Michael Chabon split his career in two with 2000’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Before then he was a Respected Young Novelist whose widely praised, commercially robust The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys mined the academic-bohemian nexus in the city where Chabon attended college. He also published two volumes of short stories, many of which initially appeared in The New Yorker. “Naturalistic,” Chabon came to call this mode, especially in short-story form; stories of “disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce — I guess that about covers it.” And although Chabon was never as dreary as this caricature, in Kavalier & Clay he became a different kind of storyteller — to use another term he means to reclaim, an entertainer. The title characters were two cousins who invent a comic-book superhero called — impudently, yet justifiably — the Escapist.