Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  In the temperament of Bina Gelbfish, Chabon has constructed a foil for Landsman in the mold of the golden age female companion. Like Sayers’s Harriet Vane and Christie’s Tuppence (Prudence) Cowley Beresford, Bina engages with her partner in the act of detection yet is more than simply a companion in mystery solving. She also displays a feisty independence as a detective herself, similar to Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. She offers him the opportunity to show a side beyond the tough detective, a man who is hurt by life. Just as Harriet Vane helps Lord Peter Wimsey come to grips with the consequences of his detective actions—as when he sent a man to be executed for murder in Busman’s Honeymoon—Bina offers Landsman absolution for the guilt he feels over the loss of their son throughout the text. The reader is given a vision of their partnership having “endured that visitation of failure, failing every day for hours, failing in their bed at night, failing in the streets of Sitka. . . . And then there was Django, who took form and impetus from the failure of the Grinshteyn case, from that hole shaped like a plump little girl. Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away” (153). But Bina approaches Landsman and, in reaching out to him, gives him an example of someone living through the same trauma and finding a sense of peace.

  Optimism after Trauma

  Chabon offers an idealized ending that is typical of detective fiction works from the golden age. The conclusion offers the audience an awareness that order and peace has been restored and that whatever chaos had preceded, no murder, theft, or intrigue was left unpunished or undiscovered. Christopher Shaw states in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia that in works of detective fiction the “reader is invited into a world which is complicated but ultimately understandable. Genre fiction becomes a form which gives reassurance about the legibility and predictability of the world. The readers share a nostalgic metaphor of consolation and security as the predictably complex structures of plot work themselves towards their comforting denouement” (100). The mystery is solved, the perpetrator to be arrested, and Landsman is able to work through his trauma. By taking action and learning the truth behind the deaths of Mendel Shpilman and Naomi Landsman, Meyer gains agency. He is able to regain power, which will allow him to stay in Sitka. He also receives absolution from Bina about the death of their son; she reminds him that she, too, had a say in the decision to abort Django. At this, he considers, “Most of the time, Bina has, good and caring woman that she is, offered Landsman the words he wanted to hear. He has prayed to her for rain, and she has sent cool showers” (Yiddish 409). Chabon’s concluding words offer a sense of future promise for Landsman and Bina:

  For days Landsman has been thinking that he missed his chance with Mendel Shpilman, that in their exile at the Hotel Zamenhof, without even realizing, he blew his one shot at something like redemption. But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.

  “Brennan,” Landsman says. “I have a story for you.” (410–11)

  This text acts in an optimistic and consolatory nature, typical of works of classic detective fiction. As Heta Pyrhönen, summarizing the works of Knight (1980) and Porter (1981), states in Murder from an Academic Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative, “The genre is inherently conservative and reassuring, even soothing, because—thanks to its code of realism, which reproduces what is assumed by society to represent reality—it is not seen to contest habitual, everyday standards of perception and thinking” (98). Chabon has been piling onto Landsman trauma after trauma: the choice of aborting his son and the breakup of his marriage, the death of his sister, murder in his hotel, the imminent loss of his job, the loss of a sense of national identity when Alaska is given back to the United States government. Yet by the end, these issues have been resolved. He comes to terms with his sister’s death, solves the murder, and has mended his relationship with Bina, who has absolved him of his guilt. They can choose whether to stay in Sitka and can face the changing government together.

  In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon uses the tropes of the golden age of detective fiction novel to create a detective who battles his way through trauma by incorporating the act of detection and is able to reestablish peace through the inherently restorative power of detective fiction. He employs an alternative modern setting that is far from those used during the typical golden age of detective fiction; there is no British manor house or small village. Yet Chabon’s Sitka displays the same mixture of trauma and hope for recovery that is found during novels from the golden age. It is ironic that Chabon’s run-down Alaska of Meyer Landsman echoes more strongly the tone of Britain between the world wars (as described by authors during the golden age) than the tone presented in his novella that features the character that inspired so many of the golden age writers. Noting this feature allows a greater appreciation of Chabon’s ability to urge a reconsidering of golden age detective stories, as well as a reexamination of how novels of the golden age address issues of trauma, recovery, and moral relativism.

  Works Cited

  Brett, Simon. The Detection Collection. New York: St. Martin’s, 2006. Print.

  Chabon, Michael. The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. New York: Harper, 2005. Print.

  ———. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.

  Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” 1950. The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction. Ed. Deane Mansfield-Kelley and Lois A. Marchino. New York: Longman, 2005. 208–19. Print.

  Chesterton, G. K. “The Detection Club.” Strand Magazine 1933: 462–68. Print.

  DiBattista, Maria. Introduction. High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889–1939. Ed. Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 3–19. Print.

  Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Print.

  James, P. D. Talking about Detective Fiction. New York: Knopf, 2009. Print.

  Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Hampshire: Macmillan, 2004. Print.

  Myers, D. G. “Michael Chabon’s Imaginary Jews.” Sewanee Review 116.4 (2008): 572–88. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Feb. 2013.

  Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. “The Professor and the Detective.” 1929. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon, 1946. 110–27. Print.

  Porter, Dennis. “Backward Construction and the Art of Suspense.” The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981. Print. Abridged excerpt in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983. 327–40. Print.

  Priestman, Martin. Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Print.

  Pyrhönen, Heta. Murder from an Academic Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative. Columbia: Camden, 1994. Print.

  Russ, Joanna. “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 2.2 (July 1975): 112–19. Web.

  Shaw, Christopher. “The Pleasures of Genre: John Buchan and Richard Hannay.” The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. 95–111. Print.

  Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Print.

  Trotter, David. “Theory and Detective Fiction.” Critical Quarterly 33.2 (Summer 1991), 66–78. Web.

  Watson, Colin. Snobbery with Violence. London: Eyre, 1971. Print.

  Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Kill
ed Roger Ackroyd?” 1945. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. New York: FSG, 1950. 257–65. Print.

  ———. “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” 1944. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. New York: FSG, 1950. 231–37. Print.

  Part III

  Ethnicity, Gender, and Masculinity in Chabon’s Oeuvre

  Chapter 10

  Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road and the Rejection of Communal Identity as Heroic Quest

  Eric Sandberg

  In the world of modern American fiction rules are meant to be broken; it is a literature that refuses and rejects, refigures and reformulates, existing in a state of perpetual revolt against both the society from which it springs and its own conventions. According to Alfred Kazin, it was “born in protest, born in rebellion” and is built “upon a tradition of enmity to the established order” (31). If we accept this vision of a literature rooted in continuous challenge, the publication of Michael Chabon’s adventure novel Gentlemen of the Road in fifteen weekly installments in the New York Times Magazine in 2007 places him directly at the center of the primary tradition of the American literary world, precisely because of its disregard for a number of unspoken but nonetheless extremely powerful literary norms.

  Chabon is, in the first place, a writer of literary consequence and cultural weight. He won, for instance, the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and writes regularly on literary topics—Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce—for the New York Review of Books. The novels of this sort of author have not generally been serially published, at least not since the Victorian heyday of the form when Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many others, made regular and successful use of it. Following its decline from popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, serial publication became the almost exclusive preserve of less reputable, lower-status genres and authors. “Gone,” as one historian of serial fiction writes, “were the rising stars in literature” and in their place “unspectacular writers took up the slack” (Crawford). Well-known exceptions to this include Norman Mailer’s publication of An American Dream in monthly installments in Esquire in 1964, and Tom Wolfe’s biweekly publication of The Bonfire of the Vanities in Rolling Stone twenty years later, but nonetheless it remains generally true that to enter the world of serial fiction was for many years to enter the world of pulp. Indeed, more recently serial publication has been associated not with prose fiction but, as Derek Parker Royal argues, with graphic novels such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and this is not a form that has as yet achieved widespread critical acknowledgment (“Coloring” 12). Chabon’s choice to publish Gentlemen of the Road serially, then, while not unprecedented, is a provocative transgression of normative literary standards.

  So too is his choice to publish genre fiction. Gentlemen of the Road is frequently, and perfectly accurately, described as a “swashbuckling” tale of adventure, and this aligns it with the twentieth century’s historical association of serial fiction with low-status genres (Casteel 798). Examples of the connection between serial publication and genre fiction abound. The pulp magazine Black Mask, for instance, published several of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled novels, including The Maltese Falcon, in serial form in the late 1920s and early 1930s, while Astounding Stories serialized H. P. Lovecraft’s novel of otherworldly horror At the Mountains of Madness in 1936. However, from the perspective of the twenty-first century these are the most reputable instances of a type more generally known for its very disreputability. Chabon acknowledges in his afterword to Gentlemen of the Road that it is, if nothing worse, at least “incongruous” for a writer of his “literary training, generation, and pretensions” to produce an adventure novel (199). As he has argued elsewhere, the modern view of genre fiction is that it is “fundamentally, perhaps inherently debased, infantile, commercialized, unworthy of the serious person’s attention,” and thus clearly forbidden to an author of any literary pretensions (“Trickster” 8). And this view persists, in spite of the fact that many subgenres such as mystery and horror have, as Chabon points out, “rich traditions in America, reaching straight back to Poe and Hawthorne” (“Trickster” 6).

  An additional inflammatory contravention of literary norms is the inclusion in Gentlemen of the Road of fifteen captioned line drawings by Gary Gianni, illustrator of the comic strip Prince Valiant between 2004 and 2012. This generates another link between the novel and both comics, a comparatively low-status cultural product, and what Chabon describes as “historical swashbuckling romance” (“Questions”). This older tradition of illustration has a considerable history, as many nineteenth-century tales of adventure—and indeed novels in general—included captioned illustrations, such as Lancelot Speed’s glorious work for H. Rider Haggard’s 1891 Viking novel Eric Brighteyes, to take an example almost at random. However, adult fiction—much less serious literary fiction—is today rarely illustrated. The exception to this lies again in the dubious world of genre fiction. Gianni has, for instance, illustrated a recent collected edition of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. Anything that establishes a more or less direct connection between a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and Arnold Schwarzenegger (or more recently, and even less palatably, Jason Momoa) is clearly mischievous, if not openly rebellious.

  The decision to publish an illustrated adventure novel in serial form, then, exposes Chabon to the understandable, if predictable, disappointment and disapprobation of literary purists who wish to demarcate strict boundaries between high and low literary culture, and of those who find the “notion that literary culture needs more adventure . . . dubious” (Almond). For some readers at least, “the contemporary transformation of what counts as serious fiction” evidenced by the use of low-status genres by high-status authors such as Chabon, Colson Whitehead, and Cormac McCarthy is cause not for celebration, but for discomfort, and this is certainly understandable if not commendable (Hoberek, “Cormac” 485). If genre fiction is considered in some fundamental way inherently less valuable than literary fiction, and if one rejects the recent “tendency to confer literary status on popular genres,” the attempts of serious authors to employ and manipulate the conventions of forms such as horror or adventure will be simply unsatisfactory; not every reader is ready for the appearance of postapocalyptic zombies or sword-wielding barbarians in the literature section of their bookstore or library (Hoberek, “Introduction” 238). Nor is this a new dispute: in 1989 Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out that despite the publication over many years of numerous works explicitly identified as science fiction by literary authors such as Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood, “the Canoneers of Literature still refuse to admit that genrification is a political tactic and that the type of fiction they distinguish as serious, mainstream, literary, etc., is itself a genre without any inherent superiority to any other” (3).[1] Despite its long history and recent resurgence, genre fiction remains unacceptable for some readers.

  Chabon and the Problem of Jewish Fiction

  If Gentlemen of the Road is located near the center of an ongoing dispute over the role of genre, or more broadly the role of rules, in American literature, it has also been the target of a more serious critique as a work that is in some sense anti-Semitic, or to phrase it less provocatively, un-Jewish. Alexander Nazaryan, for instance, claims in a scathing review of the book that its essential problem lies in “Chabon’s inability to treat Jews with the humanity that has so often been denied to them.” Rather than the “real” Jewish characters presented by the canonical Jewish American writers Roth, Bellow, and Malamud, Chabon—and other members of the so-called “Jewish New Wave” such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Gary Shteyngart—produce only “tortured abstractions” who are “little more than evidence of their own nuanced sensitivity” (Nazaryan). This critique contributes to the ongoing jeremiad of those who feel that Jewish American literature has lost its way, “traduced its values and followed strange gods” (Wisse
322). The strongest form of this argument holds that the Jewish American novel is in fact “over and done with, a part of history rather than a living literature,” a statement that can only be tenable if based on an astoundingly limited and limiting notion of what such a literature might be (Fiedler 117). But Nazaryan’s attack is particularly—and particularly unfairly—biting in its implied association of Chabon’s characters with, for example, the hideous anti-Semitic caricatures of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, perhaps the clearest and most memorable examples of the denial of the Jewish people’s humanity.

  A more complex, subtle, and exhaustive, although still thoroughly unpleasant, version of this case has been made by D. G. Myers, who is, unsurprisingly, dismissive of Gentlemen of the Road as an experiment in genre fiction that seeks to “endow a lower class of writing with the prestige of literary fiction” (582). However, Myers’s reading of the novel in the context of Chabon’s oeuvre as a whole (up to 2008, and thus excluding Telegraph Avenue) sees it as part of what he characterizes as a failure to deal with genuine, authentic Judaism; Chabon is, on the contrary, a purveyor of “an imaginary Judaism” (588). Thus the comic Passover seder in Wonder Boys is described as a “celebration of modern liberal inclusiveness” that misses the main point “about Jewishness as such” (577). For Myers, “the exclusion of non-Jews from the Jewish religion is what constitutes the Jews as a people,” and thus Chabon’s evocation of a “common humanity” means “excluding Jews as Jews” (578).[2] Chabon’s 2007 The Yiddish Policemen’s Union likewise offers what Myers sees as a cardinal misunderstanding of what it means to be Jewish by rejecting the two exclusive touchstones of authentic Jewish identity, Israel and the synagogue. For Myers, it seems, a Jew can find meaning and identity only as part of, or in relation to, one or the other. “For a Jew who turns his back on Jewish religion and the state of Israel,” Myers asks, “what remains but to invent a cultural alternative?” (588). And this is what he sees Gentlemen of the Road as: an overwritten attempt to use an inferior fictional form to offer an alternative version of Jewish history and culture that does not rely on or refer to what for Myers are the only acceptable loci of Jewish identity. It is the weakest link in Chabon’s ill-advised attempt to explore and articulate alternative Jewish identities.