He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989.

Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor[7] along with recurring themes such as nostalgia,[7] divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity.

"[7] He has written of his mother's marijuana use, recalling her "sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy's car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie.

Among his major literary influences in this period were Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Raymond Chandler, John Updike, Philip Roth and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

After the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon spent five years working on a second novel, Fountain City, a "highly ambitious opus ... about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida.

"[20] When he finally decided to abandon Fountain City, Chabon recalls staring at his blank computer for hours before suddenly picturing "a straitlaced, troubled young man with a tendency toward melodrama, trying to end it all.

In late 2010, "An annotated, four-chapter fragment"[21] from the unfinished 1,500 page Fountain City manuscript, "complete with cautionary introduction and postscript"[21] written by Chabon, was included in McSweeney's 36.

Chabon reflected that, in writing Kavalier & Clay, "I discovered strengths I had hoped that I possessed—the ability to pull off multiple points of view, historical settings, the passage of years—but which had never been tested before.

A hard-boiled detective story that imagines an alternate history in which Israel collapsed in 1948 and European Jews settled in Alaska,[28] the novel was released on May 1, 2007, to enthusiastic reviews,[29] and spent six weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.

During a 2007 interview with the Washington Post, Chabon discussed his second book under the contract, saying, "I would like it to be set in the present day and feel right now the urge to do something more mainstream than my recent work has been."

"[16] Telegraph Avenue, adapted from an idea for a TV series pilot that Chabon was asked to write in 1999, is a social novel set on the borders between Oakland and Berkeley in the summer of 2004 that sees a "large cast of characters grapple with infidelity, fatherhood, crooked politicians, racism, nostalgia and buried secrets.

"[38] Chabon said upon publication in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that the novel concerns "the possibility and impossibility of creating shared community spaces that attempt to transcend the limits imposed on us by our backgrounds, heritage and history.

[38] In a public lecture and reading of the novel in Oakland, California, Chabon listed creative influences as broad as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Altman, and William Faulkner.

[43] Chabon had previously weighed in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2010, having written an op-ed piece for the New York Times in June 2010 in which he noted the role of exceptionalism in Jewish identity, in relation to the "blockheadedness" of Israel's botching of the Gaza flotilla raid and the explanations that followed.

[citation needed] In an interview with the American Booksellers Association promoting Moonglow in November 2016, Chabon stated that his next fiction project would be "...a long overdue follow-up—but not a sequel—to Summerland, my book for a somewhat younger readership.

According to Chabon, the popularity of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had adverse effects; he later explained, "I was married at the time to someone else who was also a struggling writer, and the success created a gross imbalance in our careers, which was problematic.

"[57] In a 2017 radio interview, Chabon spoke of Trump: "Every morning I wake up and in the seconds before I turn my phone on to see what the latest news is, I have this boundless sense of optimism and hope that this is the day that he's going to have a massive stroke, and, you know, be carted out of the White House on a gurney.

"[58] In a 2002 essay, Chabon decried the state of modern short fiction (including his own), saying that, with rare exceptions, it consisted solely of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.

"[61] While The Village Voice called The Final Solution "an ingenious, fully imagined work, an expert piece of literary ventriloquism, and a mash note to the beloved boys' tales of Chabon's youth,"[62] The Boston Globe wrote, "[T]he genre of the comic book is an anemic vein for novelists to mine, lest they squander their brilliance.

On the other hand, in Slate in 2007, Ruth Franklin said, "Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.

[67] In Chabon's 1995 novel Wonder Boys, narrator Grady Tripp writes that he grew up in the same hotel as Vetch, who worked as an English professor at the (nonexistent) Coxley College and wrote hundreds of pulp stories that were "in the gothic mode, after the manner of Lovecraft ... but written in a dry, ironic, at times almost whimsical idiom.

One recurring character, who is mentioned in three of Chabon's books but never actually appears, is Eli Drinkwater, a fictional catcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who died abruptly after crashing his car on Mt.

"[73] Drinkwater was again referred to (though not by name) in Chabon's 1995 novel Wonder Boys, in which narrator Grady Tripp explains that his sportswriter friend Happy Blackmore was hired "to ghost the autobiography of a catcher, a rising star who played for Pittsburgh and hit the sort of home runs that linger in the memory for years.

"[74] Tripp explains that Blackmore turned in an inadequate draft, his book contract was cancelled, and the catcher died shortly afterwards, "leaving nothing in Happy's notorious 'files' but the fragments and scribblings of a ghost.

Near the end of Wonder Boys (1995), it is mentioned that, on the unnamed college campus at which Grady Tripp teaches, there is a building called Arning Hall "where the English faculty kept office hours.

"[77] Similarly, in Chabon's 1989 short story "A Model World", a character named Levine discovers, or rather plagiarizes, a formula for "nephokinesis" (or cloud control) that wins him respect and prominence in the meteorological field.

[78] In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a passing reference is made to the "massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology," ostensibly a building owned by New York University.

In 1994, Chabon pitched a screenplay entitled The Gentleman Host to producer Scott Rudin, a romantic comedy "about old Jewish folks on a third-rate cruise ship out of Miami.

Chabon's work, however, remains popular in Hollywood, with Rudin purchasing the film rights to The Yiddish Policemen's Union, then titled Hatzeplatz,[84] in 2002, five years before the book would be published.

The same year, Miramax bought the rights to Summerland and Tales of Mystery and Imagination (a planned collection of eight genre short stories that Chabon has not yet written), each of which was optioned for a sum in the mid-six figures.