Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  Nor is this the only compositional issue. Although placed in coherent narrative order in the collection A Model World, the stories were originally published out of sequence and even, in the case of “More Than Human,” in an entirely separate publication (Gentleman’s Quarterly, as opposed to the New Yorker). The stories were thus intended to function as autonomous units, self-contained and not requiring previous knowledge of the protagonist. In this manner, Nathan emerges as less of a coherent character than may be supposed, having a playful textual construction more reminiscent of the intertextual role of Eli Drinkwater. This allows for the introduction of a related idea, that the development of masculine selfhood involves the exploration of a number of identity issues that subtly changes the subject-position afforded to any given individual. Such an approach necessitates an awareness of the gaps between these stories, the different Nathan Shapiros that coalesce into a single character, as much as it does of the many aspects that the stories have in common.

  Chabon’s unique mode of textual interrelation would be underplayed by many critics who would review A Model World. Reviews in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times would reinforce the difference between the two sections of the novel in stark terms, using the differences between the two sections to characterize what they perceived to be different aspects of Chabon’s emergent style. Both reviews begin by discussing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which had been published three years prior to A Model World.

  Elizabeth Benedict, writing for the New York Times, chided the novel for lacking “a true depiction of feelings that are darker and less manageable than joy and summer-after-college confusion” but lauded the Lost World stories for their emotional range. Douglas Balz, writing for the Chicago Tribune, expresses a similar wariness over “stylistic excesses and a limited range of experiences” in the earlier work before lauding the “incidents that capture the subtlest of feelings” in the Lost World stories. Both reviews chide superficial stylistics in order to promote the aspects of Chabon’s work that develop his skill in writing with pathos, and do so by immediately drawing the reader’s attention to the stories in the Lost World section of the book.

  Although the best of his subsequent work has arguably found a middle ground between elegant prose and the claims of pathos, the supposed conflict between the two areas of Chabon’s literary interest is indicative of broader trends within American literature. Discussing the trajectory of Chabon’s career, Andrew Hoberek discusses a move from the “approved workshop style” found in early work to “full-on genre fictions” like Gentlemen of the Road (485). Hoberek interprets Chabon’s career as emblematic of a broader transition toward genre models within American literary fiction, but the basic domains of interest—superficial beauty and conventional storytelling—are similar to those seen in Balz’s and Benedict’s reviews. What seems implicit in this model is that “workshop” fiction (a snide reference to Chabon’s MFA studies at the University of California, Irvine) is a genre in itself, a self-contained literary domain with its own internal rules, expectations, and means of transmission.[1]

  The American short story has undoubtedly changed radically in the years leading up to and following Chabon’s own use of the form, even though short stories continue to be published by conventional publishing houses—sometimes, in the case of writers like Alice Munro, sustaining an entire literary career in their own right. Michael Chabon himself has been keen to recognize these changes, and he has mused upon his transition from MFA stylistics to genre-fiction storytelling in various essays. Particularly striking among these is a short piece that Chabon includes as an afterword to his novella Gentlemen of the Road, which is worth quoting at length:

  None [of the stories] was set any earlier than about 1972 or in any locale more far-flung than a radio studio in Paris, France. Most of those stories appeared in sedate, respectable and generally sword-free places like The New Yorker and Harper’s, and featured unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short story characters—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. Story, more or less, of my life. (199)

  Chabon is careful not to entirely reject these stories or their literary mode (self-defined as “late-century naturalism”) (200), but the tone of the passage, with its dismissive listing of the characteristics of “the eternal fates of contemporary short story characters,” is reminiscent of Andrew Hoberek’s suspicion of the “approved workshop style” he finds in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Moreover, the use of divorce as a theme is subject to particular criticism; “divorce” opens, punctuates, and closes a sentence listing the thematic interests of these stories. The format of this list has the effect of numbing repetition, an overuse of tired themes and tropes of which divorce is the most egregiously exploited; Chabon’s construction of divorce thus depicts it as a thematic cynosure of his shorter works at the same time as it draws polemic attention to the topic. The adventure novel that Chabon decided to write (and that his readers have, presumably, just finished reading) is depicted as the antithesis of this format. The contemporary short story, Chabon argues, denies the pseudogeneric qualities of its formal apparatus, a repressive move that he seeks to overturn by an embrace of the unabashedly generic fiction that it superficially opposes.

  Chabon’s desire to blend genre fiction with conventional literary fiction is further explained in an essay entitled “Trickster in a Suit of Lights,” published in the essay collection Maps and Legends. Developing the ideas in the afterword essay to include an appreciation for the quality of “entertainment” in more explicitly generic fiction, Chabon takes aim at the rise of the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story” (Maps 6). In this essay he is less willing to take his own work to task, but the description could well function as a counterpart to the list of qualities described in the Gentlemen of the Road essay, which was published at roughly the same time. Shunning storytelling and entertainment in pursuit of the hermetic assurances of literary gravitas, the short story format has become stale, in need of a genre-based makeover. Viewing the twin complaints of these essays as compatible, the Lost World stories enter into an increasingly uncertain position. While focused on divorce as a central topic and revelatory in nature, the stories are nonetheless more bound to conventional narrative-led storytelling, albeit within a more unusual “snapshot” format.

  It thus becomes worth asking whether these stories go beyond the boundaries that constrict them; they are, after all, concerned with divorce (and what happens after divorce) as both their narrative and thematic emphases—separation and the desire for new beginnings are at the core of Chabon’s literary project in these works. It could even be argued that an attempt to move beyond boundaries, and the inevitable failure of this attempt, are the hallmark of these curious fictions. Ultimately, the indeterminate position of these stories is a counterpart to thematic uncertainties that provide the pathos that early critics were so keen to praise. As this chapter has already striven to prove, these uncertainties help construct ideas about masculinity in these texts, as failure and bafflement become the building blocks of self-identity. Responses to this model become pivotal to Chabon’s processes of characterization. On the one extreme lies an unattainable model of idealized manhood, and on the other the lingering shadow of a potential violence provoked by anger at this unattainability. Characters in these stories may be largely “unarmed,” but the violence that haunts the margins of their lives is “random” only in the sense that it is not comprehended, and “domestic” only in the sense of its being largely internalized. Violence is negatively associated with not getting it in these stories, and the most successful moments of pathos found in these stories are gained when characters develop through indeterminacy rather than
fight against it.

  Of Family and Failure

  The development of the art of not getting it is the narrative force underlying Chabon’s prose in the Lost World stories. This incorporates two conflicting processes—a negative, defensive mechanism and a positive, subversive mechanism—that function to constrain the characters who are subject to their whims. One of the more defensive techniques involved in the stories is a sense of what may be dubbed paternal automatonism: fatherly affection becoming displaced and mechanistic. Nathan’s father (usually referred to as “Dr. Shapiro” in the stories) is often depicted trying to inculcate a certain cultural perspective in his children by means of repeated intellectual exercises; there is little bodily affection between Nathan and his father, and Dr. Shapiro himself often appears remote and authoritarian. This process of intellectual development is foregrounded in descriptions of Nathan’s parents themselves; in the opening story, “Little Knife,” the father is introduced sunbathing “like a monument,” a counterpart to the mother’s “Disney whistle” (Model 132, 133). The metaphors, though disconnected from explicit discussion of parental alienation, become emblematic of it; the father is a stern symbol of triumphs long since receded into history while the mother becomes symbolically American, an every(wo)man figure constructed by Nathan in terms of the cultural landscape she seamlessly inhabits.[2]

  A counterpart to this process is seen in the effects that such explicitly externalized self-constructions have on the characters subject to them. Once again, the effect is communicated to the reader via metaphor; in “More Than Human,” the story that most explicitly engages with the nature of the father-son relationship, Chabon describes the father considering his son from a quasi-professional perspective granted to him as a child psychologist. Dr. Shapiro describes how “[Nathan’s] bright eyes behind the heavy eyeglasses looked false, a little out of kilter, as though his son were a doll of humble workmanship” (Model 147). The metaphor of a doll is potent, the crafting process itself representative to the work undertaken by the rapidly disintegrating parental unit of Dr. and Mrs. Shapiro. Moreover, the metaphor is repeated in the final story, “The Lost World,” when Nathan’s would-be love interest Chaya Feldman is described by the narrator: “She was a quiet girl, with a serious brown face and tangled hair, and her parents dressed her like a doll” (Model 189).

  Arguably, the tenuous connection between Nathan and Chaya is partly created by their experience of overbearing fathers, with Chaya’s “humourless and stern” father having a similar inability to construct his child in his desired image (Model 190). Dr. Shapiro may be more empathetic than Moshe Feldman seems to be, but his communicative failure as a parent is similar. In viewing their children as dolls, uncanny and liable to manipulation, these fathers fail to recognize how this dehumanizing process reflects their attitudes to child rearing. Dr. Shapiro becomes a monument, a repository of facts with little connection to the brutal realities of marital strain, whereas Moshe Feldman becomes an archetype, a caricature of an overprotective father. For all their good intentions, the fathers in these stories fail to appreciate the value of not understanding their children. The result is a violence wrought upon their family lives when these fathers choose to move away—a futile geographic disconnection that can only repeat this process of unknowing.

  Childhood itself is depicted as a mastery of different sets of languages, ranging from the dialect of popular culture to the specialist lexicons of different moments in childhood. The language of “The Lost World” thus begins to shift toward teenage slang, with Chaya as a “skeezer” whose “crib” (a term that invites thoughts of Nathan’s own sexual naiveté) Nathan will infiltrate (Model 188). Cars and malt liquor are the main common reference points between Nathan and his friends, and Nathan himself is scarcely recognizable from his previous incarnations, his body transitioning into its adult form. This sense of independent languages operating as markers of group identity is a repeated theme in the stories, the “soothing foolishness of words” (as Dr. Shapiro describes it) serving to create superficial links that create temporary and artificial communities of understanding (145).

  “More Than Human” makes this particularly evident in its description of the idiosyncratic conversational style developed by Nathan and his father: “They made up nicknames for [Dr. Shapiro’s] colleagues at Sunny Valley and for Nathan’s schoolmates, wrought long chains of bad puns, sang operatic versions of advertising jingles” (Model 144). This subversive playfulness, the comingling of the personal and the communal, is at once charming and evasive; Dr. Shapiro is avoiding the moment at which he will have to tell his son about the divorce that will shortly split the family apart (soon after that conversation, Nathan’s brother moves in with his father and Nathan with his mother). The form of language created by Nathan and his father is representative of a superficial connection that belies the uncertainty toward a conversation that neither party actually wants to have but knows that it must—revealing and enacting the story of marital failure at the same time. In these stories, language that enacts a connection masks a separation.

  This language model influences Nathan’s bantering conversations with his friends, which masks his own perceived separation from heterosexual identity, but it extends into other characters’ speech to become a general trend. Even Ricky, Nathan’s brother—despite being younger and thus (at least in Nathan’s eyes) forever in a position of relative naiveté to Nathan himself—becomes increasingly familiar with this mode of masked language. In “Admirals,” when Dr. Shapiro is making his own faltering steps toward postmarital life, Ricky makes the mistake of mentioning Mrs. Shapiro’s new boyfriend, Chuck, in Dr. Shapiro’s presence.

  Having realized his mistake thanks to a corrective punch from Nathan (violence is deeply connected to the breaking of separate language spheres in the Lost World stories), Ricky resorts to nonsense to cover his transgression. He extemporizes by including Chuck’s name in a list of disconnected rhyming terms: “Chuck, buck, duck, muck, luck” and (whispered to Nathan) “fuck” (Model 155). Ricky creates a language of mutual knowledge between him and Nathan that serves to obfuscate and hide unpleasant realities from his father. Both Ricky and Nathan seem to borrow this process of superficial idiolect from their father, whose language of sentimental duplicity masks an unpleasant truth. Ricky’s final “fuck” belies the nonsense of his earlier speech—far from being merely transgressive, this final phrase reminds the reader of the sexual mechanics underlying the attempted disguise, and underscores the importance of the shared (if not fully comprehended) knowledge of Nathan and Ricky.

  Connection and disconnection are plot devices in their own right, as well as metaphors indicating the tentative nature of the links between Chabon’s characters. “The Little Knife” illustrates this when it depicts Dr. and Mrs. Shapiro “clasping hands, letting go, clasping hands again” (Model 137). The trajectory contained in this description seems positive; the disconnection is only temporary. Yet the opposite formulation (disconnection-connection-disconnection) would almost seem to serve a more apt symbolic purpose—by phrasing it in the way he does, Chabon suggests that the subsequent connection has been undermined and is more artificial. The movement thus fulfills a subtly different purpose to its superficial positivity, suggesting not that familial relationships end so much as their modes of identification change. Nathan’s father will always be Nathan’s father, and Mrs. Shapiro will always be his mother—as well as Dr. Shapiro’s ex-wife.

  This is not to say that isolation and alienation are not active experiences in these stories; Nathan himself is continually isolated in his quest to gain a sense of personal identity through his sexuality. In “The Halloween Party,” Nathan is described attempting to communicate via the “telepathy of love”—yet if these stories make any kind of moral statement, it is that true telepathy (especially in love) is impossible (Model 170). It is little surprise that Nathan comes to find himself “isolated in his love,” as all characters in these stories share the same f
ate (179). Nathan attempts to mold his sexual identity by utilizing the hypnotic sway of a dominant personality and finds himself reveling in the resultant confusion by the story’s end.

  This uncertainty toward dominant and visible sexuality is part of growing up as an introverted child, suggests Chabon, but it is an uncertainty that can become internalized as a character trait when one reaches adulthood. In “Admirals,” Nathan’s father meets a handsome man (a “playboy”) with a car resembling a “small, wheeled mansion,” and the incongruous difference between the two men strikes both Nathan and his brother to be somehow symbolic (Model 163). The man’s partner, a beautiful woman who is immediately assumed to be an “actress,” gazes toward this man with a “look which, now that [Nathan] recognized it, seemed to convey everything that, Nathan imagined, constituted sexual desire, a look of soft, distrustful frankness, wide and wet-eyed” (165).

  Nathan’s recognition is based on his mother’s own looks toward her philandering lover—hence, perhaps, his idea that the woman is an actress, a term that suggests both her own internal falseness and the idea of her being his mother in disguise. It soon becomes obvious that this model of manipulation and sexual assertiveness is anathema to Nathan’s own perceived sexual role. Men like the playboy are representative of an assertiveness gained through an ideal of financial success in which sex is a matter of acquisition; an ideal which, for an introvert like Nathan, seems completely unattainable. Sexual desire, codified in these terms, represents both frankness and distrust, is both wide eyed in anticipation and wet eyed with nascent tears that symbolize the inevitable failure and disconnection that will follow. Sex is contradictory—it comes with its failures built in—and connections made through it can only ever emulate the tentative and deceptive love of one’s family.