When Ayelet Waldman reads something by Michael Chabon she doesn’t like, she takes her complaints right to the source.
Honey, this sucks.
Chabon quickly shakes his head. “No, no. It’s not like that. It’s more like, “˜I see a problem here,’ or “˜You can’t do this.’”
Waldman, a petite woman with flaming red hair, flashes an impish grin. “We fight about it brutally.”
“That’s not really true,” interjects Chabon, in essence arguing with his wife that they don’t argue much.
If the so-called internecine warfare is having an effect, it isn’t showing in the Jewish couple’s home life or work. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; she’s penned the best-selling Love and Other Impossible Pursuits and a seven-part mystery series.
Interviewing the Berkeley duo is less like a formal Q & A session and more like engaging in a three-part discussion over a nice meal (and Chabon and Waldman were indeed enjoying some stuffed tomatoes she had whipped up during an hour-long break in their writing day).
The 40-something pair — who met on a blind date in New York City and became engaged within weeks — pick up and run with each other’s answers, and a question about one’s books is just as likely to be answered by the other. Even when they have their Beatrice and Benedick-like squabbles, they seem to feed off one another’s wit.
Their large but unpretentious home is sprinkled with the vestiges of their four children: little shoes, little bicycles, little helmets.
The couple works in a small cottage in the back yard, sitting back-to-back facing opposite walls (Chabon politely but instantaneously turned down a request to photograph them in their workspace, citing an unacceptable degree of clutter).
Liberally scattered throughout the couple’s home are elements of Judaism: a mezuzah, art, and many, many volumes in both Hebrew and English. That should come as no surprise for any quasi-serious reader of their books.
The Israeli-born, New Jersey-raised Waldman’s Mommy-Track Mysteries revolve around the exploits of Juliet Applebaum, the oft-pregnant and unabashedly East Coast Jewish private investigator. The author, like Applebaum, has several children, is barely five feet tall, is a Harvard-educated former public defender, and is a proud and unambiguous Jew (though she likely never took a bullet in the leg while tracking down a murderess, as did Applebaum).
“I’ve always said, if you sell your books only to Jewish women, you can live very happily atop the New York Times best-seller list,” says Waldman, who began writing after giving up law to become a full-time mom.
Being a Jewish author “is a great tradition to be part of, stretching back to…” She pauses.
“Moses?” suggests Chabon.
“Moses,” states Waldman definitively, adding Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler for good measure.
Meanwhile, Chabon’s Jewish-O-Meter has gone up a notch with every novel he releases.
His 1988 debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, had more than a few Jewish elements, while his best-selling novel Wonder Boys was structured around a Passover scene. Kavalier and Clay featured scenes with the golem and its creator, Rabbi Leow, and traced the exploits of two Jewish cousins in the nascent comic book industry.
Chabon’s latest, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, takes place in a bizarro world in which Israel fell in 1948 and the Jews of Eastern Europe have been resettled in a Yiddish-speaking enclave in Alaska.
“It’s all a process of my increasing concern with my Jewishness and my Jewish heritage,” explains Chabon, an average-sized man with sharp features, steely blue eyes and flecks of silver in his beard and wavy hair.
So, how do you out-Jew Yiddish Policemen?
“I think,” says Chabon while cracking a grin, “that may be the peak.”
And, in much the same way cartoonist R. Crumb noted he only received grief about his politically incorrect representations of black people from white liberals, Chabon admits that he has only heard from fellow Jews that his latest novel might be impenetrable for non-Jews.
“There are a lot of people fretting on my behalf,” he says with a grin.
Waldman and Chabon wake up every morning at “precisely” 7 a.m.
“We’re big believers in discipline,” she explains. “If discipline wavers, then everything wavers.”
They get their kids out the door and then head off for some manner of exercise — a walk through Strawberry Canyon or a trip to the gym. By 10:15 they’re back-to-back at their writing desks, where they pound the keys until 3:15, with only a short break for lunch.
“For someone who has a real job, 10:15 to 3:15 seems ridiculous. But, in truth, it’s really hard to write. Five hours is a pretty good workday,” says Waldman, who is nearing the end of a first draft of her third non-mystery novel, which revolves around the lives of two Maine families interacting “in the wake of a tragedy.”
A productive day for Chabon and Waldman is to produce 1,000 or so words (as a point of reference, this article is 1,300 words long), though Waldman proudly notes that one time she knocked out 8,500 words during a fiery day at a writer’s colony — and once produced the bulk of a novel during a two-week retreat.
In addition to the five-odd hours a day at the keyboard, there’s also dealing with the business side of writing and myriad calls to agents and editors. Those, invariably, become three-way calls.
“Michael’s agent doesn’t even bother having a conversation with him if I’m not on the phone,” says Waldman with a laugh.
“Or, if I’m not around, they can just talk to Ayelet,” adds Chabon.
This all goes back to “honey, this sucks.”
Chabon and Waldman’s tendency not to mince words when summing up each other’s material has led to a more refined form of debating.
“It used to be a multiple-step process: “˜You’re completely wrong and don’t be an idiot’ to “˜If I was going to consider your stupid suggestion …’ to “˜Oh my God, this is a complete disaster, so I have to fix it in just the manner you suggested,’” explains Chabon with a wry grin.
Now, however, they’ve basically expedited the system to reach its denouement more rapidly: “We just don’t have time to spend an hour going “˜nuh-uh, uh-huh,’” he says.
On the morning j. met with Waldman and Chabon, he wasn’t working on his next novel — which most likely will be less Jew-centric than his last and also set in the Bay Area. He was instead finishing up a prayer for their eldest daughter’s upcoming Bat Mitzvah.
“You have to write out the whole amidah?” gasps Waldman.
“No, just parts of it,” Chabon assures her.
That figured to be a fairly quick and easy job for Chabon. But not all of his literary endeavors end well — or end at all.
As a young novelist, his follow-up to The Mysteries of Pittsburgh grew into an 800-page albatross around his neck, and he eventually scrapped the entire thing, salvaging “around 30 pages” for Wonder Boys. His entire first draft of Yiddish Policemen was written in the first person; after years of work he decided it didn’t work, and trashed it.
When asked how he could nix so much work in one fell swoop, his answer came incredibly quickly.
“It feels so good when you do it. You feel liberated. It’s such a sense of relief and release; the weight of carrying around this wrong thing — [losing that] compensates for the loss of time and effort. It’s like getting a tooth pulled or lancing a boil. The dread and terror is almost immediately replaced by relief.”
And, Chabon notes, his disarmingly blue eyes twinkling, it may well happen again.
Writing “never gets any easier. I continue to make all the same mistakes. I make them over and over again. I never seem to learn from them.”
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