Tricks or treats?

Writer Michael Chabon is a liar. He does this for a living, and he’s the first to admit it. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union has made a career out of inventing hokum, smoke and mirrors, and what he calls the flashy “suit of lights worn by Trickster.” All fiction is a lie, of course, but the best of it can reveal more about the truth than our everyday straight reporting.

But as accomplished as Chabon is, he has long made the case that some of the best fictional storytelling — and truth-telling — can be found in the so-called lower forms of literature: the Western, the detective novel, science fiction, adventure tales. All these genres have a vitality that can transport us within the space pods of story and character to something magical — and I don’t mean Harry Potter or the Twilight series.

Chabon has been chanting this mantra from as far back as his opening essay in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, a book he helped edit back in 2003. In it, he makes a claim for the pulp genres that usually get kicked to the curb by the New York Times Book Review and other snooty literary sentinels. For the McSweeney’s book, he corralled people like Stephen King and Elmore Leonard to provide specimens of what they did best: thrilling tales. No big messages, just action and adventure.

This fascination with “low” fiction spread to Kavalier & Clay, Chabon’s epic novel about the birth of the modern graphic novel, germinated by two Jewish refugees to Manhattan during WWII. Their comic book creation, The Escapist, takes up Chabon’s themes of immigration, identity, rebirth in America, the Holocaust and McCarthyism — all in the guise of a 10-cent comic book, and fashioned by Chabon into a ripping yarn to boot.

The funny thing is, a lot of people thought it was actually a true story; they still come up to Chabon at book signings and swear they remember reading issues of The Escapist when they were growing up as kids; they take Chabon’s craft for the gospel truth.

I can go along with Chabon’s claims about “lower” fiction’s powers. Even in cinema, directors like Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray possessed an almost hyperreal, lurid intensity and crazy energy (shot through with overstimulated Technicolor), even as they skirted the edges of exploitation. Same with Russ Meyers, Roger Corman and other B-movie makers who understood that dynamite works far better than twigs and kindling if you want to ignite something.

But in Maps & Legends — charting 10 or so personal essays about Chabon’s inspiration and the journey to his own fictional lands — it’s interesting that, even among the dung heap of lower fiction, the author makes distinctions between “good” pulp fiction and not so good. Thus, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a superior specimen of post-apocalyptic fiction, while others might not quite make the cut. Who decides? Of course, Chabon is entitled to be subjective: the Pulitzer he won confers upon him a degree of authority in the matter of fiction.

In the essay “Fan Fictions,” he writes of his boyhood attachment to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes; in “Kids’ Stuff,” he gives a primer on what children’s comic books should (and shouldn’t) be about; in “The Recipe for Life” he delves into his fascination with the Golem story (that of a Jewish man made of clay who, when breathed into life, takes revenge on wrongs and injustice). In “The Killer Hook,” he champions the comic book American Flagg!! and its creator, Howard Chaykins, whom he calls a “pop artisan.”

The pop artisan operates within the received formulas — gangster movie, radio-ready A-side, space opera — and then incorporates into the style, manner and mood of the work bits and pieces derived from all the aesthetic moments he or she has ever fallen in love with in other movies or songs or novels, whether hackwork or genius; the bridge in a song by The Moonglows, a James Wong Howe camera angle, a Sabatini cannonade, a Stan Getz solo, the climax of The Demolished Man, a Shecky Greene routine…

But for me, the real stuff concerns Chabon himself: how he embraced writing and wrote his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, while sitting in a cramped position in a friend’s attic one summer; how he plucked, at random, The Great Gatsby and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus from a shelf and somehow merged the two through the prism of his own experience; and how Chabon’s second novel — Wonder Boys — came about after traveling down an endless six-year blind alley with an earlier novel he could never finish writing (Fountain City) to produce one that sealed his reputation. (Come to think of it, that’s the same problem Wonder Boys’ Prof. Grady Tripp had. Maybe Chabon isn’t such a liar after all.)

The metaphor of maps and uncharted territory fits well with Chabon’s output: like, say, John Irving, Chabon seems bent on pursuing his sense of whimsy, so long as he knows it will lead back to the heart, back to story and what he sees as the truth. He’s not above admitting it’s all built on sand and illusion. But in a striking confession (in “The Recipe for Life”), he admits he’s often felt doubts about sharing personal material with the world, finding it too revealing; he’s come to realize that unearthing the true can be more frightening than any fictional boogey man he or Stephen King could cook up.

Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if he doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of family, friends or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.

So who guides Chabon through the perils of telling the truth? Back to Trickster again: he’s the “stealer of fires, the maker of mischief, teller of lies, bringer of trouble, upset, and above all, random change.” Seems like a contradiction, but for Chabon, Trickster (call him a muse, if it makes things easier) “goes where the action is, and the action is in the borders between things. Tear down the walls, the author seems to say, and dare to cross those borders.