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A review by davidreed
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon
2.0
I wanted to like this book, and I almost made it there. Chabon's defense of genre fiction is near and dear to my heart, and his essays on Sherlock Holmes and Philip Pullman offer some powerful insights. But this collection is just much too self-aware, too self-indulgent and too unfocused. Chabon's writing comes so highly praised that I'm skeptical of my own dislike. Even so, I couldn't shake the sense that, aside from a few pages (particularly the final handful) where his passion takes over from his intellect, his style is both too florid and not enough, full of elaborate analogies and metaphors and usages that on consideration are either plain wrong or so diffuse as to be meaningless. It's showoffy writing striving too hard for profundity, a sense that is enhanced by the author's regular deployment of polysyllabic verbiage that doesn't really belong. ('Aetataureate', Mr. Chabon? Yes, I know Latin enough to parse out its meaning, but that's too pretentious even for a classicist).
Though there is genuine insight here, it's not nearly enough to fill a thin 210 pages. The sixteen essays — which, tellingly, I keep misidentifying to myself as short stories — combine reflection, memoir, and occasionally polemic, organized around the concept of the "borderlands" between genre and literature, truth and fiction, and so on. It's an interesting thread, but one which often gets lost under Chabon's rambling retelling of his own history (not all of it true). I'd be delighted to read a book-length, focused account of genre fiction, if Chabon had written it, and I'd be delighted to read a self-referential fiction account of genre fiction, if, say, Eco or Borges had written it. This is sadly neither.
Though there is genuine insight here, it's not nearly enough to fill a thin 210 pages. The sixteen essays — which, tellingly, I keep misidentifying to myself as short stories — combine reflection, memoir, and occasionally polemic, organized around the concept of the "borderlands" between genre and literature, truth and fiction, and so on. It's an interesting thread, but one which often gets lost under Chabon's rambling retelling of his own history (not all of it true). I'd be delighted to read a book-length, focused account of genre fiction, if Chabon had written it, and I'd be delighted to read a self-referential fiction account of genre fiction, if, say, Eco or Borges had written it. This is sadly neither.