Michael Chabon’s America
Contemporary American Literature
Series Editor: Bob Batchelor
Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel, by Bob Batchelor, 2013.
Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces, edited by Jesse Kavadlo and Bob Batchelor, 2014.
Michael Chabon’s America
Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and
Sacred Spaces
Edited by
Jesse Kavadlo
Bob Batchelor
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michael Chabon’s America : Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces / edited by Jesse Kavadlo, Bob Batchelor.
pages cm. – (Contemporary American Literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-3604-2 (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4422-3605-9 (ebook)
1. Chabon, Michael–Criticism and interpretation. I. Kavadlo, Jesse, 1971– editor of compilation. II. Batchelor, Bob, editor of compilation.
PS3553.H15Z75 2014
813'.54–dc23
2014006025
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues in Maryville University’s English Department: Bebe Nickolai, Leah Schwartz, Germaine Murray, John Marino, and especially Johannes Wich-Schwarz, who always wants to listen; arts and sciences deans Candace Chambers and Dan Sparling; the always wonderful Mary Ellen Finch; and the students who read and discussed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay with me, once they got over the shock of being assigned a six-hundred-plus-page novel.
And thanks, as always, to my family: Aura, Jonah, Dorian, and Daphne.
—Jesse Kavadlo
St. Louis, Missouri
Jesse and I have had the great pleasure of working with a fantastic group of collaborators deeply interested in the work of Michael Chabon—we would like to thank them for their insightful analysis and thoughtful work. We have also turned this professional project into a strong friendship and the foundation for many future collaborations.
Thanks to our editor Stephen Ryan for his continued support for the “Contemporary American Literature” series. We hope that this series grows into one of the best in the world for analysis of American literature. Thanks, too, to the Rowman & Littlefield team for all their support.
My list of mentors and friends grows with each new project. I would like to thank the following for serving as role models in my own academic journey: Phillip Sipiora, Don Greiner, Gary Hoppenstand, Lawrence Mazzeno, Lawrence S. Kaplan, James A. Kehl, Sydney Snyder, Richard Immerman, Peter Magnani, Anne Beirne, and Keith Booker. Many friends offered good cheer: Chris Burtch, Larry Z. Leslie, Kelli Burns, Thomas Heinrich, Gene Sasso, Bill Sledzik, George Cheney, Josef Benson, Ashley Donnelly, and Tom and Kristine Brown. A special thanks to the popular culture all-star team: Brendan Riley, Brian Cogan, and Leigh Edwards! I would like to thank my Thiel College friends, particularly Troy VanAken and Lynn Franken, as well as Victor Evans and Laurie Moroco, my colleagues in the Department of Communication, and other members of the Thiel family.
My family is wonderful. Thanks to my parents Jon and Linda Bowen, who provide undying support. I could not ask for a better wife or daughter—Kathy is an amazing scholar and soul mate, while Kassie is funny, artistic, smart, and beautiful. They make every single day better.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge Michael Chabon. When Jesse told him about the anthology, he said that no one would be interested in reading the book. Although we appreciate his modesty, we are positive that the results of this collection will prove him wrong.
—Bob Batchelor
Munroe Falls, Ohio
Introduction
Bob Batchelor and Jesse Kavadlo
The artist who works in words and anecdotes, images and facts wants to share with us nothing less than his digested life, his life as he conceives it, in the memories and fantasies most precious, however obscurely, to him.
—John Updike Odd Jobs (133–34)
Michael Chabon is one of America’s most celebrated and prolific authors. For more than a quarter of a century, his work has been anticipated, hailed, and debated by professional critics and those who read and discuss literary fiction. For those of us around for Chabon’s stunning 1988 debut—The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—the colorful, loopy script of the book’s cover is forever etched on the brain, as is the story of how one of his grad school professors secretly sent it off to an agent, which later fetched the second-highest advance ever given for a first novel. As a young writer often compared to literary stylists, ranging from J. D. Salinger to John Updike, Chabon seemed destined for greatness. The ensuing years have solidified the early burst of excitement, including the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000).
Chabon’s standing makes it almost criminal that literary scholars and academics have largely ignored his work, particularly given the broad popular and critical praise he has garnered. Always considered a “critical darling,” perhaps that recognition keeps scholars at a distance. Or, maybe, there is some notion that it is too early to assess his career, as if time necessitates that a writer be old and near death for such work. Regardless, neither of these excuses holds much water. The simple fact of the matter is that few scholars have tackled his work from a critical perspective, especially when compared with his contemporaries such as David Foster Wallace, Junot Diaz, or Jonathan Franzen. When looking back a generation or two, the number of academic books tackling John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth at similar points in their careers accentuates the point even further.
Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces rectifies this situation, putting a stake in the ground as the first collection to assess and analyze the author’s oeuvre to date. At its core, the book and its contributors demonstrate how Chabon uses a broad range of styles and genres, including detective and comic book fiction and essays and other types of nonfiction, to get at the heart of defining the American experience. As a result, Michael Chabon’s America provides context and exploration for understanding the author’s work from cultural, historical, and stylistic perspectives by scholars from across the globe, revealing Chabon’s deep international impact.
* * *
Jesse Kavadlo kicks off Michael Chabon’s America with an overview chapter that tackles the author’s expansive range and interdisciplinary vision. Focusing on the novel Summerland (often categorized as a “young adult” book), but then encompassing much of his fictional universe, Kavadlo demonstrates how Chabon draws on multiple traditions to portray the “epic battle of good against evil�
� that “helps us to understand Chabon’s philosophy of storytelling itself.”
What Kavadlo draws for the reader is a vision of Chabon that reveals his strength as a writer and storyteller, quite apart and unique contrasted with his contemporaries, particularly within the literary fiction arena. As a result, Kavadlo determines, “Chabon seems a world-building novelist, a term associated with science fiction and fantasy writers like J. R. R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin, more than writers of literary fiction.” Chabon’s catalog, therefore, is filled with American lore and legends, ranging from Paul Bunyan to Pecos Bill. “Chabon’s America is multicultural,” Kavadlo explains, “so his legends, not just his people, are diverse as well.”
After Kavadlo’s opening salvo, structurally, Michael Chabon’s America is divided into four sections devised to help readers make better sense of the main themes and ideas Chabon examines. The first section is “Chronicling Popular Culture,” which even casual Chabon enthusiasts recognize as a critical aspect in his writing. Like John Updike and other contemporary American literary figures, Chabon’s deft use of culture contextualizes and broadens his stylistic skills, resulting in deep analysis of the American condition in the contemporary world.
Bob Batchelor begins the exploration with “The Dudes Abide: Examining Clinton-Era Identity in Wonder Boys and The Big Lebowski.” The chapter assesses identity challenges created and confronted by American men in the mid- to late 1990s by looking at Grady Tripp, the protagonist of Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995) and the Dude, the central character in Joel and Ethan Coen’s film The Big Lebowski (1998).
What Batchelor reveals is the close link between the characters as representations of middle-aged white men of this era, as well as their spiritual connection to the period’s most dominant figure, President Bill Clinton. The connection between the three is subtle and often contradictory. At their core, each is likeable and heroic, but far from perfect. It seems as if each wears both his heart and foibles on his sleeve equally, for the world to see. This openness is admirable and falls in line with the traditional heroic narrative that demands a bit of failure among the hero’s triumphs. Despite each successive fiasco, the antihero protagonist emerges or reemerges a little roughed up, but still loveable. These are men who make both large and small mistakes, yet are given second and third chances to atone for them, like an old dog that keeps digging in the flower beds, but cannot be punished after flashing that hangdog sad face.
As we look back on the 1990s and attempt to make sense of its many contradictions and challenges, Batchelor argues that Clinton, Tripp, and Lebowski enable deep analysis into the men’s identities in that era and offer insight into masculinity as it has developed since. As artifacts that one might have used to derive significance in the 1990s or could be employed today to help make sense of culture and society, Clinton, The Big Lebowski, and Wonder Boys operate within a broader context that opens a window into the conflicted notions of identity and masculinity in late twentieth-century America. Into the early decades of the new century, society is still mulling over ideas regarding manhood. Observers today can gain appreciation for current challenges regarding masculinity by analyzing the Clinton years and how men in that era created individual and group images to cope with the times.
John Joseph Hess’s chapter, “Quentin Tarantino and the Paradox of Popular Culture in Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue,” reveals how one might read Chabon’s body of work—and maybe even much of contemporary literature—through the unlikely lens of Tarantino’s films. Further, Hess shows the connection between the filmmaker and novelist as they both disregard strict notions of genre, instead using genre as a means of expanding their storytelling skills. As Hess explains, “Tarantino’s films and Chabon’s fictions convey their serious enthusiasms for genre narratives. . . . With their similar interests in recovering (and/or inventing) undervalued and forgotten forms of popular culture, the careers of both Tarantino and Chabon over the past twenty years have been invested in the recovery and reintegration of neglected forms, genres, media, delivery systems, and figures.”
In “Driving Away: Muscle Cars, Loss, and Unrequited Travels with Chabon,” Charli Valdez analyzes the way the author uses cars and travel to illuminate interactions between characters that would not have been possible at home. Cars, according to Valdez, serve as a tool for Chabon to show a range of moves, from love and change to literal, symbolic, and emotional loss. Valdez asks, “Does the vehicle portend, in Chabon’s novels, the American promise of freedom and independence, power and largesse?” He then explains that the author’s stories use automobiles and travel to “emphasize the flux and postmodern instability that attend that freedom of choice and independence that, in turn, attend the American symbol of car, travel, and being on the road.”
The first section concludes with “‘Guess Who I Am Now’: On Communication and Childhood in Michael Chabon’s ‘Lost World’ Stories” by Mike Witcombe. Focusing on the author’s early work, but expanding the view to encompass much of his short fiction, Witcombe provides a strong framework in masculinity studies. What he establishes is the continuity in the body of Chabon’s “Lost World” stories while at the same time nicely differentiating between the more “coherent characterization and stable narrative perspective” of Lost World versus the less focused and more intertextual stories. Witcombe concludes that “the greatest success of these stories may be in communicating the difficulty of communication.”
The next four chapters in Michael Chabon’s America are grouped together as “Chabon’s Mysteries: Comics and Genre.” Stephen Hock’s “Comix Remix; or, The Strange Case of Mr. Chabon” launches this part of the book, which focuses on areas particularly important to the writer as he continues pushing the boundaries away from what an outsider might consider appropriate for a literary novelist. What the authors of this section demonstrate is Chabon’s deep commitment to genre and comic book tales, especially the superhero trope.
Hock’s close reading and convincing analysis brings together staples of Chabon’s oeuvre: genre and gender ambiguity. At the heart of Hock’s investigation is an exploration of Chabon’s work in comic books that takes as its starting point the recasting, popularized by Art Spiegelman, of the term comics as comix. According to Hock, “This revised form of the word marks comic books’ status as a co-mixture of word and image, even as it also suggests the status of comix as an art form.”
In “‘An American Golem’: The Necessity of Myth in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” Seth Johnson combines cultural history, historical context, reading of comics and superheroes, and even real-life comic book creators to provide deep insight into Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Johnson reveals how “Chabon illustrates, throughout the novel, the ways in which comic books reflected the concerns of the mostly first- and second-generation American Jews who created them, and, more broadly, the changing face of American culture in general.”
Via close reading and historical scrutiny, Johnson determines that the comic book “is not only a work of art, but also a distinctly American cultural artifact.” Therefore, Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, with its focus on the history of comics, “offers a window into the America into which superheroes were born, as well as clues as to why they continue to resonate today.”
Marjorie Worthington explores Chabon’s genre work in “The Chatter of an African Gray Parrot: The Final Solution as Postmodern Detective Fiction.” In the chapter, she discusses the ways in which The Final Solution is indebted to the mystery genre and Sherlock Holmes stories in particular. Worthington also examines the ways the book expands on those conventions, in part through its own indeterminacy and in part through its Holocaust context.
The investigation of Chabon’s detective fiction continues in “Genre for Justice: The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union as Reflections of Golden Age Detective Fiction Texts” by Monica Lott. She provides an extensive analysis of the detective fiction genre, showing w
here the author fits into this tradition. Lott explains that Chabon “demonstrates both a familiarity and respect for the classic detective fiction novel and a willingness to engage classic tropes of the detective novel.” From her perspective, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is closer to fitting in with other works from the “golden age” of detective fiction than The Final Solution.
The next section of Michael Chabon’s America, “Ethnicity, Gender, and Masculinity in Chabon’s Oeuvre,” addresses central themes that occur and reoccur throughout the author’s work. One would not be exaggerating to claim that Chabon’s hyperfocus on these ideas sets him apart from many great American writers past and present. Certainly countless others have addressed these subjects, but Chabon is rare in his deft handling of critical ideas. For example, the young author explored homosexuality and masculinity so adroitly in his debut novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh that many critics and readers assumed that he was gay and championed him as a rising star that would bring these themes to the mainstream.
In “Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road and the Rejection of Communal Identity as Heroic Quest,” Eric Sandberg assesses the serialized novel via close reading. By looking at the early critical appraisals of Gentlemen, Sandberg subverts the initial judgments, providing insightful commentary that illuminates the text in ways many reviewers overlooked. He then reveals how the novel fits into Chabon’s catalog, yet remains somewhat an “anomaly,” by examining its thematic elements that are consistent with Chabon’s other works.
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