Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  Sexual maturity may be the main theme of these stories, but they conclude with an insight into the ethnic identity of Nathan’s family, which has been only peripherally explored in the preceding stories. Several of Chabon’s other short stories—both in A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth—are concerned with characters who are ethnically (if rarely religiously) Jewish, but there remains little evidence of Nathan’s own Jewishness in the Lost World stories that precede “The Lost World” itself. The abiding social context of these stories is suburban America, and it can be inferred both from Chabon’s own pronouncements (“story, more or less, of my life”) and references in the text that they are deeply connected to Chabon’s own experiences of growing up American.[3] Such a perspective is useful but fails to offer much interpretative nuance. For Nathan, Jewish identity is configured as Jewish American identity, but this formulation leaves gaps that can be probed and subverted by events in his life.

  When Chabon writes of his dissatisfaction with the putatively “unarmed” characters of his short stories, he becomes complicit in the division between storytelling and artifice, as well as the distinction between his largely deracinated early characters and the Jewish history and mythology that inflects much of his later work. Jewish tropes are not absent from these stories until the destabilizing appearance of Chaya Feldman, but they are subsidiary—one of many story-narratives Nathan is acquainted with. “Admirals” concludes with Nathan imagining himself as the baby Moses, “floating among the bulrushes [as] his parents stood on the bank above him, their arms around each other’s waists, looking down” (Model 166). The relative incongruity of this passage suggests an awareness of Jewish tradition but also a disconnection from the quotidian reality that it functions within, an idea supported by the relative dearth of other dream-stories within these works. This helps explain why Dr. Shapiro trains his son in “famous black and Jewish Americans and their achievements,” but only among a list of other topics of presumably equal interest (153).

  Chaya Feldman spoils this neat reduction of Jewish myth into broader knowledge-culture by suggesting a form of Jewishness untethered from its “American” suffix. Chaya, who appears for the first and only time in “The Lost World,” is a deeply ambiguous and enigmatic character—a visibly lonely child who reminds the reader of the isolation that Nathan has supposedly left behind. Her walls are adorned with a variety of images and items that seem disconnected from one another, including a painting, a poster of Jerusalem, and (in a wonderfully bizarre example of Chabon’s descriptive prowess) an “old mounted deer’s head, with a split ear, wearing a purple beret” (Model 195). With this description completed by a pack of cigarettes and an Erica Jong book on Chaya’s bedside table, Chabon’s seemingly superfluous eye for detail ends up being significant through its sheer incongruity; these objects function together to reflect Chaya’s fundamental unease with the America of suburban Huxley, and her gentle rebellions against its constrictions. This unease contrasts with that of the more assimilated Nathan, who fails to integrate this experience of otherness into his Americanized worldview. Nathan’s sense of unfamiliar empathy speaks volumes about his perception of his own ethnic selfhood.

  Predictably, the sense of connection between the two characters does not last. The semifailed seduction of Chaya ends when Nathan admits his lack of sexual experience, and Chaya playfully suggests sending Nathan a letter from Jerusalem. When this letter disappears and reappears with a “strange and beautiful postage stamp” and a postmark “printed in an alien script,” Chabon is provided with the denouement of his story, and thus of the collection itself (206).

  The Chaya scene is not one of Chabon’s more sophisticated treatments of Jewish topics, but it nonetheless gestures toward the use of similar topics in later works—works in which Jewish identity is portrayed as endlessly pliable yet somehow indefinable, deeply related to the storytelling process. Despite this, readers should be wary of interpreting this scene as a declaration of intent that links the stylistic uncertainty of the Lost World stories to more vividly Jewish fictions like The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road. Nathan’s experiences are not far removed from the realist constraints of “late-century naturalism,” nor do they suggest a move toward the more playful fantasies of ethnic regeneration Chabon would create in later works. Interpreting the story’s “twist” as a turn toward Jewish-inflected magic realism may even be a simple matter of misinterpretation; it can easily be imagined that Chaya saw Nathan hide the letter, took it with her to Jerusalem, and sent it to him from there.

  Regardless of her role in the story’s plot, Chaya’s behavior remains inscrutable. The absence of motive and Nathan’s general failure to deal with his experience (he fails to understand, he fails to “get it”) is suggestive both of his entrance into the mystifying world of adult sexuality and the ever-increasing areas of misunderstanding that come with it. Jewish identity is thus configured as another aspect of unknowing, another means of defining selfhood that becomes muddled upon contact with another person.

  Of Dilemmas and Directions

  It is difficult to argue that the Lost World stories constitute a sea change in Chabon’s work; they are not at the vanguard of a new narrative style, nor are they thematically emblematic or revolutionary in their intentions. Chabon’s subsequent reluctance to engage with his short stories can seem disingenuous, yet a straightforward inversion of this reluctance on the part of literary criticism, giving them undue prominence, is an equally unconvincing strategy. A critical analysis of these stories may be obliged to consider their relative importance, given the increasing prominence and diversity of Chabon’s work, but answers may not be readily forthcoming. For example, the stories’ unique narrative construction may have paved the way for the consciously nostalgic technique used for Gentlemen of the Road, initially released in episodic sections by the New York Times, but comparisons of the publishing methods used by the two texts become problematic when broader context is taken into account: in terms of storytelling method, the two texts are extremely divergent.

  The same accusations can be made on the level of theme: the topic of masculinity would become extensively probed in many of Chabon’s subsequent novels and much of his nonfiction. The idea of intergender competition would acquire a great deal of importance in many of these works, modifying the processes of not getting it that are at the heart of the Lost World stories. Even this method can seem somewhat reductive, forcing connections where differences are more readily apparent—and perhaps, as Chabon himself suggests, more important. The answer to the conundrum of what significance the Lost World stories hold is perhaps best found in this very sense of difference, their idiosyncratic weirdness. These stories are immensely difficult to contain within interpretative models gathered from the rest of Chabon’s work—and that, arguably, is their greatest asset.

  The Lost World stories are useful for critical studies of Chabon’s work because of their frenetic uncertainty, the absence of the vague but omnipresent sense of authorial control that would be the hallmark of many of the fictions that follow on from them. Moreover, they are more reminiscent of memoirs of awkward childhood (parts of Joe Brainard’s I Remember, for example) than they are of the experiences of the uncertain and grasping men that punctuate much of the rest of Chabon’s early work. These stories thus instill an attitude of insecurity, uncertainty, and ambiguity in their readers, an attitude emblematic of the experience of growing up. The greatest success of these stories may be in communicating the difficulty of communication this entails.

  Written with a semi-ironic detachment that allows for a prose style focused on both pathos and style, these stories resist interpretation as much as they seem to invite it. Like all great tales of childhood, the effect is at once deeply familiar and utterly unique.

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Balz, Douglas. “The Different Style of Michael Chabon.” Rev. of A Model World, by Michael Chabon. Chicago Tribune 14 Apr. 1991. Web
.

  Benedict, Elizabeth. “Keeping It Short: A Season of Stories; Sorrow at the Mall.” Rev. of A Model World, by Michael Chabon. New York Times 26 May 1991. Web.

  Chabon, Michael. Gentlemen of the Road. London: Sceptre, 2008. Print.

  ———. Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. London: 4th Estate, 2010. Print.

  ———. Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands. London: 4th Estate, 2010. Print.

  ———. A Model World. London: Harper, 2008. Print.

  ———. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. London: Hodder, 1988. Print.

  Cohen, Josh. The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark. London: Granta, 2013. Print.

  Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

  Franzen, Jonathan. Farther Away. London: 4th Estate, 2012. Print.

  Hoberek, Andrew. “Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion.” American Literary History 23.3 (2011): 483–99. Web.

  Klein, Melanie. The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. New York: Free P, 1987. Print.

  Lorentzen, Christian, ed. Say What You Mean: The n+1 Anthology. London: Notting Hill, 2012. Print.

  Phillips, Adam. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. London: Penguin, 2012. Print.

  1. The literary magazine n+1 has been particularly interested in this topic, publishing several strident essays that critique the role of the short story in American literary culture. Chad Harbach’s essay “MFA vs. NYC” and Elif Batuman’s “Short Story and Novel” give particularly vivid (if polemical) perspectives on the bifurcation of the American literary market, which help contextualize Hoberek’s accusations about “workshop” fiction. They are both collected in the anthology Say What You Mean. n+1 released an edited collection on this topic, also entitled MFA vs NYC in 2014.

  2. This accounts for the relative blandness of Mrs. Shapiro as a character, as well as going some to explaining the vividly “American” setting of the last two stories in the section, when Nathan is living with his mother. The relative dearth of complex female characters suggested here may seem a cause for concern, but it is partially conditioned by the dense characterization and subversion of gender tropes found in other Chabon novels like Telegraph Avenue, not to mention the unabashedly ass-kicking female characters in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road.

  3. “Huxley,” Nathan’s hometown, with its name gesturing toward the futuristic polemic of Aldous Huxley, is reminiscent of Chabon’s descriptions of his own hometown, Columbia, and its failed idealism. For more information, see Chabon’s essay “Maps and Legends,” published in the collection of the same name.

  Part II

  Chabon’s Mysteries: Comics and Genre

  Chapter 6

  Comix Remix; or, The Strange Case of Mr. Chabon

  Stephen Hock

  “The Fledgling, Bastard, Wide-Open Art Form”

  Michael Chabon’s work demonstrates an abiding interest in genre, ranging from his engagement with comic books in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to his writing a young adult fantasy novel with Summerland, to his blending of alternative history and detective fiction in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Given the skill with which Chabon weaves various genres into his novels, it may be easy to forget that Chabon has pursued his interest in genre—specifically, comic book superheroes—not only in his novels but also by becoming a writer of comic books himself, producing stories featuring characters from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as well as doing work for DC Comics. While comic books serve in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as a means of liberation, aligned with a broadly liberal understanding of American history, however, Chabon’s work in comic books underscores the ultimately conflicted quality of the novel’s politics.

  This chapter’s exploration of Chabon’s work in comic books takes as its starting point the recasting, popularized by Art Spiegelman, of the term comics as comix. 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 that is, in Spiegelman’s words, “born out of a strange, illicit union of art and commerce,” another surprisingly productive co-mixture. Spiegelman’s phrasing recalls similar formulations in Chabon’s novel, including the following description of the state of the comic book in 1939:

  As with all mongrel art forms and pidgin languages, there was, in the beginning, a necessary, highly fertile period of genetic and grammatical confusion. Men who had been reading newspaper comic strips and pulp magazines for most of their lives, many of them young and inexperienced with the pencil, the ink brush, and the cruel time constraints of piecework, struggled to see beyond the strict spatial requirements of the newspaper strip, on the one hand, and the sheer overheated wordiness of the pulp on the other. (75)

  Akin to Spiegelman’s “strange, illicit union,” Chabon’s language of “mongrel art forms and pidgin languages” highlights the formal features of comix as a co-mixture of word and image, a genre built on the creative tension between the visual possibilities of the page and the drive to fill that page with words. At the same time, this passage also underscores the roots of the comic book in other genres balanced between art and commerce, the newspaper comic strip and the pulp. As Sam Clay, soon to be the writer of the Escapist comix, explains to his cousin Joe Kavalier, soon to be the illustrator of those comix, “Every little skinny guy like me in New York who believes there’s life on Alpha Centauri and got the shit kicked out of him in school and can smell a dollar” is, at that moment in 1939, trying to become a comix creator (94). While we might read Clay’s statement in terms of Spiegelman’s binary of art, or perhaps imagination (the belief that “there’s life on Alpha Centauri”), and commerce (the quintessentially American ability to “smell a dollar”), that reading runs the risk of excluding the middle term, Clay’s description of himself as someone who “got the shit kicked out of him in high school.” As will be seen later, however, that excluded middle proves key to the politics of Chabon’s novel and its comix spin-offs.

  Throughout Chabon’s novel, Kavalier and Clay are driven by the various co-mixtures of the comix form to explore new creative territory, a fitting pursuit for what the novel’s narration describes as a “fledgling, bastard, wide-open art form” (176). Most prominently, inspired by the experience of seeing Citizen Kane, Kavalier and Clay take up stylistic experimentation, a move that results in Kavalier’s becoming known as “one of the greatest innovators in the use of layout, of narrative strategies, in the history of comic book art” (361). Indeed, even before Kavalier and Clay are inspired by Citizen Kane, Orson Welles tells Clay, “Great stuff, the Escapist” (358). As the novel repeatedly reminds us, such experimentation is premised on the co-mixture of words and images that characterizes both comic books and cinema, their “inextricable braiding of image and narrative” (362). With its evocation of the “wide-open” spaces of America, the description of comix as a “fledgling, bastard, wide-open art form” also highlights the novel’s presentation of comix as a specifically American art form, echoing the mythic sense of America as a “wide-open” land of opportunity, offering immigrants and children of immigrants like Kavalier and Clay any number of opportunities for the freedom to build their fortunes. As Harry Brod comments on the novel, “It’s hard to imagine a more coming-to-America name than the Escapist’s secret identity: Tom Mayflower” (187).

  Of course, not every American immigrant arrived on the Mayflower. In that context, it is worth remembering that among the many nods to the history of comic books that fill The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the novel’s allusion to Art Spiegelman himself, in the character of Hal Spiegelman, proprietor of Spiegelman’s Drugs, the establishment young Tommy Clay visits every week for purposes of arranging the displays of comic books disordered by other customers (501–8). Spiegelman’s Drugs is also the venue where Tommy, the adopted son of Sam Clay, first mee
ts his biological father, Joe Kavalier. Placing Tommy’s encounter with Kavalier, a Jewish escapee from Nazi-occupied Prague, in a store named after Spiegelman, who rose to fame with the publication of Maus and its treatment of the Holocaust in comic book form, therefore functions as what Christoph Ribbat describes as a “meta-fictional reference to the adaptation of the Holocaust by popular culture” (206), and underscores Chabon’s reading of the history of comix in terms of Jewish history. Beyond the role of the Escapist as an incarnation of Kavalier’s twin desires to escape from and then return vengeance on the Nazi regime, Clay comments more broadly on comix in terms of Jewish immigration to America, “What, they’re all Jewish, superheroes, Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself” (585). This comment parallels Brod’s argument that “it turns out that the history of Jews and comic book superheroes, that very American invention, is the history of Jews and America, particularly the history of Jewish assimilation into the mainstream of American culture” (xix), a history the novel reflects in the transformation of Sammy Klayman and Josef Kavalier into Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier, a “pair of newly minted American names” that seem to promise success (148).

  “A Poster Advertising a Dream-Movie”