Politics can't spoil this wild imagination

Font: Michael Chabon, however, has been sending messages since he published The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in 1989. That book, submitted as his University of Pittsburgh thesis, was secretly submitted to an agent by his teacher and garnered Chabon offers to model for the Gap and appear in People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People.

" Chabon turned both offers down, but ended up blocked with his follow-up book. "That was ? a failure," he says of the novel he agonized over for nearly six years.

Finally, he shelved it, harnessing the experience into his dizzy second book, Wonderboys, which caught Hollywood's eye. The film version of Wonderboys, starring Michael Douglas, Katie Holmes and Tobey Maguire, also earned Bob Dylan his first Oscar for best song. And that set the stage for Chabon's breakthrough, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay, the story of two cousins battling Hitler and puberty with comic books that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.

"It was confirmation that it was OK for me to keep doing what I was doing," says Chabon. "When I was working on Amazing Adventures, I often got puzzled stares and head-scratching. But to be told you did this loopy thing and it was OK, that made me think if I had another loopy idea -- like write a hardboiled detective novel in a Yiddish speaking Alaskan territory -- that it might be OK, too.

"
Like his hero Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, The Yiddish's Policemen's Union is a counterfactual novel imagining a different outcome of the late 1930s. "I was well underway with my book when suddenly one of my favourite writers, who had never before written an alternative history, comes out with a striking piece of Jewish alternative history, set during the Second World War," Chabon says. "It was a discouraging moment, but I was deep in with my characters, I had to keep pushing on.

"
Where he'd finally arrive, like in Chabon's previous works, is a madcap love story with one-ofa- kind characters -- a beautiful pie-maker's daughter, a half- Indian, Jewish Orthodox giant cop, a sexually confused messiah on smack -- set against dire times. Chabon says the Yiddish he grew up overhearing in his grandparent's home in Columbia, Md., may have influenced his desire to create this colourful, secretive world.

"It was a great vibrant thing, but there was also a shame associated with it, that it was a ghetto language," he says. "Still, like my great uncle Stanley, it had its enthusiasts. I'd like to think this detective story is something he might have liked.

"
In his work and his personal life, Chabon has always garnered attention. (His wife, Ayelet Waldman, also an author, made waves in a highly personal New York Times magazine essay in which she weighed her love for her husband against her love for her kids.) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union have both been optioned by producer Scott Rudin ( The Royal Tenenbaums, School of Rock, The Queen) and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is currently in production with Nick Nolte and Sienna Miller taking direction from Dodgeball's Rawson Marshall Thuber.

But with his latest, the author has attracted some unwanted attention, even if it is only from the New York Post.
"Now if it was the National Post, then I'd be worried," says Chabon, who has family in Toronto and Montreal and will cross Canada this September on his extended book tour. "Politics, religion, so much is in the eye of the beholder.

I'm just trying to tell stories. I get a flash, an idea -- a Yiddish-speaking, hardboiled detective!--and just think: How cool is that going to be?