Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  “I start with a setting and a character or two from my life. It’s like a math problem—you have these givens. But to write an interesting story you have to depart from them” (Benedict). Chabon believes the short story is a more difficult medium than the novel “on a line-by-line basis . . . I feel much more disturbed and haunted by the possibility that I can ruin the whole thing with one poor sentence or paragraph.” But short stories also offer different rewards. A group of linked narratives, like the ones about the fictional Shapiro family in A Model World, “can create an effect you can’t get from a novel or from one story alone,” Mr. Chabon emphasizes. “It’s like a series of snapshots taken over time. Part of the pleasure is turning to them again and again.” The finest example of this technique, he feels, is Updike’s collection about the Maple family, Too Far to Go. For the reader, Mr. Chabon notes, “The interest lies in what has happened in the interstices” (Benedict).

  At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Burroughs was a resident of Hawaii where he applied for permission to become a war correspondent in his sixties. The chronicler of distant empires wanted to observe twentieth-century warfare. Permission was granted, and it was the last substantive work Burroughs performed before his death in 1950 (Holtsmark). Perhaps there is a bit of reality in fanciful characters. Even the great minds cannot escape authenticity. Chabon has lived the life of dreams and the mundane. Just the way he prefers.

  Works Cited

  Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

  Angulo, Sandra P. “Penn Stationed: Director Curtis Hanson and Star Frances McDormand Explain the Advantages of Filming in the Forgotten City.” Entertainment Weekly 25 Feb. 2000. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,85026,00.html.

  Benedict, Elizabeth. “Keeping it Short: A Season of Stories; Sorrow at the Mall.” New York Times 26 May 1991. http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/24/reviews/world.html.

  Benefiel, Elizabeth. “Michael Chabon Interview.” AVClub.com. 5 July 2007. http://www.avclub.com/articles/michael-chabon,14122/.

  Braman, Lindsay A. “Naturalism.” Curlyfarm.com. 4 Dec. 2003. http://www.curlyfarm.com/edu/Naturalism.html.

  Buchwald, Laura. “A Conversation with Michael Chabon.” Bold Type. Random House.com. 2000. http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1000/chabon/interview.html.

  Burroughs, Edgar Rice. The Return of Tarzan. Chicago: McClurg, 1913. Burroughs’s descriptions of Tarzan are derived from the following works: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), The Return of Tarzan (1913), The Beasts of Tarzan (1914), The Son of Tarzan (1914), Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916), and Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1919).

  ———. “The Tarzan Series.” Burroughs Web Summary Page. EdgarRiceBurroughs.com. 2011. http://www.edgarriceburroughs.com/?page_id=16. Plot is described at this address.

  Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random, 2000.

  ———. The Final Solution. New York: 4th Estate; New York: Harper, 2004.

  ———. “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood.” New York Review of Books 16 July 2009.

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

  ———. Telegraph Avenue. New York: Harper, 2012.

  ———. Wonder Boys. New York: Villard, 1995.

  ———. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: Harper, 2007.

  Comics Journal. Issues 184, 187–188. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1996. Also referenced in Roger Stern’s Superman: Sunday Classics: 1939–1943 (New York: Sterling, 2006).

  Conrad, Joseph. “The Secret Sharer.” Harper’s Magazine, Aug.–Sept. 1910. Conrad’s quote, reprinted at the beginning of reproductions of the story, 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.”

  Didato, Thom, and David McLendon. “Michael Chabon Interview.” Failbetter Literary Journal (E-zine) 1.1 (Fall/Winter 2000). http://failbetter.com/01/Chabon.htm.

  Feingold, Harry L. Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1995. The following sources also address the material: Tom Kizzia. “Sanctuary: Alaska, the Nazis, and the Jews: The Forgotten Story of Alaska’s Own Confrontation with the Holocaust.” Four-part series, Anchorage Daily News 16–19 May 1999. Raphael Medoff. “A Thanksgiving plan to save Europe’s Jews.” Jewish Standard 15 Nov. 2007.

  Grant, Gavin J. “Michael Chabon Interview.” Booksense.com. 2002; repr. 2008. http://www.indiebound.org/author-interviews/chabonmichael.

  Hasak-Lowy, Todd. “The Language Deep, Deep in Chabon’s Ear.” Jbooks.com. 2007; repr. 2009. http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_HasakLowy_Chabon.htm.

  “History of Tarzana.” Woodland Hills–Tarzana Chamber of Commerce. 2013. http://www.woodlandhillscc.net/our-community.html.

  Holtsmark, Erling B. Tarzan and Tradition: Classical Myth in Popular Literature. Westport: Greenwood, 1981.

  Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: FSG, 1998. The book was also republished with the alternate subtitle: “How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture” in 2008. The 2010 edition featured a foreword penned by Chabon.

  Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic, 2004.

  Lodge, David. Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays. The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature Series. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Similar material is addressed by Michael Hayes, ed., The Supernatural Short Stories of Charles Dickens (London: John Calder, 1978). Another excellent source is Donald Hawes, Who’s Who in Dickens (London: Routledge, 1998).

  Lupoff, Richard. “The Michael Chabon Interview.” ERBzine 3047 (Jan. 2010). Transcribed by Bill Hillman. http://www.erbzine.com/mag30/3047.html.

  Martin, Tim. “John Carter: Michael Chabon Interview—Goodbye, Cool World.” Telegraph 9 Mar. 2012.

  Maslin, Janet. “An Affair, a Murder, a Sensation.” New York Times 5 June 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/books/a-wild-surge-of-guilty-passion-by-ron-hansen-review.html?_r=0.

  Mechanic, Michael. “Michael Chabon’s Nonfiction Picks.” Mother Jones 11 May 2010. http://www.motherjones.com/riff/2010/04/michael-chabon-interview-nonfiction-recommendations.

  “Michael Chabon Interview.” Powell’s Q & A. Powells.com. 2007. http://www.powells.com/ink/chabon.html.

  “Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures.” Author Interview. PowellsBooks.Blog. Powells.com. 10 Oct. 2006. http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/michael-chabons-amazing-adventures-by-dave/.

  Neyer, Rob. “The Interview: Michael Chabon.” ESPN.com. 23 July 2002. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=neyer_rob&id=1409085.

  Norris, Frank. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. 1899. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

  O’Donnell, Patrick. “Chabon, Michael.” The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer. London: Wiley, 2011.

  O’Hehir, Andrew. “Chabon on Race, Sex, Obama: I Never Wanted to Tell the Story of Two Guys in a Record Store.” Salon.com. 20 Sept. 2012. http://www.salon.com/2012/09/20/chabon_on_race_sex_obama_i_never_wanted_to_tell_the_story_of_two_guys_in_a_record_store/.

  Pulido, Laura, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng. A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Although Tarzana real estate heritage is not discussed specifically, Dennis McDougal’s Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and The Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty (Cambridge: Perseus, 2001) describes Otis’s and his relatives’ real estate investments and promotion of the region.

  Raz, Guy. “Michael Chabon Journeys Back to Telegraph Avenue.” All Things Considered. NPR.org. Natl. Public Radio. Transcribed by NPR Staff. 9 Sept. 2012.

  Schine, Cathleen. “Imaginary Friends.” New York Review of Books 11 Oct. 2012. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/11/imaginary-friends/?pagination=false.

  Schulz, Kathryn. “M
ichael Chabon May Just Be the Perfect Writer for the Obama Age.” New York Magazine 24 Sept. 2012: 100.

  Tayler, Christopher. “The Author of Manhood for Amateurs talks to Christopher Tayler.” Guardian 26 Mar. 2010.

  Timberg, Scott. “Interview with Michael Chabon.” Goodreads.com. Sept. 2012. http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/807.Michael_Chabon.

  “Wonder Boys.” Essay in Kirkus Reviews 1 Dec. 1994. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/bookreviews/michael-chabon/wonder-boys/.

  Yates, Richard. Interview conducted and transcribed by Geoffrey Clark and DeWitt Henry and guest edited by James Randall. Ploughshares 3 (Winter 1972). “I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the fifties,” answered Yates during the interview.

  York, Michelle. “Century after Murder, American Tragedy Draws Crowd.” New York Times 11 July 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/nyregion/11tragedy.html.

  Chapter 16

  “Hope Unfulfilled, Not Yet Betrayed”

  Matt Kavanagh

  Michael Chabon’s Nostalgia for the Future

  “I seem to be the custodian of a vast repository of feelings of loss, abandonment, and failure,” Michael Chabon writes in his abandoned second novel, Fountain City. “In part my project as a writer has consisted of seeking objective correlatives for that intangible hoard” (4).[1] The author of seven novels and two collections of short fiction as well as two collections of essays and personal narratives, Chabon is a connoisseur of nostalgia, a term that encompasses everything in his work from a yearning for imaginary homelands (like Jewish Sitka in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Khazaria of Gentlemen of the Road) to fabulous idylls (the golden age of comics depicted in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or, more broadly, of childhood itself).[2] This chapter explores the seductive appeal of nostalgia—and the slipperiness of the concept—in Chabon’s oeuvre, paying particular attention to the various invocations of his own childhood home: Columbia, Maryland.

  Over the course of his career, the author’s treatment of nostalgia has evolved from the lyrical invocations typical of his early work to the much more critical interrogation of the concept evident in his later efforts. While this development can be ascribed in a general sense to Chabon’s growth or maturation as an artist, I would like to suggest that such seasoning actually came about in response to a specific crisis: the difficult and ultimately unsuccessful gestation of Fountain City, a “lost” novel that is itself “about loss—lost paradises, lost cities, the loss of the Temple, the loss of a brother to AIDS; and the concomitant dream of Restoration or Rebuilding” (“Diving into the Wreck,” in Maps and Legends 159).[3] Chabon suggests that he found himself at a creative impasse working on this book precisely because he failed to recognize that all of these varieties of loss enacted one loss in particular: “the notion of the lost world, of those vanished afternoons in the fields and woods of the lost Utopia of Columbia, Maryland” (“Fountain City” 28).

  What I see now that I did not quite see then was how central, how crucial to the reverberation of this initial micro-idea was the presence in it, from the first, of marriage and divorce. Everything that came afterward—the Temple, baseball, environmental restoration, the Pharos of Alexandria—all the unforeseeable detours and dead ends and authentic inspirations, the whole simple and complicated theme of the Lost World, derived ultimately from my own experience of exile, from the narrative of the lost family happiness that was, from the day my father moved out of the house, my heritage. (“Fountain City” 28)

  Chabon’s idée fixe as a storyteller has been to collect the bright shards in which the memories of his broken home are refracted and, by carefully arranging and rearranging the pieces, capture a glimpse of what he has lost.[4] This continues to be the animating concern of his work and prolific source of his ideas, but only because he learned a difficult lesson in the writing of Fountain City, which was that, however arrayed, the pieces cannot be fused back together again, that the memories of his childhood home cannot be unbroken. Fountain City’s misplaced emphasis on the theme of restoration indulged in a fantasy of wholeness the author would eventually come to see as constraining, one that makes the past a prison and memory a cage.

  Chabon would eventually write himself out of this predicament with Wonder Boys (1995). By dramatizing his own experience as a frustrated writer in the character of Grady Tripp, the author provides himself with some distance from his own struggles, building a lifeboat of sorts to escape the wreckage of Fountain City. I focus on this episode in order to discover how the author learned to write about nostalgia without simply being nostalgic. It is a fine distinction, so in order to capture its subtleties I will refer to the work of Svetlana Boym, who discriminates between two types of nostalgia in The Future of Nostalgia. “Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps,” she explains. “Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance” (41). I argue that over the years, Chabon’s art has matured as he has learned to embrace the values of reflective nostalgia, a process that has deepened and enriched his sense of Columbia’s legacy. The experience of growing up there, he has come to recognize, encompasses far more than his broken home. In fact, he credits its founder James Rouse and his ideals of racial equality for providing him with the opportunity to participate in a grand experiment in integration just by being a kid in a certain place, at a certain time. It was a formative experience that taught Chabon utopia must be built before it can be discovered, and that this creative process takes place in the unremarkable interactions of everyday life. It’s also a potent source of nostalgia, a longing not so much for the past but for the possibilities foreclosed in the present. He takes the lesson to heart in Telegraph Avenue, which explores his complex sense of nostalgia for a moment when he was not nostalgic, which is portrayed in Telegraph Avenue as the brief interlude between Barack Obama’s meteoric ascent to national prominence after his career-making 2004 speech and the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a moment characterized by the author as radiating “hope unfulfilled, not yet betrayed” (202).

  A Historical Emotion

  Often defined simply as a sense of homesickness, nostalgia has been the object of a surprisingly persistent yet inconclusive debate as to its nature and utility. Is it a feeling or an idea? Is it real or ersatz, a sentimental fallacy located somewhere between wishful thinking and daydreaming? What is it we all long for and where, exactly, do we feel its ache? We know that home is always smaller than it seems in our memories, that the past was never quite like that. Evidently, the term itself is as untrustworthy as the recollections it inspires. Wandering erratically along the border between emotion and intellect, sensation and reflection, affect and concept, nostalgia is a notoriously difficult term to locate, let alone define.

  In her study of the phenomenon in The Future of Nostalgia, Boym suggests that nostalgia should be treated as a “historical emotion”—that is to say, as an emotion about our relation to history, to the ongoing reconstruction of the past according to the whims of the present, but also as an emotion that is itself historically contingent, the product of “a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body—internal and external well-being—were treated together” (7). Boym excavates its roots in seventeenth-century Europe when the somatic was inextricable from the spiritual and so, given the state of the art, nostalgia was initially diagnosed as a medical condition. Its first sufferers were the victims and perpetrators of continental wars and other types of displaced persons subject to the tumult and upheaval of the modern age. Their symptoms included sadness, loss of appetite, violent longing for home, hallucinations (usually the specters of absent loved ones), and even suicidal tendencies. Treatment, meanwhile, meant leeches, purges, opium, and, where possible, restorative trips to the Swiss Alps (4).

  Eve
ntually the disease theory of nostalgia gave way to a more recognizable view of it as a sentimental disorder. Boym argues that nostalgia came into its own in the nineteenth century, which saw the spread of museums and official encouragement of increasingly public practices of commemoration as a form of civic virtue. This is restorative nostalgia par excellence, the promise that what had been lost could be found and, indeed, collected and displayed. “The past was no longer unknown or unknowable,” writes Boym. It became “heritage” (15). Such exhibits proved vital to the project of nationalism, the parading of collective memory, and the invention of “the people.” In the hands of conservative ideologues and political traditionalists, nostalgia serves as an agent of the state.[5] However, it also comforts dissidents of all sorts. This period saw an outburst of reflective nostalgia among those who longed for an elsewhere or otherwise and not necessarily for a return to some putative home. It is a complex impulse that takes many forms, some utopian and others mundane. The nineteenth century was shot through with many strains of this Romantic dis-ease, beginning with the dissatisfaction with the everyday implied in the celebration of nature as sublime or retreat to Fourierist communities, and ending up on the couch, so to speak, in mourning and melancholia (with apologies to Freud).