Birthday: "It's Chabon," he says. "Cha- as in Shea Stadium. Bon as in Bon Jovi."

Michael Chabon (1963-  )

Novelist, short story writer

How good a writer is Michael Chabon?

In 1991, when he published a set of short stories, A Model World, in book form, he did a reading at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. I rarely go to readings: I’m only interested in authors whose book I have already read, and was impressed by, and so am no use to him/her as a non-buyer. There’s that, and the audience questions are usually dreadful and cringe-inducing.

But Michael Chabon was a special case. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) was a critical and commercial smash, submitted by Chabon as his Master of Fine Arts thesis. His academic supervisor sent to, on the sly, to a literary agent, who responded with a $155,000 advance. Chabon was 25 years old.

A Model World was drawn from short stories Chabon published in The New Yorker in those heady days when he had to figure how to be young, hip and famous. At Powell’s he read the title story, about a hapless PhD candidate in meteorology, Levine, who- stuck for a thesis topic- was poking through a bookshop’s “please take this stuff away” barrel and found one on “nephokinesis”, or cloud control.

Levine tore apart his university library in those last days before the Internets, and could not find any record of the thesis’ author ever having been awarded his doctorate (or even having existed), or the citation of it anywhere, anytime, in the tight little world of academic weather studies. So he decided to retype it in up-to-date PhD format, and submit it as his own.

The story was enthralling. And when Chabon finished it, a member of the audience asked, “How much research did you have to do to describe all that technical stuff about weather?”

Chabon smiled an enigmatic smile, paused, and replied,”I made it up.”

That, friends, is how good he is.

His first book, about a Pittsburgh collegian who, his summer after graduation, found himself falling out of love with his girlfriend and in love with a man, is a wonder that bears re-reading.

Like all truly good love stories, it ends badly, with recriminations and regrets, but so deftly did Chabon handle his characters it became accepted doctrine in the American gay tribe that Chabon himself was gay. No one could write of such things so well, and so knowingly, from the outside, especially in those days, the common wisdom held.

Except he wasn’t. And isn’t. Married twice, first- briefly- to a poet, he married author Ayelet Waldman in 1993 and they have been together ever since, producing four children. It's hard to think of an American writer of the last half-century whose ability to work gay characters into a story without a sense of gears grinding, or doing it as a little pirouette of self-conscious PCness, is as natural as Chabon’s. He has long welcomed the rumors about his sexuality; through them, he says, he has gained an insightful, loyal and appreciative audience.

That’s how good a writer Michael Chabon is.

After The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon started novel about an architect trying to design the perfect baseball stadium, and couldn’t stop it. He piled up 1500 pages of it, with no end in sight. He carved out a 672-page manuscript for his agent and editor, and they hated it.

He was well and truly blocked. A methodical, five days a week writer, Chabon produces maybe 1000 words a day. Having one thousand five hundred pages of a book that can’t get to its end messed with his head in the worst way.

So he gave it up, abandoning five years’ work.

Then he got an idea. Telling no one he was no longer adding reams to the Fountain City mountain, he turned out Wonder Boys- the story of a college professor trapped in a 1500 page novel he couldn't finish, in seven months. Published in 1995, it was another bestseller, and one of the best adaptations to film of the last quarter century.

Less happily, the film version of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was a 2008 catastrophe, gutted by the gutless to stitch some kind of story about of the characters surrounded the excised gay couple at its heart. Film seems to be Chabon’s Achilles heel: he has has written a number of screenplays for big budget films, but not a one has made it to production.

In 2000, Chabon published a sprawling historical novel on the rise of the comic book industry in America, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Did I mention how good a writer Michael Chabon is?

This century, Chabon has roved through all sorts of genres. He serialized a novel about two swashbuckling adventurers on the Silk Road in 1000 AD (his joking title was “Jews With Swords”) in The New York Times Magazine.

He wrote a popular young adult novel about baseball, and a Conan Doyle pastiche on Sherlock Holmes’ last years in World War II.

A counterfactual fantasy novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, imagined all of America’s Jews interned to Alaska, and staying to form a de facto 51st state. It won him Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Manhood for Amateurs was a highly-regarded set of essays on fatherhood. Telegraph Avenue is a complex tale of families in a racially changing neighborhood in Oakland, California.

Chabon has an O. Henry Award up on a shelf somewhere, and a seat in the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His next novel is due out this year.

You should read him. He’s really good.