Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  His first two novels were set in Pittsburgh during the 1980s and 1990s. Chabon’s college city, no longer an economic jewel and sanctuary for steel titans and working immigrants, was portrayed as a lively wayward station, ignored by a nation focused on the future. A place from which talented people (like Chabon) escape, or remain, because of local uniqueness and charm. Movie director Curtis Hanson even implemented the city as a primary character when adapting Chabon’s novel, Wonder Boys, for film. “Pittsburgh is a ‘wonder boy,’” Hanson said when interviewed in 2000. “It’s a city that had this glorious past of wealth and success that ended. And then it had to deal with figuring out what’s next. What happens after triumph?” (Angulo).

  “I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, which during the [ten] or [eleven] years my family lived there tried and to a fair degree succeeded to be a very racially integrated, economically integrated, place where all were welcome,” remembered Chabon when discussing writerly inspiration (O’Hehir). Columbia was a “new town” promoted by uberdeveloper James Rouse, a famous example of an imagined community concept in the twentieth century. “In Columbia I grew up surrounded by black kids. They were in my classroom, they were my friends, they were my enemies, they were my persecutors and my saviors and my girlfriends and my teachers and my school principals, and when I left Columbia, I rapidly discovered that the rest of the world wasn’t like that. It was a rude awakening for me” (O’Hehir).

  Chabon’s experiences in Columbia mirror his literary ambition. Part ideal, part confining and unique, with specific rules and values, Columbia launched his framework for comparison. Pittsburgh was an ideal antidote, a place defined by its past. “It would be like someone who was raised fundamentalist Christian encountering the raunchiest pornography for the first time. The most memorable encounter I remember was with a policeman, a Pittsburgh policeman, just hearing him so comfortably and casually spout the most atrocious kinds of things about black people who were nearby.” The experience made the Steel City seem strange and planted an idea for the future. “And then this long period began, because of where I was living and what I was doing, where I drifted away from that experience of being around black people and living around black people—and feeling connected to African-American culture just got away from me” (O’Hehir).

  Nearly twenty-five years after his debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue groped for Rouse’s idealism in the author’s adopted hometown of Berkeley. While exploring diverse families and local changes, Chabon discovers contemporary society in another former wonder boy, to use Hanson’s comparison. The city that helped launch the free speech movement had descended into a borderland state between quality and rent control, an ideal zone for protecting human values while property slowly deteriorated. President Barack Obama even makes an appearance in the book, personifying what Americans have become, and can achieve, when creative environments are cherished. Chabon’s prose integrates naturalism in historical environments and builds suspense with fanciful events. In Telegraph Avenue the duality is clear: what goes up (property values, egos, success) must come down.

  This method of strategic comparison (time, place, and space) frames all of Chabon’s work. Relying on powerful nostalgic memories, he blends more perfect histories, using imagery similar to his 1970s literary compatriot, Rick Moody. As both authors bombard readers with pop culture and comic fantasies, the specters of domestic strife, confusion, and collapse in Vietnam are omnipresent. For Moody, The Ice Storm provided a Connecticut version of 1970s turmoil. Chabon assesses how the wild days of the era affect people years later in Telegraph. “I don’t know if you remember or not, but the middle of the 1970s were not exactly the most joyous of times,” Chabon reminded one interviewer. “The whole world seemed to have turned into a Robert Altman movie. Jarring and sour, and crazy, and colored in a palette that I believe drove my entire generation mildly insane. This malaise—that’s how Jimmy Carter later styled it—had invaded baseball too. Among the bizarre, misbegotten adventures of that time, along with the bombing of Cambodia, wife swapping, and necklaces for men, was the invention of the designated hitter” (Neyer). Clearly, Chabon does not appreciate change.

  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay illuminated the author’s duality: fantasy and subplots derived from classic American values and freedom of speech, reminiscent of Burroughs. A budding superhero is inspired by boyish thoughts of liberty and power. The Final Solution is a detective story on a global scale, literature held together by myth and history. Sherlock Holmes is reintroduced in spirit and solves a crime. Even he cannot account for numeric sequences relating to Nazi crimes. Naturalism is framed by the surreal: a superhero sleuth unable to address the world’s most disturbing horrors. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union continues the alternative history brigade, imagining a world where political maneuverings save lives. Jewish settlement in Alaska, loosely based on the Roosevelt administration’s Slattery Report, protects more than four million who died in the Holocaust (two million still perish in the book). Chabon even created his own cowboy—heading to AD 950 to portray sword-wielding Jewish rebels protecting their honor in Gentlemen of the Road. This fantasy carried classic naturalistic themes: survival and violence. Human endurance stories of Jewish heritage draw Chabon’s characters from the past to the present, since the rise of Israel occurred just after the twilight of the naturalist’s epoch.

  Chabon’s most recent work, Telegraph Avenue, closes loops in the author’s naturalistic oeuvre, a blended realism since the author lives near the street and was inspired to write the tale after a trip to a local record store. Social environment shrinks to a culturally rich avenue. Revolutionary Road was Richard Yates’s ode to a nation that got off track along the way, the title a careful play on words, harking back to the beginning (Yates). Chabon does something in reverse in Telegraph Avenue. He identifies an interesting slice of Americana and projects revolutionary energy still burning. A blend of naturalism and fantasy replaces consensus; there is hope on the horizon.

  His work and personality is so bubbly that Chabon’s cynicism and cool fortitude is ignored by critics. Like Yates, concern for the future drives his work; his turn toward nostalgia is palpable, even within nonfiction. He pokes fun at overly protective parents in “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood.” “The sandlots and creek beds,” Chabon writes, “the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations—Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked Staff Only. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger and sometimes calamity,” he added. “Done right, it is a journey undertaken with only a ‘fragmentary map’ constructed out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children” (“Manhood”). Such beliefs connect Chabon, the champion of genre fiction in interviews, to naturalistic identities. Technique and inspiration melt his facade. While Chabon builds flowery language compared to his naturalist brethren, his stories build from historical precedents: nonfiction to fiction, reality transported to other lands.

  “My father really made the middle years of the twentieth century in America come alive for me when I was a kid. He was full of lore about the radio shows, politicians, movies, music, athletes, and so forth, of that era. And since he was from Brooklyn, his memories and his view of that time had a very New York slant to them” (Buchwald). Chabon’s experiences spur the naturalist feel of a creative mind, experiences redolent of Theodore Dreiser, reporter exemplar, who made an actual court case the basis of his An American Tragedy (York). James Cain, who is attributed to lowly crime fiction by many experts, used similar inspiration when penning another member of the naturalist clan: Double Indemnity. Cain’s research included a 1927 murder schemed by a married woman, Ruth Snyder, and her lover in New York (Maslin).

  “Chabon
is a writer committed to exploring genres and writing entertaining, serious fiction that contains protagonists who are experiencing complex personal and social conflicts at various stages of life,” writes Patrick O’Donnell in a profile for the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. According to Dreiser, and other practitioners of naturalism, human destiny results from environmental, economic, social, and fatalistic forces that act upon him or her. Traits learned and inherited are omnipresent. Chabon carries this weight around his literary soul. He was an upper-middle-class white kid with divorced parents. His profile matches the buyers of comics and the science fiction he cherishes. He references influences close to home, he never pretends to be someone else, or acts like supernatural forces inspire him. He is not even a copycat, influenced by others producing similar literature. Refining old stories and abridging them to new generations makes his material fresh. Combining naturalism and fantasy is his true skill when crafting fiction.

  “I have always been drawn to lost worlds, lost paradises, lost cities, etc., maybe because my father grew up a Dodgers fan in Brooklyn in the lost world of the forties” (Neyer). For Chabon the past, the real, icons, are soothing. Wonder Boys takes on a naturalist’s form, wrapped around escapism. Even the quote from Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” reprinted at the beginning of the book, indicates shrouding oneself in mystery and escaping from impending conflicts: “Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank—but that’s not the same thing” (Conrad). The entire novel links naturalist pathways. Grady Tripp has early success, winning a PEN literary award for his third novel, The Land Downstairs. A significant advance follows (Chabon, Wonder Boys 11). Coping with success is more challenging. When developing the background of the story, Tripp tells a cautionary tale about former friend and writer John Jose Fahey, who fell apart emotionally and professionally while trying to finish his fourth novel following a large advance (13–14). Fahey dies by way of an armored car filled with casino revenues on the streets of Las Vegas. Tripp dreams of leaving his hometown and local college, Coxley. “After graduating from high school I took great pains to avoid having to go to college at all, and in particular to Coxley, which had offered me the annual townie scholarship, along with a place as tight end on the starting eleven.” After leaving town with no degree Tripp travels around the country, inspired by Kerouac, and does not become serious about life again until he receives an acceptance letter from the University of California (17–18).

  Inspiration

  Chabon’s personal turn to the past, like Cain and Dreiser, is understandable because it is dangerous for novelists to project the future, exactly what the author was attempting in Fountain City, the work he abandoned to finish Wonder Boys. “One of the many frustrating and embarrassing things about writing that novel [Fountain City] was that, when I began it in late 1987, the idea of someone building a cozy, downtown, baseball-only, green-grass, asymmetrical ballpark ever again sounded like the purest fantasy. Things like the SkyDome seemed to be the wave of the future. And then it took me so long to write the damn book . . . a few years into it, I started hearing these rumors of a new park going up in Baltimore along the old B&O railroad yards . . . by the time I abandoned the thing, they were already building Jacobs Field, new Comiskey (not so hot), Coors Field . . . Sheesh” (Neyer). Fountain City, depicting a perfect baseball venue in Florida, lacked character, like a hulking edifice of a ballpark with nobody inside, or a home plate stuck in a museum. So Chabon manufactured human compassion around the story of an author unable to finish a book, Grady Tripp, instead. After failing to produce at the college at which he is employed, “You’re a goddamn fraud, Grady,” Tripp is told by his boss. “You’ve produced nothing at all since you’ve been here” (Wonder Boys 359). Tripp recognizes he is perpetually stuck in neutral. The angry superior happens to be married to the woman Tripp desires. After his girlfriend, now divorced, attains the position of dean of students at Coxley, Grady is back where he started, working part-time at the college and gutting out fiction, a classic naturalist trick, proving characters are destined to end up where they begin, no social climbing allowed (366–67).

  The prognosis continues in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which built stories around the real-life tales of comic heavyweights Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster, all referenced in the “Author’s Note” section of the book. “But as far as the inspiration for this book, it was reading about Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of Superman, and how they sold the rights to the character to DC Comics for $100.00,” notes the author in a 2000 interview. “That’s not what my book is about, but it was the combination of wild imagination, male partnership, popular art, and commercial failure that resonated, and got me started” (Didato and McLendon). Discussions of animal characteristics among characters in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay personify the interlude of fantasy and manufactured societies. The discussion of specific traits, pure naturalism.

  “‘The Lion, I don’t know. Lions are lazy. How about the Tiger? Tigerman. No, no. Tigers are killers. Shit. Let’s see.’” Sammy (one of the two comic partners) assesses options. “They began to go through the rolls of the animal kingdom, concentrating naturally on the predators: Catman, Wolfman, the Owl, the Panther, the Black Bear. They considered the primates: the Monkey, Gorillaman, the Gibbon, the Ape, the Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents” (Chabon, Amazing 95). The conversation between two youthful immigrants had double meaning. If animals in their natural state had obvious strengths and weaknesses, the lesson was illuminating for the comic creators. Immigrants with limited resources understood that successful competition depended on playing to one’s abilities, more naturalism.

  Siegel and Shuster’s life stories provided the inspiration Chabon required. They both attended Glenville High School in Cleveland, Ohio, which sits in a neighborhood that changed markedly during their lifetimes—European immigrant to African American, similar to Berkeley’s fringe. Siegel was born in Cleveland, the youngest of six children of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania (Jones 24). Shuster’s family, also Jewish immigrants from Europe, moved from Toronto to Cleveland when he was in fourth grade. Both boys were fans of movies, comics, and science fiction and met at school where they became great friends. Siegel, who worked for Glenville’s student newspaper, the Torch, even popularized a Tarzan parody, “Goober the Mighty.” “When Joe and I first met, it was like the right chemicals coming together,” remembers Siegel (Comics Journal/Stern).

  Their creation inspired Chabon’s unique story within a story, providing human faces to dreams. “I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude,” Chabon said in October 2000, when discussing the book and the traits of the characters. “The Superman story is one of the underlying threads of the story, coming from another planet, leaving his parents and his world that got blown up behind. He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I’d been working really hard trying to come up with something” (“Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures”). Chabon’s duality extends to sexuality. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay the men share, each entirely in their own way, a love for young artist Rosa Saks. They are forced to defend the honor of comic books during congressional hearings addressing juvenile delinquency and the advocacy of homosexual lifestyles. Sexuality can take unisex forms in Chabon’s world, as if people can change their sex, like the common reed frog, to format the story and make characters whole, blurring simple traits. In Mysteries of Pittsburgh bisexuality is a significant theme.

  Even Luther’s girlfriend and former costar, Valletta Moore, in Telegraph Avenue, crosses gender barriers, aging naturally. “Big-boned, shapely, on the fatal side of fifty, high-waisted, high-breasted, face a feline triangle” (Chabon, Telegraph Avenue 71). The Gwen character features “virtuoso hands . . . , freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like
the Golden Gate Bridge” (Schine). Even Chabon’s love of parrots evokes duality. The birds are mysterious, capable of sharing information without human filters. As characters they respond to what they observe. They are dual threats that repeat and react—friends of language. A parrot signals intrigue in The Final Solution and views characters in multidimensional space in Telegraph Avenue (Telegraph Avenue 239–50). Chabon shows all of his protagonists simultaneously from the perspective of a bird, explaining the thinking behind the passage, “I wish I could just do a big tracking shot, like in a movie, where I could move effortlessly—fly, as it were—from character to character.” A modern story of realism and rebirth in Berkeley infused with a dash of modernism. “I went and took a drink of brandy from the bar of Faulkner and Proust and Joyce, and reassured myself that I could do this, or at least that this could be done. And then I went and did it. And it was so much fun” (Schulz).

  History to fantasy is most perceptible in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which imagines that the 1939 Slattery Report was implemented. Alaska provides temporary refugee settlement for European Jews persecuted by the Nazis during World War II. As a result, two million Jews are killed in the Holocaust, instead of the six million in reality. The Slattery Report, officially titled The Problem of Alaskan Development, was produced by the United States Department of the Interior under Secretary Harold L. Ickes in 1939–1940. It was named after Undersecretary of the Interior Harry A. Slattery (Feingold 106–24). The proposal noted two hundred families from the dust bowl had settled in Alaska’s Matanuska Valley. Franklin Roosevelt never took the plan seriously, nor did Jewish Americans: perfect fantasy ground. Chabon incorporated old-time witty dialogue and repartee, reminiscent of the naturalist era. An old man’s advice to a young man falls like “rain against an umbrella” (Schine). “I started with the setting and tried to settle on a way of presenting it that would help with all the unfamiliar things I’d be demanding of the reader,” says the author (Benefiel).