11. For more on contemporary American fiction and television, please refer to Jonathan Franzen’s “The Reader in Exile” (2002), Jonathan Lethem’s “The Disappointment Artist: Mrs. Neverbody vs. Edward Dahlberg” (2005), and David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibas Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1998).
12. Davis and Womack have identified what they call the “pop-cultural inroad[s]” of Pulp Fiction. Rather than reading Tarantino’s use of popular culture as a “lust for the flashy entrails of pop culture over the sublime qualities of artistic substance,” they argue that Pulp Fiction actually “explore[s] ethical and philosophical questions regarding faith, morality, commitment, and the human community” (60–61). According to Davis and Womack, one aspect of this ethical framework is the attempt “to establish a community not only among [Tarantino’s] fictional characters but with his viewing audience as well. The witty repartee that many critics praise as the film’s singular strength in fact affords its audience with a pop-cultural inroad to Tarantino’s fictive world” (61). In their discussion of Tarantino’s “community” building, they cite Martha Nussbaum’s claims in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) that “the search for the good human life invariably includes ‘joke telling, hospitality, friendship, love itself’” (Davis and Womack, quoting Nussbaum 61).
13. Telegraph Avenue takes place during the summer of 2004. Although this is several months after the spring 2004 release of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, the majority of references in Chabon’s novel focus on the first volume of the film, with only the revelation of the real name of “The Bride” (Uma Thurman) as “Beatrix Kiddo” (246) suggesting the specific familiarity of Chabon’s characters with the second film.
14. Chabon has previously discussed his love of the novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Introduction to McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Secrets (xi) and “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story” in Maps and Legends [15, 20]). In the character of Peter Van Eder, Chabon creates a multipart Nabokovian academic satire.
15. See, for example, Jenkins’s introduction (“Worship at the Altar of Convergence: A New Paradigm for Understanding Media Change”) in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006).
16. Whether Chabon is aware of Jameson’s work or its long cultural afterlife, Chabon’s discussion of Star Wars (1977) in his Manhood for Amateurs essay “The Omega Glory” (258) recalls Jameson’s discussion of Star Wars as “nostalgia film” in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1983), the essay that would later develop into Jameson’s book-length study, Postmodernism.
17. See, for example, Van Eder’s discussion of Tarantino’s comments on Vincente Minnelli musicals (Telegraph 97) and compare with Tarantino’s own comments (Fuller xv).
18. Tarantino, incidentally, appears to identify himself as a “cultural magpie” through his suggestive use of a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon at the conclusion of Kill Bill, Vol. 2.
Chapter 4
Driving Away
Charli Valdez
Muscle Cars, Loss, and Unrequited Travels with Chabon
The car in the United States has always signified and signified loudly. Muscle cars embody power and largesse, foreign luxury cars financial actualization, convertibles freedom and independence, and even the Prius has come to signify environmental compassion and (carbon) civic duty. Chabon’s fiction has a place in this cultural discourse, speaks even to Fitzgerald’s consideration of this most American of themes. While the cars that inhabit Chabon’s fiction enable intimate interactions between characters that wouldn’t have been possible at home, in contrast to the empowering significations above, the cars also figure for literal, symbolic, and emotional loss.
Douglas Fowler, in “The Short Fiction of Michael Chabon: Nostalgia in the Very Young,” notes in passing a car accident that ends the promising career of a baseball star in one of Michael Chabon’s stories. He even cites The Great Gatsby but otherwise does not attend to the quintessentially American motif of the car and the road trip in Chabon’s work. In this chapter, I will examine four stories by Chabon in which the car, road trips, and travel figure predominately.
In his short story, “Admirals,” which was first published in the New Yorker in 1987, the same year he earned his MFA, Chabon narrates one of the various road trips that figure in his early short stories. This story—which is expanded upon in the 1990 New Yorker publication of “The Lost World,” and the 1991 collection, A Model World and Other Stories—tells how Nathan Shapiro’s relationship to his father is invigorated through newly possible dynamics and perspectives that have been set into motion by the road trip itself. For example, at one point in the story Nathan gives up his pocket change for the parking meter. “For the first time, he made his father a loan” (35). Nathan literally “trembles” at the act. Despite the promise of a new, or renewed, relationship with his father, Nathan is left deflated and claustrophobic in the story that ends with him having difficulty sleeping until he dreams his parents back into a singing reunion.
In “The Lost World” Nathan is an adolescent traveling in a car that at first glance appears to signify a departure from the claustrophobic vehicular references in “Admirals.” Nathan and his friends travel in an outsized car that invokes the classic American imagination of the car as large, powerful, and enabling. The loss that is delivered in the story—the plot centers on him trying and failing to engage Chaya in a sexual and romantic relationship—is prefigured by the Ford LTD and the travelers of the story who encroach upon Nathan’s world and then disappear from his life.
Meanwhile, Eddie Zwang, the protagonist of “Mrs. Box,” drives around Portland in a Volvo, which, as Eddie imagines, a Sikh wants to repossess. The Sikh drives a Ford LTD that is immediately identified with (the threat of) loss or dispossession. While Eddie’s movement initially insinuates the raw power of a car—to be able to go wherever one cares to go—by the end he had been dispossessed of his Volvo and his tenuous connections to his previous life.
Finally, in “Along the Frontage Road,” a story in which the reader’s attention is drawn initially to the detritus by the side of the road, it is the red Firebird that exacts the reader’s attention and then drives away. The father and son protagonists of the story arrive in a vehicle that is never mentioned nor seen.
Does the vehicle portend, in Chabon’s novels, the American promise of freedom and independence, power and largesse? Although I will focus on his short stories in this chapter, at a glance, one can see in the troubled and foundering protagonist of Wonder Boys the antithesis of power and freedom. Crabtree is the first to speak his name, “Tripp,” greeting him as soon as he walks off the plane (7). And a trip is what it will take for him to get his feet underneath him again, to find the humility necessary to reconcile his writer’s block and place in the literary world. There appears to be a pattern, then, in how the car signifies in Chabon’s fiction, and it turns this most American of symbols on its head.
“Admirals,” False Vacations, and Pseudoplaces
“Admirals” is a story in which the symbol of the car, travel, and the road trip would beg to indicate the mobility, power, and freedom to choose, which is the domain of the contemporary middle class. In the postmodern historical moment when performance theory enables us to understand how we are empowered with the power to choose how we participate in our own social construction, the protagonist, Nathan, appears to choose the restaurant, and the father chooses to take the road trip, sleep in a motel, drive where they please, and go shopping, but choice, mobility, and freedom are ultimately, ironically, constrained.
While one might expect the car to actualize the quintessentially American symbol of mobility and freedom, at the opening of “Admirals,” it is actually depicted in claustrophobic terms: Nathan is wedged in the backseat behind his father in the opening sentence, his feet pressing up against it. He has been implicitly displaced by his father’s girlfriend, who sits up front. The car continues to be depicted throu
gh an interior visualization, emphasizing the claustrophobia. Even the barrage of questions at the hand of his father, the quizzing that Nathan cannot escape because he is trapped in this confined space, is emphasized by the movement of his father’s hand, “as though guiding Nathan into a tight parking space” (34). This gesture further emphasizes the fact that Dr. Shapiro is inattentive to Nathan’s perspective and needs (Nathan does not drive) and underscores Nathan’s confinement. Rather than a car on the open road, signifying power, independence, and freedom, the automobile here is the site of entrapment. There are many other kinds of transportation referenced in the story—ocean liners, sailboats, Moses’s basket, and small planes—but none provide any sense of escape or rescue.
In fact, “Admirals” is a story rife with broken signification—referents that point to nothing, events and relationships that aren’t what they appear to be, nostalgic pining for significations no longer present, and wrong answers. The family’s overnight road trip is a simulacrum of an overnight trip; it’s revealed that there is no reason to sleep in a motel as they are really only half an hour from home on a day trip to Annapolis. Nathan is “allowed . . . to decide where they would eat lunch” (35) only after his father has narrowed the restaurant choices to three. While he is allowed to order anything he wants off the menu, regardless of price, and although his father orders the soft-shell crabs that Nathan had anticipated and his younger brother, Ricky, orders shrimp and chocolate milk, the reader learns only that “Nathan preferred, as a rule, to order the dishes with the most ingredients and with the most adjectives applied to them” (36). After this buildup, specifically what dish Nathan has decided upon is never revealed. In part, this withholding simulates the fact that Dr. Shapiro does not know what was ordered since he has walked away from the table. Nathan waxes for the ceremony of the past when his father would remark amiably on their orders. The metaphor of both Orpheus’s and Lot’s wife’s backward-looking gaze are referenced earlier, just as Nathan’s father and his new girlfriend are “disappearing” into the restaurant. Both Nathan and Ricky have looked back over their shoulders to glance at the “mysterious” airplane pilot, ostensibly their mom’s boyfriend, as he makes off with another woman. By sewing into the narrative a profusion of broken signification, figures that move away, and nostalgic pining, Chabon renders a tone of longing and anxiety that culminates in Nathan’s insomnia at the end.
The story is rife, furthermore, with much spectacle, which on the surface might make the trip seem worthwhile but on close inspection is imperfect, dubious, or empty. In the restaurant, Nathan marvels at the “flock of admirals . . . their dazzling coats . . . their cocktails [which] flashed . . . the elegant lime in a gin-and-tonic . . . of the shining admirals” (36). The fact that these men are admirals is never independently verified. They are named admirals by the children, a decision which is later cast into doubt when they later playfully declare the fabulous car’s driver a playboy and millionaire. Even the water, as seen from within the restaurant, is characterized as being “platinum” (36), worthy of awe in and of itself, “as though a great, gay ocean liner were passing by” (36). There is no ocean liner, however, and the father stares “emptily” at water that has been emptied of ocean liners, leaving only a longing in the wake of their trace. These instances lay the groundwork for the spectacle of the playboy’s car at the end of the story.
This car, twice denominated the “fabulous car” (38), is the “purest” example of a simulacrum in the story. It is never definitively identified; is described as “airless and artificial” (37); is valorized initially because it “was like a colorplate” (37) in a book Nathan owns. Simultaneously, the car is compared to “extinct breeds” (37) of car, nostalgia inextricably woven together with the simulacrum.
Then, a lengthy description of car and driver evokes the morning Gatsby first calls on Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s novel is likely the first that comes to mind when thinking of the car in American literature. While Gatsby is seen by Nick, the protagonist, “balancing himself on the dashboard” (68), the driver of Chabon’s story, seen by Nathan, “stood . . . with one foot on the running board” (37). Gatsby’s car “was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns” (68). The famous hyperbole here, embedded within expanses of largely spartan prose, maps a critical posture that disparages such excess. This allusion reinforces the cynicism regarding Chabon’s fabulous car, which is described like one of the “extinct breeds of car that looked like small, wheeled mansions, with curtains, doorknobs, tiny lamps, the running boards like long verandas” (37). The lodestone of the story, then, this fabulous car, is signified by alluding to other depictions of cars—the one an exceedingly famous symbol from the book of fiction, The Great Gatsby, the other in an unknown and apparently fictional yet familiar picture book, The History of the Motor Car. While the former is perhaps the most famous American novel of the twentieth century, the latter appears not to be an actual book in fact, but rather to be a fabricated and Borgesian illustrative reference text.
Nathan even characterizes the spectacle of the fine car at the end of the story as the kind of automobile that one is simply “supposed to look at” (38). This layered vehicular event dangles a glittering silver life before Nathan. In watching his father long for the car and engage with the patronizing driver, he identifies it and everything it signifies as beyond reach. What’s left for Nathan to feel but entrapped? Ricky wonders if the car can go one hundred miles an hour and when he learns that it is indeed capable of more than just being looked at, he chastises Nathan for having lied to him, crying, “It does go” (38). Although Ricky doesn’t appreciate Nathan’s sarcasm regarding the car-as-spectacle, he and Nathan both watch their father watch the fabulous car disappear, understanding that Dr. Shapiro has been patronized by the driver and demeaned by his proximity to the car. Dr. Shapiro is identified by Ricky in that moment as being merely a psychiatrist, not a playboy.
The resulting anxiety felt by Nathan’s (disappearing) father is then displaced as he “bought his sons several bright things that they had not asked for” (38). Dr. Shapiro attempts to buy back the pleasure that being on a trip demands. The excess demonstrated in that act of consumption arises earlier in the story as well. In the restaurant Dr. Shapiro tells Nathan to order whatever he wants and not to worry about the price. While Nathan “adores” (36) this latter gesture, Paul Fussell, in Abroad, comments on the economics of tourism and how tourists “derive secret pleasure from posing momentarily as a member of a social class superior to one’s own, to play the role of a ‘shopper’ and spender whose life becomes significant and exciting only when one is exercising power by choosing what to buy” (42). It is the brevity of the trip—one doesn’t have to sustain such expenditures—that allows for one to reach for the trappings of richer persons. Caren Kaplan, in her book Questions of Travel, insightfully accounts for gender disparities and male privilege in travel narratives and offers illuminating discussion of Fussell and his exclusion of all but British male travelers (54). Nevertheless, and despite his potential objections, this passage of Fussell’s is useful in reading the spectacle and simulacra of this American text depicting middle-class travel. As mentioned earlier, the entire conceit of this middle-class trip itself is significant only because it is a gesture of superfluous consumption. They don’t need to spend the night, but they do.
Nathan’s adoration of his father’s impulse to make their dining experience exciting, if not meaningful or even substantively intimate, is framed by Dr. Shapiro’s disappearing movements. His father disappears into the dining room then again disappears from the table at lunch to make his phone calls. This dynamic provides profound protection to the shape of the insignificant trip itself. How can the inanity of the trip come under inspection if Nathan is busy pining for his disappearing father
?
The restaurant in which they sit, Bonhomme Richard, is an obscure reference to the three navy ships of that name, one contemporary, one midcentury, and the first an eighteenth-century vessel, itself a renamed loan from France referencing Benjamin Franklin (Mooney). More than that, however, it underscores the hyperreality of the place. Fussell writes of the relationship between such paranormal space and tourism: “Tourist fantasies fructify best when tourists are set down not in places but in pseudo-places” (43). Pseudoplaces enable tourists to hold history and sociopolitical realities under erasure while they create the illusion of excitement by pulling out their wallet too often. This enables a safe, dehistoricized, and individualized interaction with the greater tourist site. For all that a story called “Admirals” about a trip to Annapolis might portend, the American military history and even the supposed admirals themselves are held off, beyond arm’s length, on the other side of the restaurant and even beyond verification. The trip ultimately includes no more than inanities: a round of who’s-the-musician in the car; the selection of a restaurant from the choices laid down by a tourism book; browsing shops; gazing at a fancy car.
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