Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Introduction: The Opposite of Writing

      Little Man

       Adventures in Euphemism

       The Bubble People

       Against Dickitude

       The Old Ball Game

       Be Cool or Be Cast Out

       Pops

      Footnotes

      About the Author

      Also by Michael Chabon

       About the Publisher

      At a literary party the summer before my first novel was published, I found myself alone with a writer I admired, on the deck of our hosts’ house along the Truckee River. People came and went with blue Mexican wineglasses and bottles of beer, but I sensed that, for whatever reason, I had the man’s attention.

      “I’m going to give you some advice,” he told me, a warning edge in his voice.

      I said I would appreciate that. I was curious to hear what he had to say, not because I felt in need of advice but as a clue to the mystery of the great man himself. He presented a smooth surface without chinks or toeholds, the studied amiability of someone unaccustomed to giving himself away. Advice might be the only clue I was going to get.

      The great man said that his advice was going to be painful—or maybe that was just in his tone—but he knew what he was talking about, and if I wanted to make a go of it as a novelist, I would do well to pay attention. The guy was nearly twice my age, but he was not old. He was young enough, for example, to wear black Chuck Taylors. He was young enough to smile ironically at himself, laying the Polonius routine on some raw hurler of metaphors out of UC Irvine.

      “Don’t have children,” he said. “That’s it. Do not.” The smile faded, but its ghost lingered a moment in his blue eyes. “That is the whole of the law.”

      I was due to marry my future ex-wife in under a month; my book would come out the following spring. It turned out that this conjunction of circumstances, in the view of the famous writer, was cause for alarm. Now, marriage was fine—in fact, all of the guy’s books were dedicated to his long-suffering wife—but if you were not careful, you would run a serious risk of damaging your career. After this one, he patiently explained, there would be a second novel to write, and second novels were notoriously thornier and more unwieldy than debuts. Following the inevitable sophomore cock-up, if I were lucky and stubborn in the proper measure, I would go on to tackle the magisterial third and fourth novels, and then the quirky fifth, the slim and elegant sixth, the seventh that, in some way, would recapitulate and ring the changes on all its predecessors, and so on, for as long as my stubbornness and luck held out. Unless, of course, I made the fatal mistake of so many would-be young hotshots before me.

      “You can write great books,” the great man continued. “Or you can have kids. It’s up to you.”

      I nodded, reeling a little at the prophecy he had just laid down for me, a career of struggle and triumph stacked up to the heavens like Babel, book by torturous book.

      “I never thought about it that way,” I confessed. My future ex-wife and I had gotten as far as the usual drawing up of rotisserie-league baby-name rosters, but no further. Did I need to put an immediate halt to these playful conversations, along with any more earnest ones that might arise? She was a poet, with ambitions of her own.

      “Poe,” he said. “O’Connor. Welty. None of them had children.” This was a list that, by implication, included him; he was a Southerner himself, and he and his beloved dedicatee were childless, too. “Chekhov. Beckett. Woolf.”

      I tried to muster some counterexamples, but alas, the one who came immediately to mind was my current idol, John Cheever, packed into a house in Ossining with his aggrieved wife and three children. I had just been reading the memoirs of his