Word: novelistic
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...main reasons for writing children's literature is that it offers so many chances for dialogue like that. (Just try to work that sentence into a romance novel.) Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize last year for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, is a novelist who can fashion an elegant grownup story as if it were a piece of soft aluminum. But the opportunity to plunge into the burdleburple of sheer fantasy is one reason he wrote Summerland (Hyperion/Miramax; 500 pages), the kind of book that features a motherly Sasquatch, some intrepid kids, numerous giants and "werefoxes...
Chabon (pronounced Shay-bon) is the best known of a field of established authors who are all at once producing books for the Potterhead age group and up. This fall brings titles by the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende; Carl Hiassen, the deadpan satirist of modern Florida; and Clive Barker, the ghoul--or whatever you would call the man behind the Hellraiser films. There's serious money here. Even before Barker's book appears in stores, Disney has reportedly paid $8 million for the film, merchandising and theme-park rights to his characters. Theme-park rights? This never happened to Faulkner...
...ceiling. He's one of those radiant-child adults, the kind you can imagine as the dreamy fourth-grader he must once have been. We're in his big Arts and Crafts-style house in Berkeley, Calif., with his wife Ayelet Waldman, a former public defender turned crime novelist, and their three children, Sophie, 7; Zeke, 5; and Ida-Rose, 16 months. Chabon and his wife live in a noisy, kid-centered world. Waldman's books are about a former public defender turned stay-at-home mom who cracks cases while the baby naps. As Chabon answers questions...
Some people would call it a charmed life anyway. Chabon has been a published novelist almost from the moment he completed the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine. The manuscript he produced for his master's degree was passed along by his thesis adviser to an agent. Eventually it became The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the 1988 book that got him noticed immediately as a young writer on the rise. "I've been very lucky all my life," he says. "You can't help but feel that you don't deserve it. You're an impostor, impersonating...
...Virgin Suicides was a triumph of strange suburban melancholy. It marked Eugenides as a novelist of voluptuous gifts. Middlesex is a sign he's not sure what to do with them. The narrator, Cal, is a hermaphrodite raised by unsuspecting parents as a girl, until puberty forces him (her?) to opt for manhood. But before Cal can tell his own intricate story, we get hundreds of pages about his parents and grandparents (who are brother and sister; it's a complicated clan), the burning of Smyrna, the Detroit riots of 1967 and the Greek-American embrace of the beckoning American...