How does one introduce a book of introductions by an author who needs no introduction? This month heralds the paperback release of Michael Chabon’s Bookends, an enjoyable collection of his introductions (as well as outros and liner notes) to an eclectic range of texts. Combining literary and cultural critique with revealing autobiographical reflection, Chabon shares his enthusiasm for everything from literature and popular fiction to comic books, Norse myth, movies, food, music, and baseball. He glories in the rhythms of Mark Ronson’s Uptown Special, debunking a few myths along the way, and takes time to recommend West Oakland’s soul food restaurant, Brown Sugar Kitchen. There are also personal observations about his own fiction, including a short extract from his unpublished work, Fountain City. The collection even has its own (meta) introduction. Fans of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author will seize on this book to better understand the texts and experiences that shaped Chabon as an artist. More broadly, Bookends is a wander along the lost avenues and borderlands of the twentieth-century popular imagination.

Whether discussing the cultural significance of Superman’s cape, or the pastel, symmetrical frames of Wes Anderson, the pieces that form Bookends return time and again to the role that art plays in shaping who we are. Chabon remembers picking up paperbacks of The Great Gatsby and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus before embarking on his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He talks about his immersion into the magical-realist settings of Greek and Norse myth as a third grader. He discusses the way Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Rocket Man’ changed his life forever when he was just ten-years-old: “I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. And not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor.” Bookends celebrates the skill of artists and writers to conjure imaginary worlds, navigating the fantasy landscapes of Michael Moorcock and getting lost in the graphic dystopian cities of Howard Chaykin. Chabon has a critic’s awareness of poststructuralist and postmodern approaches to art and representation, with nods here and there to writers like Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin. But, ultimately, the success of Bookends lies in the way it demonstrates a lifelong emotional engagement with the possibilities of art, and the texts that speak to us at important moments in our lives. It traces the strange spark that arises at “the intersection of a wish and the tip of a pencil.”While the tone is often humorous and celebratory, many of the pieces also take time to reflect on loss. Chabon reveals how the loss of a baby in the early 2000s led to an obsession with baseball, and formed part of the genesis of his novel Summerland. There is a moving tribute to the author’s friend, the late writer Amanda Davis, who died in a plane crash in 2003. Going beyond the personal, Bookends seems to mourn twentieth-century America: the lost world or way of life evoked by John Cheever’s New York, liner notes on the sleeves of old LPs, and the solid reliability of 1980s computer hardware. Chabon writes that he suffers “intensely from bouts, at times almost disabling, of a limitless, all-encompassing nostalgia.” During such periods, it is art that comes to the rescue. When writing about what makes a good introduction, he cites its “restorative” power, something which summons “for the writer and reader alike a sensuous jolt of things past.” When discussing the work of M.R. James, he observes that all short stories “are ghost stories, accounts of visitations and reckonings with traces of the past.” These artistic acts of restoration are not simply nostalgic, but serve a recuperative purpose. In an introduction to Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection, Chabon reflects on how the filmmaker “understands that distance can increase our understanding of grief, allowing us to see it whole.”

All of this brings us to fairies. In an ‘outro’ to his prose work Summerland, Chabon confesses that when he was eleven or twelve, around the time of his parents’ separation, he started believing in fairies: “I believed in fairies because I wanted to believe in fairies.” He states that this belief was a way to “cope with and transform calamity into narrative”, but, most importantly, it became “a kind of discipline, an enforced habit of looking and listening that invested the world around me with rich and strange possibility.” As this collection attests, Chabon’s childhood willingness to believe in fairies evolved into a broader understanding of the ambiguities and contradictions that underpin all art, storytelling, and creative expression, and a celebration of how imaginative works allow us to make better sense of a broken world. Entertaining, funny, and eminently readable, Bookends restores the intrinsic and illuminating role that art can play in our lives.

This review of Michael Chabon’s Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, 23 January 2019.