Film Critic John Powers

DATE August 17, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Michael Chabon discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"
NEAL CONAN, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Neal Conan, sitting in for Terry Gross.

Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last spring for his novel,
"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." Terry spoke with him then.
Now the novel is out in a paperback edition. Chabon's novel "Wonder Boys,"
was adapted into a film last year, starring Michael Douglas as a professor
and
novelist. "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" begins in 1939,
during the early days of the superhero comic craze. When the novel opens,
young Sammy Clay works for a novelty company. His cousin Josef Kavalier is
a
magician and escape artist who used some of the tricks of his trade to
escape
Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Josef has come to New York and lives with
Sammy
and Sammy's mother, who's trying to make enough money to get his family out
of
Prague. Sammy suggests that they cash in on the Superman craze and create
some superheroes of their own. Several of their characters catch on; the
most
popular is called The Escapist.

Here's Michael Chabon reading the scene in which Joe and Sammy create their
costumed hero.

Mr. MICHAEL CHABON (Author): (Reading from "The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier
and Clay") `The Escapist,' Joe tried it out. It sounded magnificent to his
unschooled ear, someone trustworthy and useful and strong. `He is an escape
artist in a costume who fights crime. He doesn't just fight it,' Sam said,
`He frees the world of it. He frees people, see? He comes in the darkest
hour, he watches from the shadows, guided only by the light from--the light
from his golden key.' `That's great. I see,' Joe said. The costume would
be
dark, dark blue, midnight blue, simple, functional, ornamented only with a
skeleton key emblem on the chest.

Joe went over to one of the drawing tables and climbed onto the stool. He
picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper and started to sketch rapidly,
closing
his inner eyelid and projecting against it, so to speak, the image of a
lithe,
acrobatic man who had just leaped into his mind; a man in the act of
alighting, a gymnast dismounting the rings, his right heel about to meet the
ground, his left leg raised and flexed at the knee, his arms thrown high,
hands outspread, trying to get at the physics of the way a man moves, the
give
and take of sinews and muscle groups to forge in a way that no comic book
artist yet had, an anatomical basis for grace and style. `Wow,' Sam said,
`Wow, Joe, that's good. That's beautiful.'

TERRY GROSS:

That's Michael Chabon reading from his book "Kavalier and Clay."

The most popular superhero that your two main characters create is called
The
Escapist. What are his powers and how does he use them?

Mr. CHABON: He is initially conceived by Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier to be a
superhero without any real superpowers, but to be in a way like Batman, to
be
a product of intense course of physical training that has brought him to the
peak of his abilities as an escape artist and he performs by day as a
vaudeville escape artist, magician--or I guess you can say by evening. And
in
his spare time, with his team of crack assistants, who are his stagehands
and
his driver and so on during his civilian life, he roams the globe, releasing
other people from chains. He uses his skills as an escape artist to
liberate
political prisoners and concentration camp inmates and orphans from cruel
orphanages and so on.

But actually fairly quickly within the story, that isn't enough for Joe and
Sammy. Those powers are too limited and we learn of the existence of this
shadowy organization called The League of the Golden Key(ph). And they
impart
some kind of extra amount of magical superpower to him so that he does
eventually become superstrong and can do all of the great World War II
superhero things like tying anti-aircraft guns into pretzel knots and
peeling
open jet fighter planes and so on.

GROSS: Now this superhero, The Escapist, has the ability to do escapes in
the
way that Houdini did, and Houdini is an inspiration for the characters in
your
novel and I suspect something of an inspiration for you as well. Can you
talk
a little bit about what Houdini means to you and if you had to learn about
picking locks and undoing chains and handcuffs and other stage magic kind of
things, in order to write this book?

Mr. CHABON: Yes, I did. I never really expected to be writing about
Houdini
at all. I've always been fascinated by him but it was only gradually that
the
theme of escape emerged for me in the writing of this book. But as soon as
I
recognized it and that I had this character of Joe Kavalier, who is a
refugee
from Prague and who has escaped to the United States and freedom that
somehow
this figure of Houdini began to press itself upon my imagination more and
more
and I realized I was going to have to, somehow or another, work him or his
craft or both into the book.

You know, the thing about Houdini, the two things about Houdini that
interested me, at least from the point of view of writing this novel were,
on
the one hand, that he did have this legend and that he--that he was, in some
respect, I think, an unacknowledged forebear of the whole idea of the
superhero. In many ways, he was a superhero. He fits the definition in
that
he had a secret identity. He was really Erik Weisz, the child of a rabbi
and
Jewish immigrants from Hungary. He was born in Wisconsin but he let on that
he had been born, you know, over there on the other side. And he also
fought
crime in the sense that, as you probably know, he devoted the latter part of
his life to debunking false mediums and people who claimed they could
communicate with the dead. He had a crusade that was very much like a kind
of
superhero crusade against these people.

So there was that aspect but there was also this idea of Houdini as an
immigrant, as a kind of hero of immigrants and it just seemed to me that
somebody like Sammy Clay, this kid from Brooklyn, child of immigrants, would
probably look up to a guy like Houdini.

GROSS: Another theme in your novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and
Clay," is the golem, which is something that comes from Jewish legends, and
you see certain parallels between the golem and the superhero. Why don't
you
start by explaining what a golem is?

Mr. CHABON: Well, a golem is an artificial man, essentially, a homunculus,
a
creature created out of usually clay or mud that then is brought to life by
means of incantation and spells. Stories of the golem go all the way back
to,
I think, the Babylonian exile several thousand years ago. But the most
famous
golem of all and the one who appears in my novel is the golem of Prague that
is said to have been created by Rabbi Judah ben Bezulel ben Low, I think in
the 16th century. And there are a lot of different stories about that
golem.
In some stories, he's just created to be an artificial manservant to help
sweep up around the synagogue on Friday afternoons, getting ready for
Sabbaths, you know.

And in other stories, there's a more, sort of, melodramatic tinge to the
creation, and the golem is brought to life to be a protector of the ghetto,
to
be a defender of the oppressed Jews of Prague against pogrom and blood
libels,
and it's that golem that is the golem in my novel, and that I see as being,
possibly, an antecedent, like Houdini, of the whole superhero idea, in that
you have this sort of created man--which is the case with a lot of
superheroes, historically, too, from The Human Torch onward--who is brought
to
life in order to, you know, protect the helpless and defend the weak.

And I kind of had this intuition, I guess, about the golem. And then in
conversation with Will Eisner, I asked him why he thought so many of the
original comic book creators in the 1930s and '40s were Jews, and he gave me
a
very logical, sort of economical explanation. But then he said, `But I've
often wondered if there wasn't something in the Jewish storytelling
tradition
that didn't lend itself to the creation of Superman. For example, we have
this golem story.' And that was very exciting for me, to kind of get
confirmation of something that I had just sort of guessed at. And I wasn't
really sure what to do with it until that point.

CONAN: More with Terry's conversation with novelist Michael Chabon after a
short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: Let's get back to Terry Gross' interview with Michael Chabon. His
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"
is
just out in paperback.

GROSS: Michael, why are so interested in the formative era of superhero
comics?

Mr. CHABON: Well, it was a childhood interest of mine in that I was a big
reader of comic books as a kid. And it just so happened that at the time I
was most interested, even obsessed, with comic books in the early 1970s was
a
period when DC Comics, the home of Superman and Batman and The Flash and
Wonder Woman, were printing out these big, fat comic books, 64-page, 80-page
and 100-page comic books. And typically, the first story in one of these
things would be a new story, but then they would pad the rest of the comic
with reprint material, and this material was just stuff they would dig out
of
their vaults and it was all this Golden Age stuff.

And, you know, I was little. I was seven, eight, nine years old. I
didn't--I
knew it was not exactly the same stuff as the newer material. You could see
there were differences in the style of drawing, and there were always World
War II references, and so on. But somehow or other, I didn't quite
distinguish among it all, and I think that was an important thing because my
father grew up reading, essentially, the very same comic books that I had
read
and they were reprinting the things that were new when he was a kid. And it
formed this sort of continuum of--I don't know what you want to call
it--almost a kind of imaginative continuum that we had almost identical
fantasy lives, in some respect.

And that got me interested in the world of his childhood, my father's
childhood. He grew up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, and I used to ask him about
things like the radio programs he listened to, the movie serials of the
time,
the--you know, going to the theater on a Saturday morning for a full day of
programming with the newsreel and the cartoons and the A picture and the B
picture. And he was only too happy to kind of indulge this curiosity of
mine.
So he really vividly sort of recreated the world of his childhood in my
imagination. And that's the world that I was trying to recreate, I guess,
for
myself and, you know, also for readers.

GROSS: Now you also mention at the end of the book--I think it's in your
acknowledgements--that your grandfather worked as a topographer in a plant
that published, among other things, comic books. Did that give you any
special access to or interest in comics?

Mr. CHABON: I guess--well, it partly always gave me an awareness of the
technical or maybe the better word would be sort of technological side of
comic books, that there were printing plants and there were these guys whose
job it was to take the big photoengraving plates and, you know, run them on
the presses and all of that stuff. I was aware of that from a fairly early
age. But I think more importantly was just that it was my father's father
who
had gotten him into comic books by bringing home bags filled with comic
books
from his job. He worked the night shift and he would bring home these big
bags of comics for my father to read, and that's how it all began. And, I
mean, I think in a way this book is just sort of the outcome of that initial
act of kind of fatherly generosity that my grandfather preformed for my dad.

GROSS: Now the superhero The Escapist in your novel--in The Escapist comics
he uses his powers to try and fight Hitler. And you know, both of the
creators of The Escapist are Jewish, and one of them is a refugee from
Czechoslovakia and his parents are left behind and he can't get them out.
So
you know, he has many reasons to want to fight Hitler personally.

Mr. CHABON: Yeah.

GROSS: But he's doing it through his creation The Escapist. How much of
the
superhero comics during the period of World War II had World War II
backdrops?

Mr. CHABON: Well, World War II made the comic book and especially the
superhero. They almost exactly coincided. Superman first appeared in 1938,
and in the first few appearances, or let's say the first couple of years of
his existence, he had a kind of late '30s sort of socially messianic aspect
to
him in that he was always--I don't know--rounding up corrupt mine owners and
foiling corrupt union bosses and so on. And then there appeared this figure
of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and also it should be said that, you know, the
Japanese, too, after Pearl Harbor. And that was perfect. That was exactly
what the superhero was designed to fight.

And, yes, the superheroes went to war en masse, oddly enough with the
exception of Superman, who pretty much stayed home during the Second World
War. I think his creators must have realized that even though you had
Captain
America and The Human Torch and so on over there fighting the Luftwaffe and
the Wehrmacht and so on, that if Superman really did get into World War II,
he'd probably be able to wrap it up fairly quickly and to sort of get around
that fundamental problem. Superman pretty much stayed home and fought
saboteurs and so on. But all the other superheroes went to war and comic
book
sales just skyrocketed during the war years into the several millions of
copies per month sold of each individual issue.

They were also shipped in crates over to the GIs fighting in Europe along
with
cigarettes and gum and so on. And a lot of GIs discovered comic books while
fighting in Europe and then came home with their taste for comic books
whetted, and so that this sort of the boom of comic books continued even
after
the war was over. But it was never really the same for superheroes. And
you
know, when they came back from the war and were forced once again to deal
with, you know, card sharks and gamblers and so on, it was not--the
superhero
genre died out, actually, fairly quickly after the war.

GROSS: Both of the main characters in your novel who were comic book
artists
are Jewish. And the creators of Superman were Jewish, as well. In your
novel, one character says that all superheroes are Jewish. He says,
`Superman; you don't think he's Jewish coming from the Old Country; changing
his name like that? Clark Kent; only a Jew would pick a name like that for
himself.' What do you mean; because it's so non-Jewish sounding? This is
somebody trying to pass?

Mr. CHABON: It's just so--exactly. It's just so goyish sounding, yeah.
And
they all had names like that. The Flash--the golden age Flash. His name
was
Jay Garrick and Bruce Wayne. And, you know, they all had these names that
were just taken right off of a--you know, I don't know. They sound like
housing--streets and housing developments in the suburbs. Yeah, I mean, it
seemed to me that this was a case--and then I was actually a little bit
dismayed, although, also excited to see my intuition confirmed when Jules
Feiffer, the great Jules Feiffer wrote an obituary for Jerry Siegel in The
New
York Times and made this exact same point about the kind of disguised
assimilationist fantasy that Superman and--represents and that with this
idea
of coming from Krypton and, you know, leaving his real parents behind. And
even his name, Kal-El; that's the real name of Superman. It has that kind
of
vaguely Hebraic sound to it.

GROSS: It's true.

Mr. CHABON: So, you know, I'm sure this is another example of something
that
was just at work in the minds or in the consciousnesses of Siegel and
Shuster.

GROSS: In your book there's a subcommittee investigating whether comics
lead
youth into juvenile delinquency. And I know there really was a subcommittee
investigating comics. But in your book, one of the aspects that they're
interested in, really, in investigating is the Batman-Robin relationship;
superheroes with boy sidekicks.

Mr. CHABON: Yeah. Yeah.

GROSS: And they asked, `Was this a thinly veiled allegory of pedophilic
inversion?' And one of the investigators says, `And outfitting these
muscular, strapping young fellows in tight trousers and sending them
flitting
around the skies together. Were you in any way expressing or attempting to
disseminate your own psychological proclivities?' And he asks this to one
of
the comic book artists who actually is a closeted gay man. Did the comic
book
investigating committee really investigate veiled homosexuality in the
comics?

Mr. CHABON: Well, they alluded to it. They stayed away from that. The
hearings were fascinating. They were actually televised and I've met people
that grew up in the era then and remember watching them on television. And
they were mostly concerned with the violence that was prevalent, especially
in
the EC horror comics of the time and the kind of gruesome scenes that one
often found in them and with depictions of drug addiction and antisocial
behavior; other kinds of--they--as I recall--and I read through the
transcripts--there were some allusion to the latent homosexual fantasies
that
comic books were alleged to contain and disseminate. But they did stay away
from it, for the most part.

However, Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose book, the "Seduction of the Innocent,"
was really the trigger for these hearings, devoted an entire chapter, as I
recall, of this book to this very subject. And he explored the highly
questionable relationship between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. And also,
he
was not too happy with the sexuality of Wonder Woman, either, and viewed her
as being clearly having lesbian tendencies and that this was all warping the
minds of America's youth. And so, no, I fictionalized that aspect of the
hearing, but it didn't seem to me to be completely out of character with the
hearing, itself, or with the kinds of things that they were worrying about.

GROSS: So to sum up, you have congressmen investigating the Ambiguously Gay
Duo.

Mr. CHABON: Exactly. And they--you know, I think that aspect of comic
books, that the critique that Dr. Wertham offered was a kind of stinging one
to guys that were doing comic books at the time. I really don't think they
had any intention of telling any kind of stories other than stories about
sort
of father figures adopting these sort of war--they always had these wards,
you
know. I remember, as a kid, I never--I didn't know any wards. I didn't
know
anybody could be a ward, but comic books were filled with wards.

CONAN: Novelist Michael Chabon, speaking with Terry Gross. "The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" has just been issued in paperback. More of
their conversation in the second half of the show. I'm Neal Conan. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Neal Conan sitting in for Terry Gross.
Let's
continue with Terry's interview with Michael Chabon. His Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" has just
come out in paperback. It's an homage to the golden age of superhero
comics.
Chabon's novel "Wonder Boys" was adapted into a film starring Michael
Douglas
as a novelist professor and mentor to a budding writer played by Tobey
Maguire.

GROSS: When you were a young writer, did you go through a very pretentious
period of imitating the great writers who you read and wanted to be like?

Mr. CHABON: Definitely. In fact, some people probably would say I still
haven't come out of that pretentious period. But I was a slavish imitator
of
my favorite writers for many years, starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
When I was about 10 years old, I wrote a kind of pestish Sherlock Holmes
story, inspired, in part, I guess, by Nicholas Meyer's "Seven-Percent
Solution," which came out around that time. And I wrote my own imitation of
Doyle and, thereafter, just began imitating one writer after another; Ray
Bradbury and then Henry Miller, then John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Raymond
Chandler. I think I learned how to write by doing that...

GROSS: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Did you do a lot of sex stuff during your
Henry Miller era?

Mr. CHABON: Yeah, and it was even more an active imagination than coming up
with August Van Zorn.

I--yes, definitely. I--you know, it--well, Henry Miller has this really
intoxicating, unhinged, exclamatory style of writing that was very
distinctive, very easy to catch on to and, also, somehow made it seem OK to
write about the kinds of things that--you know, that he was writing about
and
that then I, therefore, invented for my own characters, since I had no
actual
personal experience of it.

GROSS: Did you go through a period of not only imitating great writers who
you admired on the page, but imitating them in life, as well?

Mr. CHABON: I tried. I tried. You know, Henry Miller--I think that just
reading Henry Miller had a very heavy influence on my decision to become a
writer because I really did think it was gonna be all about lying around in
tawdry, clichy apartments, drinking cheap red wine and, you know, very
quickly...

GROSS: And having sex.

Mr. CHABON: Exactly; lots of it, too; preferably with, you know, multiple
partners of dubious sexuality and, even, gender. But, you know, it didn't
work out that way.

His was, really--of all my early heroes, I think his was, probably, the
only--he was the only really writer that had that kind of lifestyle attached
to his writing. You know, the other ones--Bradbury, somebody like John
Updike
or--I was really into Thomas Mann for a while. I mean, writers like that,
they didn't have that kind of glamorous lifestyle. They were more about
going
into your office and shutting the door behind you and staying in there until
you got some writing done. And that has, actually, turned out to be much
more
the case with my life, too.

GROSS: Pretty exciting.

Mr. CHABON: Oh, yeah.

GROSS: Now in "Wonder Boys," your main character wonders if fiction writers
suffer from a rare disorder from what he calls the `midnight disease.' What
is the midnight disease?

Mr. CHABON: Well, the midnight disease is, essentially, I think--it's two
things. It's the way in which writers--and this is sort of my theory, too,
although I think it means a lot more to Grady Tripp than it does to me--but
I
think that when you're a writer, you're forced into this observer position
all
the time; that you're always sort of paying--you're paying attention to
things
on a level that necessarily means that you aren't participating in them.
And,
therefore, that you often have a sense of detachment from things that are
going on around you or that you're not fully participating in sort of the
rich
pageant of life because you're busy trying to get it all down or remember it
so you can use it later on.

So that's part of the midnight disease. And the other aspect of it that is
definitely more important to Grady Tripp than it is to me is that not only
do
you sort of get forced out of the participating in life by trying to pay
attention to it, but you also begin to engineer your own life so that it
will
provide you with richer material for your fiction. And I think that's more
of
a problem for Grady than it is for me, but I have observed it, myself, I
think, in other writers, certainly, that I've known; that there seems to be
this almost imperative to create drama in one's life as a way of--sort of
what
Grady calls as a `hedge against any lack of future material.'

GROSS: I want to actually read your description in "Wonder Boys" of the
midnight disease. You describe it as (reading) `a kind of emotional
insomnia.
At every conscious moment its victim, even if he or she writes at dawn or in
the middle of the afternoon, feels like a person lying in a sweltering
bedroom
with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and
airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a
fly
trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him, the neighbors soundly sleep.
This is, in my opinion, why writers, like insomniacs, are so accident prone;
so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities; so
liable
to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when
urged repeatedly to do so.'

I'm interested in that `obsessiveness; that inability to let go of a
subject.'
Do you think that's something unique--that's some--do you think that's
something a lot of writers have?

Mr. CHABON: Yeah, I don't think it's unique to writers, by any means, but
I...

GROSS: But writers have their own big dose of it.

Mr. CHABON: It seems to me--and I know I'm that way, and it just--I've had
the experience so many times of just finding myself at the other end of a
kind
of obsessive, going over again and again, of a particular experience that I
might have undergone with another writer. Say we've gone off to do
something
or other, even if it's as simple as, you know, trying to pick up something
at
Target or something like that; that the experience will get just sort of
broken down; like, `Why did the--why do you think the clerk was looking at
me
that way? Do you think that she noticed that I was--that I had tape on my
glasses?' And it's that kind of obsessive going over things that, maybe, is
just--it's a byproduct of always going over plots of stories and trying to,
you know, get everything sort of causally oriented, which is always what you
try to do with a plot--is, you know, have this sort of causal imperative to
things. And life often tends not to have such a strong kind of
cause-and-effect thing, but I think it's something that you get in the habit
of seeing, even if it's not there, definitely.

GROSS: Because there are central characters in several of your novels who
are
gay, a lot of readers have assumed that you are gay. And I think one major
newsweekly wrote that you were gay.

Mr. CHABON: Yes.

GROSS: Which is not true. You're married and have two children. But,
anyways, I'm wondering...

Mr. CHABON: Well, that has been pointed out. That, of course, has no
guarantee of anything, but, yes, in fact...

GROSS: That--yes--true, true, true. But you could just be very, very
closeted.

Mr. CHABON: That's right.

GROSS: But I'll make the assumption that you're probably not just very
closeted.

Mr. CHABON: OK.

GROSS: But I won't--shouldn't assume anything. My question is that--but
the
question is...

Mr. CHABON: Yes.

GROSS: ...do you have any very amusing stories that come out of this
assumption?

Mr. CHABON: Well, I don't know if they're amusing. I had a couple of--what
would I call them?--slightly, almost upsetting experiences fairly early on
when the whole `Chabon is gay' thing was much more current than it is now.
You know, back--it was sort of like the `Paul is dead' thing, I guess. And,
you know, I would go into--I would get booked into a bookstore; a place like
Land A Rising(ph) or Different Light and would read something from, say, my
first short story collection that was not--and it had no real overt gay
content of any kind because I didn't really think it mattered what I read,
but
there were people to whom it did matter a lot. And there were some people
that, you know, I think were upset that I was being somehow billed as other
than I really was or that--I think there were some people in the gay
literary
community that were--that felt that, somehow, I was being put over as a gay
writer, when--you know, when I really wasn't. And that wasn't fair. But
nothing really amusing, unfortunately. That would have been nice.

GROSS: Well, how did you handle coming out as heterosexual, you know,
because
if people are assuming that you're gay, on the one hand, you don't want to
kind of falsely get the loyalty of a gay audience by appearing to be gay, if
you're not.

Mr. CHABON: Right.

GROSS: On the other hand, you don't want to kind of trot around a woman on
your arm all the time just to kind of prove you're not...

Mr. CHABON: Right. No, exactly.

GROSS: ...because that would make it seem like you were so uncomfortable
with
the possibility of somebody perceiving you as gay.

Mr. CHABON: Right. You're right. It's very--it's been kind of a balancing
act for me. I mean, you know, I've always thought of that character in that
movie, "The Turning Point." You know, I think it's Tom Skerritt's character
who, at some point, is accused by his wife that he only married her to prove
to everybody that he wasn't really gay. And there's that aspect of it. On
the other hand, as you say, there's, you know, not wanting to seem to be
falsely representing myself. Maybe I'm fortunate in having kind of come of
age in a the time that I did, say, in the early 1980s when the categories
started to get blurred a little bit more. I have always had, as one of my
great heroes, Prince. And I, you know, have always taken great comfort in
his
sort of--the way that he almost refused to identify himself in any way
because
that would be satisfying other people's expectations too much. And I don't
have anything like his courage or his chutzpa, God knows, but it was just,
somehow, not, ultimately, that important to me.

And, really, what I always felt I was most interested in writing about,
especially in "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," my first novel, were--was a
world
in which those categories don't really apply and that you have a character
in
that novel who's not sure what he is or, to quote that Prince song, you
know,
"Am I Straight or Gay?," is kind of the--is the question that he's faced
with
in that novel. And what he ends up deciding is that those are just labels
and
they don't really apply to his own emotional experience.

I think there's a paucity of labels for people's sexuality, but fiction is a
way of kind of filling up the gaps in our vocabulary that allows us so few
true options for expressing our feelings about people of the same sex.

GROSS: I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. CHABON: Oh, it's been my pleasure. It was such a treat. Thank you,
Terry.

CONAN: Michael Chabon, speaking with Terry Gross. His Pulitzer
Prize-winning
novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" is just out in
paperback.

Coming up, Steve Buscemi, actor, firefighter and dental patient. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

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Interview: Steve Buscemi discusses his new film, "Animal
Factory," which he produced and directed
NEAL CONAN, host:

My guest, Steve Buscemi, is probably best known for his work with Quentin
Tarantino in "Reservoir Dogs," and several of the Coen brothers movies,
including "Fargo," "Barton Fink" and "Miller's Crossing." Right now he
stars
in "Ghost World," a movie based on the graphic novel by Daniel Clowes.
Buscemi plays Seymour, a shy, awkward record collector. He's befriended by
the movie's heroine, Enid, an alienated teen-age girl, who hates just about
everything and everyone with the exception of her best friend, Rebecca, and
her new friend, Seymour. In this scene, Seymour is hosting his weekly
garage
sale, and Enid comes to check out his old blues records.

(Soundbite of "Ghost World")

Mr. STEVE BUSCEMI (As Seymour): What about the--did you like "The Memphis
Minnie"?

Ms. THORA BIRCH (As Enid): Yeah, that was good, too. The whole record was
good. But that one song, "Devil Got My Woman," I mostly just keep playing
that over and over. Do you have any other records like that?

Mr. BUSCEMI: There are no other records like that. Actually, I have the
original 78 in my collection. It's a--it's one of maybe five known copies.

Ms. BIRCH: Wow.

Mr. BUSCEMI: Want to see it? I can run upstairs and get it.

Ms. BIRCH: Sure. Yeah.

Mr. BUSCEMI: Watch my stuff. Here we go. It's only about V minus. It's
got an incipient lamb crack, but it plays decent, as I recall.

Ms. BIRCH: Hmm. Oops, I dropped it!

Mr. BUSCEMI: Oh! Jeez.

Ms. BIRCH: I was only kidding.

Mr. BUSCEMI: Umm, umm, it's--yeah.

Ms. BIRCH: Seymour, you all right?

Mr. BUSCEMI: Yeah. It's just--it's--it's very valuable.

CONAN: Steve Buscemi in the new film "Ghost World." I spoke with him last
year.

You grew up in and around New York City. Did you start out to be an actor?

Mr. BUSCEMI: Yeah. I mean, I--it wasn't until my senior year in high
school
that I started doing the school plays. And my plan was to somehow get to LA
because I thought, you know, if you wanted to be an actor, you had to be in
Hollywood. This was when I was 18. And I was living in Long Island. And
it
was my dad who said, `Look, if you really want to do this, then you should
go
to an acting school. And there's plenty of good schools in New York.' So I
checked out some and ended up going to the Lee Strasberg School for a
six-month period, and then studying with John Strasberg and Sabra Jones.

CONAN: At the same time, though, weren't you working as a firefighter?

Mr. BUSCEMI: Well, that was--that came a little bit later. I had taken the
test for the fire department when I turned 18, while I was living in Long
Island. And then I had since moved to Manhattan. And it was about four
years
later that my name finally came up on the list.

CONAN: That's still...

Mr. BUSCEMI: But I was also still doing theater.

CONAN: Back to firefighting.

Mr. BUSCEMI: Yeah.

CONAN: I mean, that's not--everybody knows that's not an easy job. It's a
dangerous job. Did you enjoy it?

Mr. BUSCEMI: Yeah, I did. I mostly liked working with the guys that I was
working with. My first year on the job I decided that I should, you know,
really devote my, you know, energies into learning this job. And so I
stopped
doing the comedy. I was not taking acting classes. And I didn't tell
anybody
in the firehouse that I had any aspirations of, you know, being anything,
you
know. I was just like the quietest guy in the firehouse. And there was
another firefighter named Dean Tulipane who worked at another house who I
had
heard about who was an actor. And after about eight months of being on the
job, I finally met him. And I was living in the East Village. He was
living
on MacDougal Street. And he totally busted me. He said, you know, `Why do
you live in the East Village? What do you do? What are you, a painter,
actor, musician, what?' you know.

CONAN: Had to be something.

Mr. BUSCEMI: Had to be something because most, you know--I mean, the rest
of
these guys lived in Long Island or Staten Island. And so I told him. And,
you know, the guys from my house looked at me astonished. And after that,
they sort of forced me to perform at the firemen parties, so I kind of got
back into doing stand-up that way. And then I met a couple of actors. We
didn't do stand-up, but we wrote and performed our own one-act plays;
eventually did some full-length plays. And that's really how I learned not
only to be a better actor, but it's where I learned to write as well.

CONAN: When did you get into movies?

Mr. BUSCEMI: That came towards my fourth year on the fire department. Just
from doing, you know, a lot of stage work, some filmmakers would come to
check
out our shows. And it was when I was doing "Parting Glances." I was also
doing a play with John Jezeran, who was a writer--who is a
playwright-director
that I've worked with a lot. I was doing his play called "Red House." I
was
doing "Parting Glances" and still trying to make it to the firehouse. And I
was, you know, about ready to collapse. So something had to go. So I took
a
leave of absence from the fire department and I just never ended--I just
never
went back.

CONAN: Been a long leave.

Mr. BUSCEMI: Took a very long leave, yes.

CONAN: One of the possibilities that opened up to you when you were in an
independent movie was one that seems most unlikely. You got a chance to
sing
in the movie "The Impostors." We're going to play a clip from that movie
now.
You play a guy who's a suicidal lounge singer...

Mr. BUSCEMI: Right.

CONAN: ...by the name of Happy Frank. And...

Mr. BUSCEMI: Happy Franks. Yeah.

CONAN: Happy Franks. And you're just about to go on stage and it's getting
a
little emotional for you. Here's the clip.

(Soundbite from "The Impostors")

Mr. BUSCEMI (As Happy Franks): (Singing) It's not the pale moon that
excites
me; that thrills and delights me. Oh, no. It's just the nearness of you.
When you're in my arms and I feel you so close to (sobs). All my wildest
dreams come true (sobs). I need no soft lights...

CONAN: Shortly afterwards, Happy Franks goes sobbing off the stage. When
you
were growing up and fantasizing as a kid about being a movie actor, did you
ever think in your wildest dreams you would see yourself up on the big
screen
singing?

Mr. BUSCEMI: No, but it was certainly a lot of fun. And I do like to sing.
Mark Boone and I used to have a band. And I used to sing in this sort of--I
won't call it a joke band, because we did write songs and we had real
musicians and we got real gigs, you know. But it was--sort of grew out of a
theater piece that we did where we played two guys in a band. And our band
was called the Pawns of Love and was sort of described as psychedelic
country
music. And so, I mean, I do like to sing. And I was really happy that
Stanley gave me that opportunity.

CONAN: Was there a time when you made your first couple of movies that--did
you buy a ticket and go in and watch yourself on screen?

Mr. BUSCEMI: Yeah. I mean, I remember doing that for "Parting Glances."
And
I think the last time I did it was with Adam Sandler. He hadn't seen
"Reservoir Dogs." And we were in LA and it was showing--there was a
midnight
showing of it. And he convinced me to go along with him and a few of his
buddies. And he said it was the only way that he would see it was if I went
with him. So we went. And it was, you know--and it was fun because I
don't,
you know, really get a chance to see films with, you know, sort of a regular
audience. I mean, I see my films either at special screenings or in a film
festival where it's--you know, you're getting real film lovers at a film
festival. But just to see it with a regular, general audience is nice.

CONAN: Actor Steve Buscemi stars in the new movie "Ghost World."

Coming up, John Powers reviews "The Others." This is FRESH AIR.

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Review: Newest horror flick, "The Others"
NEAL CONAN, host:

"The Others" had already opened in theaters when our film critic John Powers
caught up with it. He took in a late show at his local suburban Cineplex
and
has this review.

JOHN POWERS reporting:

Horror movies come in two kinds: those that scare you with what they show,
think of Linda Blair's head spinning like a top in "The Exorcist," and those
that scare you with what they don't. Hollywood usually prefers the
sure-fire
thrills of the former, but ever since "The Sixth Sense" and "The Blair Witch
Project" made a fortune, there's been a boomlet in supernatural thrillers
that
aspire to something subtler and more oblique. That's just what you get in
"The Others," a creepy new ghost story set in a huge, old house on the
British
Channel isle of Jersey at the end of the Second World War.

Nicole Kidman stars as Grace, an overwrought, upperclass English woman whose
husband is off fighting and whose children, Anne and Nicholas, have a spooky
disease. They're deathly sensitive to light. They must spend their lives
in
curtained rooms; the doors always carefully closed whenever anyone passes
through, lest light somehow spill in. To make matters spookier, the
electricity is out and the house is cut off from the world by fog. And to
make matters even spookier, Grace has just hired three disconcerting new
servants, including a smug governess played by Fionnula Flanagan.

Soon, the kids start feeling the presence of ghostly intruders, a visitation
that Grace desperately wants to deny. Then she, too, starts encountering
the
inexplicable, or is she just imagining things? Filled with terror, she
talks
with the new governess.

(Soundbite of "The Others")

Ms. NICOLE KIDMAN (As Grace): There is something in this house, something
diabolic.

Ms. FIONNULA FLANAGAN (As Mrs. Mills): Ma'am.

Ms. KIDMAN: Something which is not--not at rest. Oh, I know you don't
believe it. You don't believe it, do you? No, I don't blame you. I used
to
not believe these things.

Ms. FLANAGAN: I do believe it, ma'am. I've always believed in those
things.
Oh, they're not easy to explain, but they do happen. We've all heard
stories
of the beyond now and then. And I think that sometimes the world of the
dead
gets mixed up with the world of the living.

Ms. KIDMAN: But it's impossible. The Lord would never allow such an
aberration, the living and the dead. They will only meet at the end of
eternity. It says so in the Bible.

Ms. FLANAGAN: Ma'am, there isn't always an answer for everything.

POWERS: When I saw the movie a few nights ago, the teen-age audience was
unusually restless and I could understand why. With its deliberate pace and
obsession with mood, the film feels old-fashioned compared to pictures like
"Scream," which slaughter a famous star before the opening credits. What
makes "The Others" scary is not what we see, but what we imagine we might
see.
Watching it, I kept thinking of Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" or the
low-budget triumphs of Val Lewton, whose films like "Cat People" and "I
Walked
with a Zombie" were famous for scaring you while never showing you anything.

"The Others" was written and directed by the young Spaniard Alejandro
Amenabar
whose 1997 film "Abre los Ojos" is being remade as "Vanilla Sky" with Tom
Cruise. I'm not sure that Amenabar has a lot on his mind. His work doesn't
leave you with much to think about. But like many European directors, he
obviously has a crush on the splendors of '40s Hollywood, and he mimics it
with startling confidence, endowing the screen with an old-school elegance
in
costuming, production design and photography. The movie's exquisitely lit
in
shadowy grays, and it's carried by the performance of Kidman, whose Grace
looks a bit like the neurotic version of Grace Kelly. Kidman has always
been
a cold actress, that's why the audience has never really warmed to her. But
she's superb at playing characters trapped inside themselves. Characters
like
Grace, whose made frantic by her own fears and brittleness and ideas. Far
more than the things that go bump in the night, it's Grace's mounting panic
that gets our blood racing.

I can't say much more about "The Others" without spoiling the twists that
eventually won over those jaded teen-agers and even had them shrieking a
couple of times. But it is worth noting that this is another movie, like
"Ghost" or "The Sixth Sense," that's less concerned to demonize the
supernatural than to humanize it. In fact, near the end, a character talks
about how the living and the dead must learn to co-exist. Sort of a
spectral
version of the Rodney King `can't we all get along' speech. Liberal as
ever,
Hollywood now stands proudly in the forefront of the movement for ghosts'
rights.

CONAN: John Powers is executive editor of LA Weekly.

(Credits)

CONAN: Terry Gross returns on Monday. I'm Neal Conan.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.