Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  The resolution of Chabon’s Wonder Boys is neat where Grady’s novel has no ending at all. Grady’s crisis brings realization: “I had lost everything: novel, publisher, wife, lover; the admiration of my best student; all the fruit of the past decade of my life. I had no family, no friends, no car, and probably, after this weekend, no job” (342). The question is how to move forward. Clay asserts that “this period of living with uncertainties is the turning point of a midlife crisis. Some people get stuck at this stage, unable to surrender the ‘former self’ clinging tenaciously to old habits and attitudes” (3). He also notes that “few men can get through a midlife crisis unaided. To move on, help is needed” (4). For Grady, it is no different; Sara offers not only help—it is she who literally pulls him back from falling over a balcony (344)—but also represents the chance of a new purpose in life. When she pulls him back, rather than the anxiety or numbness he has felt previously, he feels hope, perhaps because he has no further left to fall. From crisis comes the opportunity to reassess: “The past weekend had made two things clear to me: first, that as I presently live it, mine was not a life into which a baby ought responsibly to be introduced, and second, that when this pregnancy was terminated, my relationship with Sara would not survive the procedure” (Boys 350). Instead of resisting, as he has throughout the novel, Grady makes the leap and marries Sara. They return to his hometown and begin a smaller life at a less prestigious college, with him quitting marijuana and fulfilling father and husband roles, writing only when “the boy will let [him]” and when he is not teaching. Thus, the focus of his life has become family rather than creativity, the collective rather than the self. The WordFest weekend has been, as Clay characterizes crises more generally, “the springboard for a complete change of lifestyle” (130).

  If the Grady of Chabon’s novel conforms to midlife stereotypes, the Grady of Curtis Hanson’s 2000 movie adaptation portrays a more mature, even aged masculinity. Most obviously this stems from the casting. Though forty-one in the novel, Michael Douglas was fifty-six when playing the role. Cultural gerontology scholars have argued in favor of more older people on-screen and visible in the media more generally. Jeff Hearn has noted that the media has always given airtime to successful older men, because “successful men defy being simply ‘older men’; as such they reproduce men’s taken-for-granted asexual, agendered, a-aged power and authority” (108). These successful older men can be “world leaders, politicians, businessmen, experts, administrators, judges” (107) or “broadcasting men” (108), anchormen, newscasters, and so forth. However, in film representations of older men, characters are much less likely to be protagonists; they function, as Hearn asserts, “as complements to the main characters, as exceptions to the general flow of the film narrative, as objects of fun, interest, and curiosity” (110). Where a story does focus on an older character, Gullette has stated that “age appropriate casting is powerful and ‘right’” (Aged by Culture 176), that the age of the actor should be close to that of the character. Although Hanson’s film does not reestablish Grady’s age—there is no mention that he is forty-one or fifty-six in the script—by casting an older actor rather than an age-appropriate overweight actor, Grady’s image is associated with age entirely rather than age and obesity. Moreover, the choice of Robert Downey Jr., who was thirty-five at the time, to play Crabtree, who in the book is the same age as Grady, both changes the dynamic and highlights Grady’s aging. Reflecting Woodward’s argument regarding female aging, situated against Crabtree and James, Grady is no longer young and, therefore, old.

  Douglas is made to look every one of his years. Although later in his career he would play other older characters, at this point he had played heroic, psychotic, and flawed but had always appeared powerful and handsome. For Wonder Boys, the first poster—a headshot of Douglas alone—showed him unshaven, shaggy haired, and leering. This unappealing appearance was integral to his portrayal. In an interview with Chris Gore, Hanson has stated:

  I only had one meeting with [Douglas] about it, because I only had one question. The question in my mind was, “Would he be prepared to go all the way in playing this character?” I felt that he could play it very effectively, but the question was would he shed all movie star vanity, and in a sense all caution to give himself over to this character? (“Wonder Director: A Curtis Hanson Interview”)

  In another interview Hanson confirms that Douglas “gained weight for the role and we dressed him like shit and photographed in ways that are anything but flattering” (Tobias). Added to the graying hair and unshaven face is his wardrobe of dark, muted colors and threadbare tweed and corduroy. In some respects, Douglas’s portrayal of Grady works so well because the audience has two versions of Douglas in their mind: the handsome Hollywood actor and the wreck of a man before them. This physical and visual difference underscores Grady’s fall from wonder boy to burnout but also establishes an identity built primarily on age.

  Grady’s professional failure is accentuated by Douglas’s voice-over narration, but also through his interaction with James. In the novel, the reader is not allowed access to James’s prose (or Grady’s, for that matter), but in the film, Crabtree reads from a piece of paper they find in his typewriter. The subject is obvious; it is James’s revised estimation of Grady after spending the weekend with him:

  Finally the door opened. It was a shock to see him shuffling into the room like an aging prize-fighter, limping, beaten. . . . But it was later when the great man squinted into the bitter glow of the twilight . . . and muttered simply, “It means nothing. All of it. Nothing,” that the true shock came. It was then that the true shock came. It was then that the boy understood that his hero’s true injuries lay in a darker place. . . . His heart, once capable of inspiring others so completely could no longer inspire so much as itself. It beat now only out of habit. It beat now only because it could.

  Although this estimation comes from a very young man and so his perception of age may be relative to his own youth, he nonetheless aligns Grady with professional decline, ill health, and depression—markers of old age rather than midlife.

  The soundtrack for the film only strengthens this association with age. The film begins with “Things Have Changed,” Bob Dylan’s Oscar-winning song, directing the audience toward the idea of transformation/transition from the start. Hanson has been quoted as saying that Dylan’s music would be the “ideal musical expression of Grady’s taste and character” (Sargow). The notion of an aging protagonist—as he is in the film—attempting to recapture the creativity and originality of youthful expression without repeating himself is an obvious parallel to Dylan himself, if not in his own mind then certainly in the musical press. The figures of Grady and Dylan become further connected by the music video for the song directed by Hanson, in which Dylan takes the place of Douglas for several scenes in the film. The very title “Things Have Changed” forces comparison to the early work “The Times They Are A-Changing,” not just allowing for a contrast of tone—the latter angry, the former despondent—but to evaluate what has changed. The imagery of “Things Have Changed” holds a sense of finality. Dylan mentions “gallows,” “the last train,” and a “lot of water under the bridge,” and equally of a man out of sync with the modern world, “A worried man with a worried mind,” “People are crazy and times are strange,” “Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through” (“Things”). This dislocation, especially when taken against the collectivist plea of “The Times They Are A-Changing”—“Come gather ’round people,” “Come mothers and fathers / Throughout the land” (“The Times”)—highlights that the life Grady has chosen for himself is one of self-indulgence and temptation.

  All the songs on the soundtrack are integrated into the film, and many highlight aspects of Grady’s character—John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” touching on themes of past triumphs and longevity; Tom Rush’s “No Regrets” exposing Grady’s sense of helplessness at his own lack of creative achievement: “For far too long
I’ve had nothin’ new to show you.” Yet the two that stand out most due to the silence of the scenes they accompany are Neil Young’s “Old Man” and another later period Dylan song, “Not Dark Yet.” “Old Man” plays as James is driven away from Grady by his parents/grandparents, and continues as Grady sits alone in his car reading James’s manuscript. The song both establishes the similarities between the characters and the idea that the baton of creative genius has passed from one generation to another. Wonder Boys, the title of Grady’s novel as well as Chabon’s, refers not only to Grady’s aborted potential, but also to James’s ascendancy to proper novelist and young man with a future. James is in the same position that Grady was in twenty-some years ago: he has a novel that an editor wants and that will bring both success. “Not Dark Yet,” on the other hand, underscores Grady’s sense of mortality. Like “Things Have Changed,” Dylan’s imagery resonates with the end of life: “time is running away” and “I’ve followed the river and I got to the sea,” as well as the title itself (“Not Dark Yet”). The song was released on Dylan’s forty-first album, Time Out of Mind, when he was fifty-six. In his Rolling Stone review, Greg Kot notes that “Time Out of Mind finds Dylan on the culture’s fringe, confronting his advancing years and the prospect of failing health (he was hospitalized a few months ago for a heart ailment) and irrelevance,” which clearly resonates with Grady’s position. The song is used to establish Grady’s dislocation from the younger characters; in the scene, James and Crabtree close the bedroom door on him and he finds Hannah asleep, still clutching his manuscript.

  The tone set by the music is also echoed in the cinematography. Like the novel, the film is set in Pittsburgh, but in deep winter, further emphasizing the idea of late life. The colors and lighting also emphasize the generational gap between Grady and James. As Sargow’s interview with Hanson attests: “The film’s visual poetry is the kind that sneaks up on you. ‘It’s partly just Pittsburgh in the winter,’ says Mr. Hanson. In a typically beautiful, unstressed nocturnal car shot, the viewer sees, in the director’s words, ‘the furnaces and the factories of Pittsburgh glowing behind James Leer, the one whose future lies before him,’ while darkness shrouds the driver, Grady Tripp.” Hanson has also stated that the history of Pittsburgh corresponds with the protagonist’s trajectory: “It’s this city that has this really rich and powerful past that had burned out and gone away when the steel industry went away. It was now faced with what now, what next? You can’t turn the clock back, so what do you do?” (Gore). So Pittsburgh, like Dylan and Grady, is a wonder boy.

  The film’s palette is autumnal at best and wintery for the most part; as A. O. Scott notes, the “weather seems to consist of variations on snow, rain and wind.” Grady’s classroom and house, like his wardrobe, are rather old fashioned, decorated in predominantly brown and rusted tones; this clearly links to the former industrial glory of Pittsburgh but also highlights Grady’s decline. It is only toward the very end of the film, when the book has streamed from the car into the Monongahela River, that the sun comes out. In the closing scene, the audience sees hope symbolized by modernity; Grady is now using a computer and saving his work, and also looks a whole lot healthier and better groomed.

  The physical differences between novel Grady and film Grady, which are further emphasized by the film’s music and cinematography, alter the reading of his masculinity. Both narratives are Bildungsromane that portray a transformation of masculinity from self-obsessed immaturity to a more traditionally acceptable identity. Indeed, the novel and the film end in the same way, with Grady taking an appropriate masculine role as husband and father, and seemingly dedicating himself to this, where before he shunned commitment. Because the Grady of the film has been associated with old age rather than middle age throughout, his new position in his family and society seems to function as a way of stalling old age for a few more years; however, for the Grady of the novel, his new settled life certainly signifies a successful path through his midlife crisis but is also the confirmation that he has at last grown up.

  Works Cited

  Bakhtin, M. M. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typography of the Novel).” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.

  Beneke, Timothy. Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

  Blaikie, Andrew. Ageing and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

  Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974.

  Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. 2000. London: 4th Estate, 2008.

  ———. Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. London: 4th Estate, 2009.

  ———. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York: Sceptre, 1988.

  ———. Summerland. 2002. London: 4th Estate, 2008.

  ———. Wonder Boys. 1995. London: 4th Estate, 2000.

  Clay, John. Men at Midlife: The Facts, the Fantasies, the Future. London: Sidgwick, 1989.

  Dylan, Bob. “Not Dark Yet.” Time Out of Mind. Columbia, 2001. CD.

  ———. “Things Have Changed.” The Essential Bob Dylan. Sony Music, 2000. CD.

  ———. Time Out of Mind. Columbia, 2001. CD.

  ———. “The Times They Are A-Changing.” The Times They Are A-Changing. 1964. Columbia, 2005. CD.

  Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. “Images of Ageing.” Ageing in Society: An Introduction to Social Gerontology. Ed. John Bond, Peter Coleman, and Sheila Peace. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2000. 304–32.

  Gore, Chris. “Wonder Director: A Curtis Hanson Interview.” Film Threat. 4 Nov. 2000. Web. 12 Jan. 2013.

  Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Aged by Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.

  ———. Safe at Last in the Middle Years. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

  Hearn, Jeff. “Imaging the Aging of Men.” Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life. Ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick. London: Routledge, 1995: 97–115.

  Japtok, Martin. Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2005.

  Jung, Carl Gustav. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. 1933. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.

  Kot, Greg. Rev. of Time Out of Mind, by Bob Dylan. Rolling Stone 2 Oct. 1997. Web. 17 Jan. 2013.

  Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. 1993. New ed. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2007.

  Lennon, John. “Watching the Wheels.” Double Fantasy. 1980. Parlophone, 2000. CD.

  Moody, Harry R., and Jennifer R. Sasser. Aging: Concepts and Controversies. 7th ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012.

  Porterfield, Sally, Keith Polette, and Tita French Baumlin, eds. Perpetual Adolescence: Jungian Analyses of American Media, Literature, and Pop Culture. Albany: State U of New York, 2009.

  Rooke, Constance. “Hagar’s Old Age: The Stone Angel as Vollendungsroman.” Crossing the River: Essays in Honour of Margaret Laurence. Ed. Kristjana Gunnars. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1988. 25–42.

  Rush, Tom. “No Regrets.” The Circle Game. 1968. Rhino, 2008. CD.

  Sargow, Michael. “Wonder Boys: L.A. Noir or College Comedy, the Genre Is Real Life.” New York Times 13 Feb. 2000. Web. 16 Jan. 2013.

  Scott, A. O. “Wonder Boys: Marijuana, Manuscript and Marriage Equal a Mess.” New York Times. 23 Feb. 2000. Web. 16 Jan. 2013.

  Synnott, Anthony. Re-Thinking Men: Heroes, Villains and Victims. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

  “Things Have Changed.” Dir. Curtis Hanson. Perf. Bob Dylan. Sony Music, 2000. Music Video.

  Tobias, Scott. “Curtis Hanson.” The A.V. Club. 21 Feb. 2001. Web. 13 Jan. 2013.

  Ward, Robert. Rev. of Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon. New York Times 9 Apr. 1995. Web. 15 Jan. 2013.

  Wonder Boys. Dir. Curtis
Hanson. Universal Studios, 2000. DVD.

  Woodward, Kathleen. Introduction. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. ix–xxvii.

  Young, Neil. “Old Man.” Harvest. 1972. Reprise Records, 2009. CD.

  Chapter 13

  Queer Masculinities in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Manhood for Amateurs

  Josef Benson

  In Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), the first-person narrator and protagonist Art Bechstein struggles with socially constructed and limiting binaries of sexuality and gender that rigidly categorize human beings as gay or straight and feminine or masculine. Obversely, just two years after the novel’s publication Robert Bly published Iron John (1990), a book warning that men have grown soft and need to access the violent warrior and “Wild Man” inside in order to recoup some of the patriarchal power that was lost in the preceding two decades. Iron John contains a valuable illustration of a rival notion of masculinity with which Chabon and his first novel conflict. Further, since Iron John was published only two years after The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, revisiting the book offers a snapshot of the U.S. cultural and intellectual landscape twenty-five years ago in relation to masculinity. In Chabon’s novel, the characters Joe Bechstein, Art’s father, and Cleveland, one of Art’s new friends, represent Bly’s vision of ideal masculinity. These characters represent archetypes of hypermasculinity[1] that influence Art. As an extension of these archetypes, Art’s tumultuous relationship with Phlox signifies heteronormative[2] socialization and a symbol of acceptable sexuality. Art and the character Arthur,[3] a gay man whom Art falls in love with and with whom he eventually runs away, conflict with Bly’s archetype and the characters Joe and Cleveland. At the end of the novel, Art disavows his father as a remnant of an obsolete patriarchal world and accepts both Arthur and Cleveland as aspects of himself with which he can enact a queer masculine self. In Michael Chabon’s two books of nonfiction, Maps and Legends (2008) and Manhood for Amateurs (2009), his feelings about sex and gender are much more certain. What dramatically plays out in the novel, and perhaps in Chabon himself in the 1980s, has crystallized in his nonfiction in the late 2000s in that Michael Chabon argues for a redefinition of positive masculinity as feminine and queer instead of normative and hypermasculine. Chabon posits that queerness does not necessarily have to do with whom one decides to have sex. A queer identity or a queer masculinity simply means that one has decided to eschew old tired and destructive sexist, homophobic, and patriarchal notions of masculinity in favor of new ones that embrace those attributes traditionally linked with femininity, such as emotional openness, generosity, and humility.