Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  While the title of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay seems based on characters rather than place, its title also alludes to the pulp and comic book world of Kavalier and Clay’s superhero, the Escapist, who is imaginary even by the already imaginary standards of superheroes, who fights “Razis” in an imaginary Germany where costumed heroes join the Allied forces. But Chabon also invents a Prague for Josef Kavalier, one that includes not only stage magic but a real Golem, even if Chabon will not imagine a Europe without Nazis. On the other side of the Atlantic, Chabon creates the world of late-1930s Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn, with Sammy Clayman and Josef’s comic book collaborations and the rise and fall of the superhero’s golden age. These places do not exist today, if they ever did, yet these worlds naturally intersect and cohere in Chabon’s novel.

  The Sitka, Alaska, of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union seems even more imaginary, even if Sitka itself is not. In his alternate history, his “What if?” in the Marvel Comics tradition, Chabon imagines a Jewish state not placed contentiously in the Middle East but rather somewhere no one would fight over it. And even within this imagined universe, we see the doubly imagined world of the Jewish hard-boiled detective novel, Yiddish-speaking flatfoots and underworld goons, a fantasy genre that becomes palpable in the book’s pages, its conventions invented as the novel progresses. This Sitka, Chabon writes, was inspired by Say It in Yiddish, “a book that proposes a world that never was and might have been, and makes it all feel absurdly and beautifully ordinary” (Maps and Legends 184). Rather than using language to invent a place, here Chabon invents a place to use a language.

  While Benjamin Percy writes in his book review that “Telegraph Avenue aligns itself more with [Chabon’s] earlier pre-Marvel novels—about real people in the real world, such as in the remarkable Wonder Boys,” he misses the magic of the seemingly realistic novels. Despite seeming to be based on Oakland, despite the voluminous attention to real-life detail with occasional real-life people—including a pre-presidential Barack Obama—thrown in for good measure, Telegraph Avenue, is, like Summerland, set in an imaginary place, a fantasy that exists only on the pages of the book and the author’s and reader’s minds. By most standards—certainly not those set by The Dictionary of Imaginary Places—Telegraph Avenue contains no imaginary places at all. Its setting is a real, identifiable place. No one invents any superheroes, although there are plenty of allusions; his Oakland does not speak Yiddish, although several prominent characters are Jewish. Writing about his novel in the New York Times Magazine, however, Chabon returns to his primal scene, Columbia, Maryland, and the notion of using stories to recreate lost lands:

  In the fall of 1969, when I was 6, my family moved to Columbia, Md. Columbia was a new town, a planned community, a City of the Future built ex nihilo in the middle of what had been tobacco country, about 30 miles from Washington. It was avowedly utopian in its aims, transformative in its ambitions. It featured large, well-tended swaths of public open space, schools without classrooms, accessible public transportation, a single ecumenical worship center shared by all faiths, streets named for the works of great poets and novelists.

  Unlike the similar description of Columbia in his previous essay, however, this time Chabon’s point is not only that the place emerged from the map, and not vice versa, but also that “most wondrously of all, this particular City of the Future was integrated.” Its racial dynamic imprinted itself in Chabon’s imagination, so that many years later,

  after moving to the East Bay, I walked into one of those used-vinyl soul taverns, just on the Oakland side of the city line. There was a big black dude working the counter and a little white guy carrying in boxes from the back. The morning’s customers had arranged themselves at the front counter—old, young, black, white and brown, Jews and gentiles, a dentist, a guy out of work—theorizing, opining, tearing off woof tickets. Hanging together . . . Not long after that, the shop went out of business—it is in the nature of Utopia to go out of business—and it has never really quite been replaced. And so, once again, as in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, I found myself obliged, and eager, to recreate through fiction, through storytelling and prose, the lost utopia that never quite happened, that I never quite knew, that I have never since forgotten and that I have been losing, and longing for, all my life.

  Chabon’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” begins, “I write from the place I live: in exile” (Maps and Legends 169). The title is from Salman Rushdie, who, in his own “Imaginary Homelands” essay, explains his title this way:

  It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (10)

  Despite that Chabon’s exile could not be more different from Rushdie’s multiple and life-threatening exiles, Chabon’s novels demonstrate that exile may be the quintessential condition of the artist, or even modernity: exile from Columbia, which is no longer the map or utopia of Chabon’s youth; from the era of Jewish immigration and first-generation American identity, with its good war and golden age comic books, its greatest generation that Chabon was born too late to experience but expresses apt ambivalence for nonetheless; from a Jewish land that never existed and is imperiled even in Chabon’s own imagination. For Michael Chabon and Salman Rushdie, if unlike George Carlin, being safe at home is the greatest wish imaginable.

  What kind of novelist is Michael Chabon, then? Despite writing best-selling novels and winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, Chabon, born in 1963, has not received the same critical attention or academic admiration as his contemporaries, David Foster Wallace (1962), Jonathan Franzen (1959), or Jonathan Lethem (1964). This is, in part, because of critics’ need to categorize. Rightly or wrongly, Wallace has become his generation’s face of postmodernism, while Franzen represents the contemporary social novel; despite their differences, both write “literary fiction.” By contrast, Chabon’s work has realistic internal character development and plotlines but, after his debut as a writer of straightforward literary fiction, Chabon has gleefully created intersections between disparate genres, just as Summerland’s galls bridge worlds from which stories emerge. Especially in Summerland, but certainly in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Telegraph Avenue, and like the unfinished novel that Grady Tripp writes in Wonder Boys, itself based on Chabon’s abandoned project, 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. Yet John Barth, one of the writers most associated with literary postmodernism, has clearly articulated that in creating a story, the writer does not comment on or depict the universe, but rather creates it:

  My contention . . . is that a novel is not essentially a view of the universe (though it may reflect on), but a universe itself; that the novelist is not finally a spectator, an imitator, or a purger of the public psyche, but a maker of universes: a demiurge. . . . I don’t mean this frivolously or sentimentally. I don’t even mean it as a figure of speech. . . . I mean it literally and rigorously: The heavy universe we sit in here in Hiram, Ohio, and the two-pound universe of The Sot-Weed Factor [Barth’s most recent novel at the time], say, are cousins, because the maker of this one and the maker of that one are siblings.

  This contention will strike you as immodest. It is. (29)

  Barth positions his work as the opposite of minimalism: “maximalism,” a concept that literary critic Tom LeClair develops in The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American F
iction, in which he describes the “systems novelist,” a category that includes Barth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula Le Guin, and others. LeClair writes that “the massive novel—if profoundly informed, inventively crafted, and cunningly rhetorical—can have a greater cultural significance, more authority to contest the powers in which literature exists” (2). Indeed, Chabon often writes big books, ones that, as LeClair suggests, “proceed from, include, and frame information that most novels ignore. . . . The intertextuality of systems novels is polydisciplinary” (15). Certainly, novels such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Telegraph Avenue have been exhaustively researched. And for LeClair, “One of the recurrent metaphors in systems novels [is] the map, [which] makes clear the issues of structure, proportion and scale” (24), a line written in 1989, well before Chabon wrote any of the essays in published Maps and Legends but that could have been written with him specifically in mind.

  Yet characterizing Chabon as a systems novelist, akin to William Gaddis or Joseph McElroy, does not seem entirely right, either, and it is impossible to picture a YA novel by, say, Don DeLillo. Chabon is also a prolific essayist, book reviewer, and writer of short stories and novellas, capable, in The Final Solution and Gentlemen of the Road, of understated, subtle, and cryptic fictions. In the end, he is a writer of young adult metafiction and a Pulitzer Prize–winning adult novel about superheroes. A writer of literary multigenre fiction who loves—and loves to subvert—the conventions of whatever genre he appropriates. A semi-systems novelist and part-time minimalist. A world builder who invests round characters with emotions and vast interior lives. Chabon creates imaginary homelands with real Golems.

  At the end of Summerland, in order to win the final game against Coyote, Ethan has an epiphany about Jennifer T.: “Maybe,” Ethan suggests, “you’re a shadowtail” (397). At the pitcher’s mound,

  Jennifer stood there, turning the ball over and over in her fingers. A shadowtail? To be a shadowtail meant—what had her uncle Mo said? “You have to be something neither fish nor fowl, a little bit of this. A little of that. Always half in this world and half in the other to begin with.” She was a little bit of a lot of different things, she supposed. Her mother was half Scotch-Irish and half German, with some Cherokee in there, too. Her father was half Suquamish and half Salishan and half junkyard dog. Everyone said she was a tomboy; that was a kind of half and half, too. According to her Aunt Shambleau—it had not been intended as a compliment—she was half a girl and half a woman. She had grown up on Clam Island, and had passed most of the days of her childhood living in a world of her own, out in the wintry gray at Hotel Beach. She had, over the years, thought of herself at one time or another as a half-breed, a mongrel, a mutt, a misfit, and an odd-ball. It had never occurred to her to think of herself as a shadowtail, or to consider that you could find power in being caught between two worlds. (398)

  Living outside of a clear category is not easy, but Jennifer T. recognizes, and seizes, the strength and power that come from spanning multiple worlds. Through his novels, so does Michael Chabon.

  Works Cited

  Barth, John. “More on the Same Subject.” 1960. The Friday Book. New York: Putnam, 1984. 26–29.

  Bresnick, Adam. “Take That, Harry Potter!” Rev. of Summerland, by Michael Chabon. Los Angeles Times 29 Sept. 2002: R.4.

  Bright, Amy. “‘A Game of Worlds’: Crossing Mythologies on Michael Chabon’s Summerland.” “Curious, if True”: The Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Amy Bright. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge, 2012. 91–115.

  Carlin, George. “Baseball and Football.” An Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo. Atlantic, 1975. CD.

  Chabon, Michael. Maps and Legends. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008.

  ———. “O. J. Simpson, Racial Utopia and the Moment That Inspired My Novel.” New York Times Magazine 27 Sept. 2012.

  ———. Summerland. New York: Hyperion, 2002.

  Colbran, Louise. A Dangerous Fiction: Subverting Hegemonic Masculinity through the Novels of Michael Chabon and Tom Wolfe. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

  Grant, Gavin J. “Michael Chabon Interview.” Booksense.com. 2002. Web.

  Hansen, Liane. “Interview: Author Michael Chabon Discusses His New Fantasy Book, Summerland.” Weekend Edition Sunday (NPR), n.d. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

  Lacayo, Richard. “Kids Are Us!” Time 160.13 (2002): 68. MAS Ultra—School Edition. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

  LeClair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.

  Lee, Patrick. “Pottermania Lives On in College Classrooms.” CNN-U. Web. 25 Mar. 2008.

  Lipsyte, Robert. “Field of Really Strange Dreams.” Rev. of Summerland, by Michael Chabon. New York Times 17 Nov. 2002. Web.

  Manguel, Alberto, and Gianni Guadalupi. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Toronto: Vintage, 2001.

  Murray, Noel. Rev. of Summerland, by Michael Chabon. AV Club 11 Oct. 2002. Web.

  Percy, Benjamin. “Michael Chabon’s Strange New Sound.” Rev. of Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon. Esquire. 4 Sept. 2012. Web.

  Rev. of Summerland. School Library Journal, Curriculum Connections 49.10 (Oct. 2003): 68.

  Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands.” 1982. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta, 1991. 9–21.

  “Summerland.” Book Wizard. Teachers. Scholastic, n.d. Web. 19 Aug. 2013.

  Timberg, Scott. “The Idea Hit Him Right in the Kishkes.” Los Angeles Times 1 May 2007.

  Part I

  Chronicling Popular Culture

  Chapter 2

  The Dudes Abide

  Bob Batchelor

  Examining Clinton-Era Identity in Wonder Boys and The Big Lebowski

  I feel your pain. I feel your pain.—Bill Clinton, 1992

  Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski and Grady Tripp could be cousins: each is (among other things) middle aged, slovenly, smart-alecky, quick with a sarcastic remark or grin, smart, lazy, ill focused, and often drunk or high. Together, their respective shenanigans and responses to crises capture the spirit of the 1990s, a decade important in contemporary American history and culture, yet somewhat overlooked in comparison to its flashier neighbors, the me-centric, self-absorbed era of the 1980s and the 9/11-dominated 2000s.

  Published in 1995 and made into a film released in 2000, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys focuses on a bloated, blocked creative writing professor as he attempts to navigate his chaotic life, which seems on the verge of spiraling out of control. In The Big Lebowski (1998), Ethan and Joel Coen create a modern-day film noir set in early 1990s Los Angeles at the dawn of the Gulf War during the George H. W. Bush administration. The film centers on a supposed kidnapping of a millionaire’s wife and the subsequent botched delivery of ransom money and its fallout. The antihero of the story is the Dude, an erstwhile slacker who just wants to go bowling, smoke marijuana, and drink White Russian cocktails—heavy on vodka and cream.

  Tripp and the Dude share more than body types and lifestyle choices. Though scholar ShaunAnne Tangney labels the Dude “a nameless, impoverished, collapse of a man,” she might have been summarizing either him or Chabon’s Grady Tripp (205). The latter has shown brief glimpses of brilliance as an author with a critically acclaimed novel under his belt, but these days are clearly long gone. The current iteration is a burned-out creative writing professor who cannot find a story in his one-thousand-plus-page work in progress. As a result, he makes his way through a third marriage and nearly botches the relationship with his pregnant mistress, who happens also to be the chancellor of the university where he teaches and wife of his direct boss, the chair of the English department.

  Taken together, the Dude and Grady offer insight into American male identity in the 1990s, particularly in the popular culture depiction of middle-aged white men of their era. In addition to being slovenly and doughy, yet charming and oddly handsome, there are vestiges of the 1960s in both characters. Their perspectives are derived from th
at decade and perhaps symbolize a longing to return to that nostalgic free-love era after the harshness of the money-grabbing 1980s. As symbols of 1960s era America, Grady and the Dude represent the nation’s continuing challenge in making sense of the decade of the characters’ youth. Drawing a line from these fictionalized characters to the real world, one must acknowledge the symbiosis between them and President Bill Clinton. The physical similarities are clear, as well as the laid-back attitudes. From an ideological perspective, both the fictional characters and Clinton himself were viewed as stand-ins for how scholars, journalists, writers, and others would determine the legacy of the 1960s, which ever since that era has seemed to undergo constant renegotiation.

  The president, for better and worse, dominated the decade, first in his meteoric rise to national prominence, and later through a series of personal failings, culminating in the Monica Lewinsky affair and impeachment. The president’s largesse at the center of popular culture makes it impossible to examine mainstream masculinity in the 1990s without assessing his role in defining and transforming manhood in that era. What emerges from an assessment of the works by the Coen brothers and Chabon is a study of middle-aged men that helps us better comprehend the changing nature of manhood and identity in the late twentieth century.

  The connection between Lebowski, Clinton, and Tripp 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.