, Wonder Boys, was made into a critically acclaimed feature film, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon's latest effort is Manhood for Amateurs—his first major work of nonfiction.
Novelist talks about the hypocrisy that is required of parents. (1:05)
Full Interview (12:25)
Michael Chabon
Tavis: Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist whose many notable books include "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and "The Yiddish Policeman's Union." His latest is a work of nonfiction called "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son." At least this time I don't have to speak Yiddish.
Michael Chabon: (Laughs) Exactly.
Tavis: So I'm glad to have you back anyway.
Chabon: Neither do I. (Laughter) Thank you. Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: Glad to - how you been?
Chabon: I've been very well, thank you.
Tavis: It's good to see you. Every conversation, obviously, is different, and whenever I have authors on, which is often, obviously, I'm always trying to figure out the best way to make the most of the conversation in a very short period of time, and you do me a great favor here because the cover of this book has a nice - I guess you would call this a compass, a wheel?
Chabon: It's like a wheel, yeah.
Tavis: It's like a compass of a wheel, or a wheel of a compass. But on this compass, on this wheel, there are some interesting words that I think I can just walk through and get a sense of what this book is really all about.
Chabon: Let's give it a try.
Tavis: In no particular order - will you play the game with me?
Chabon: Yeah, spin the wheel. Let's spin the wheel.
Tavis: Let's spin the wheel. (Laughter) I can tell you now, you ain't going to win no money. This is PBS, you ain't going to win no money. But we'll spin the wheel anyway.
In no particular order, innocence. Tell me about innocence as it relates to Michael Chabon's life.
Chabon: Well, when you have children - I have four children, my wife and I have got four of them - just almost from the beginning you feel like you've been made the guardian of their innocence. They come into the world, they don't know anything, you have to protect that innocence and try to preserve it.
But almost immediately you start having - you get asked to start doing things where you're going to have to betray that innocence in many ways. So like you take your kids - I remember once my daughter hurt herself pretty seriously, we had to take her to the emergency room and these doctors and nurses all crowding around, and they're grabbing her arms and legs, she's screaming, she's in pain, and they're holding her down and they're going to start doing all these things for her.
My daughter was about two years old. I just remember she looked me in the eye at that moment with this look of like, "How can you possibly be letting these people do this horrible thing to me? You're my dad; you're supposed to be protecting me."
So the question of innocence and preserving innocence and then sadly, many times being forced to betray that innocence, I think it's one that just comes up a lot once you start having kids.
Tavis: Before I move on to the next one here, how does, in your own life, protecting, preserving the innocence of your child - juxtapose that effort with losing or - you know where I'm going with this.
Chabon: Yeah.
Tavis: With losing or navigating your own innocence as a child?
Chabon: Right. Well, you have that double vision always, so that when your kids are going through something it just starts bringing it all back, what you - how the similar circumstances, how things were different when you were younger. So when I was a kid, I grew up in the '60s and '70s, and that was a time when already people were starting to say kids were too wised up, kids were too sophisticated.
I talk in this book about these things. You probably remember the Wacky Packages that were these trading stickers that made fun of, they mocked products and the kids - "Mad" magazine, there was this kind of sense of like -
Tavis: Alfred E. Newman.
Chabon: - kids are too sarcastic, too - but compared to now, that time already starts to seem like a pretty innocent time. So you want your kids to be savvy, you want your kids to be sophisticated, you don't want to feel like your kids can be taken advantage of or preyed upon by marketers too easily.
You want them to be able to watch commercials and feel like they're wise, they know. But on the other hand you don't want them to be too savvy, too sophisticated. You don't want them to be cynical about everything and mistrust everything.
I don't know, for me, I think in many ways I was a savvy, sophisticated kid, I was sarcastic, but on the other hand I think kids grow up even faster now than they did back when we were kids.
Tavis: I'm not a parent as yet; you are, as you said, of four kids. How much innocence is there these days to protect, where your kids are concerned? Because to your point now, they get exposed to so much so quick and they're not around you 24/7, and when they're not around you they're being exposed to even more stuff than you want them to be exposed to.
Chabon: Right, no doubt.
Tavis: What innocence is there left to protect? I don't mean to be - you know.
Chabon: No. It's still - there's still so much, and there's still - and even the ones - my oldest is almost 15 now and so she's a teenager, but still, she has her innocence and she still will ask me questions or just want to know about things and I'll just realize that she's still - there's still a lot of child even in a 15-year-old, even today's -
Tavis: And you smile ear-to-ear when she starts asking you certain questions, like yes, she doesn't know this yet.
Chabon: Exactly, yeah. (Laughter) Like wait, how did that happen? But we have a lot of ambivalence in our society. We are so obsessed with protecting children, child protection, and we have this fear of predators and we all work hard collectively in a way to try to preserve children's innocence and things like - even something like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, these lies we tell kids because in a way we're just trying to sustain that blessed ignorance that they could think some guy comes down the chimney and leaves presents, or the fairy builds castles out of the teeth that she - that's always kind of a creepy one to me.
But anyway, on the other hand we're also - there's so much hypersexualizing of kids and getting the dress ever sexier, even 11-year-old, 12-year-old kids. We're torn in this society between that desire to preserve and protect kids' innocence and on the other hand this sort of pressure we put on kids to grow up really fast.
Thank God we are still torn about it. We haven't gone all the way in the one direction.
Tavis: Now I'm wishing, Jonathan, that we'd put a label on this show, a parental label. Michael Chabon is about to completely implode the myth of Santa Claus. It's too late now. If the kids are watching they just got a - (laughter) parents are like, "No, no, Michael."
Chabon: He doesn't mean it. (Laughter)
Tavis: You just ruined it for a bunch of kids. But anyway, no, I'm just being funny.
Chabon: I know, I know.
Tavis: Back to this wheel - regret is on this wheel. Why is regret on this wheel?
Chabon: Regret is on that wheel because that is probably the most omnipresent emotion that I feel. If it's not regret about my kids, which God knows there's plenty of that, but just in general, as soon as I start looking back, and a lot of these pieces are retrospective in a way, and having children invites retrospection. As soon as I start looking back everything that you go back to, you go back to a certain time and place, there's all kinds of regret.
It's not necessarily the kind of regret that oh, I'm sorry I did that or I wish I had done something differently. Sometimes the regret you feel is just a simple I wish that was still around. I regret the loss of this or that thing. I regret that I can't go back and see that person again, my grandmother or whoever it might be. There's all kinds of regret.
Tavis: But we're told so many times by so many people in so many witticisms and quotes, don't live a life of regret. Don't live a life of regrets.
Chabon: Yeah, that's, like, easier said than done, isn't it? I think it's human to regret. If you don't experience regret, if you have no regrets, I think there's something wrong with you because it means you haven't ever stopped to think - it implies you think everything you do is right and I definitely don't have that misconception.
There are so many - there's not just missed opportunities; we've all missed opportunities. But it's also just simply regretting that you didn't pay more attention when, you could have, to something that once it's gone, you miss terribly.
Tavis: Hypocrisy is on this wheel. That got my attention.
Chabon: Yeah, that's another one that just comes with the territory of being a parent. You are an official hypocrite when you're a parent. It is part of your job and part of what's hard about being a parent is to come to terms with that and to realize that do as I say, don't do as I do, or do as I did, is - it just comes with the territory.
You can't help it, because you are holding your kids to a higher standard than you necessarily meet yourself. That's how you try to elevate their game and you try to live up to the expectations you set for them, but you're going to miss the mark, they're going to miss the mark.
Around questions of things like drug use and other things, sex, you're so frequently put in that position of like I did this and I did that and did all these things - don't you ever do that. Yeah, hypocrisy's a big one.
Tavis: You mentioned sex - sexuality is on this wheel.
Chabon: Yeah. That's a pretty common theme in this book, not so much in dealing with my kids, although there is a piece in there that talks about how dismayed I was to realize that I was kind of the stereotypical father when my daughter, my older daughter, started drawing some attention from boys around her and I would just see a guy looking at my daughter and I would have those feelings of like, "What are you looking at?"
I just want to be out there on the porch with a shotgun, and I don't want to feel that way and I don't like having those feelings, but I think the question of my own sexual history and growing up as a boy and then a teenager and then a man, coming of age, early relationships with women, my first marriage, my current marriage, watching my mother, who was a single woman in the '70s, trying to navigate those very, very rocky shoals of being a single woman in the '70s and growing up sort of watching her date men and all of that plays a pretty strong role in the book.
Tavis: I'm turning this book around because the wheel is turning.
Chabon: The wheel doesn't really spin.
Tavis: Yeah, the wheel doesn't spin.
Chabon: They didn't want to go all that way with the budget.
Tavis: Nostalgia.
Chabon: Nostalgia - well, and it's kind of come up already in what we've been saying, but nostalgia kind of has a bad name, just like regret has a bad name, nostalgia does too, and people are saying, "Let's not engage in nostalgia here."
Tavis: Live in the present.
Chabon: Yeah, exactly.
Tavis: Be in the moment.
Oren:
Chabon: There's a kind of false nostalgia that maybe gets invoked of invoking this sort of Norman Rockwell past that never really existed as a way of criticizing the present and that kind of thing. But nostalgia's natural, it's inevitable, and for me the important thing about nostalgia is that it's not that you wish things were like they used to be - that's not the kind of nostalgia that interests me or that I really experience, it's more just that sense of realizing that you can't go back, realizing that the past - that you might want to just go back and just - you don't want to live in the past again.
God knows I don't want to live in the past again, but just to see it again, to just see the people you used to know, the ones who were passed on or the world that you lived in that doesn't exist anymore, you can't do that, it's impossible. And so it's that sort of wistfulness, that wish to see it again at least one more time. That's nostalgia to me, and that comes up so much with kids, when you're dealing with children, because they help bring the past back for you in a certain way, but then again you never really do get to go back again.
Tavis: I haven't even gotten to everything on this wheel, much less everything that's inside the book. Finally, a book for me and all of my friends, starting with the guys I work with on this set every day - "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son" by Michael Chabon, his latest. Michael, nice to have you on. Thanks for the book, man.
Chabon: Hey, thank you. Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: It's good to see you.
Chabon: Good to be here.
Back to October 19, 2009