Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  Around this time, Boym reports, nostalgia became an object of suspicion as the advent of mass culture led to the industrialization of sentiment. “The melancholic sense of loss turned into a style, a late nineteenth-century fashion” (16). Nostalgia became a big business; what you once lost could be held in your hands again—or at least some shiny approximation thereof, and for a price.[6] Mass reproduction, however, denudes the nostalgic object of its particular history and thus much of its emotional texture. At least, that is Michael Chabon’s concern, which echoes earlier misgivings: “The mass synthesis, marketing, and distribution of versions and simulacra of an artificial past, perfected over the last thirty years or so, has ruined the reputation and driven a fatal stake through the heart of nostalgia” (“Landsman of the Lost,” in Maps and Legends 135). Chabon here rehearses an old argument about the coarsening effects of commercialization on memory, but it is one that inadvertently illustrates the durability of the concept. “Those of us who cannot make it from one end of the street to another without being momentarily upended by some fragment of outmoded typography [or the] curve of a chrome fender,” he suggests, “are compelled by the disrepute into which nostalgia has fallen to mourn secretly the passing of a million marvelous quotidian things” (135). Once standardized, nostalgia becomes inauthentic, kitsch. Its banality is a potent source of embarrassment to those who would attribute any sort of personal significance to it at all, making it something to be enjoyed in private. But paradoxically once it is condemned as an illicit pleasure, nostalgia becomes intensively personal anew, shame reanimating the object formerly rendered inert through mechanical reproduction.

  So, if not a disease, nostalgia appears as a pathology of character, a symptom of the divided self. Boym traces this ambivalence back to the beginning, when “intellectuals and poets from different national traditions began to claim that they had a special word for homesickness that was radically untranslatable” (13).[7] Their aim was to capture the ambiguous sense of loss that, though experienced universally, nonetheless remained strangely incommensurable. “While each term preserves the specific rhythms of the language, one is struck by the fact that all these untranslatable words are in fact synonyms; and all share the desire for untranslatability, the longing for uniqueness,” Boym says (13).[8] There are as many varieties of nostalgia as there are people to succumb to it. The only element they have in common is the certainty that they will, that the lure of nostalgia is both ubiquitous and inevitable.

  Nostalgia, then, serves as a correlate to identity itself, that which constitutes the individual as unique, untranslatable. “I bear no marks or scars. I haven’t lost anything that isn’t lost by everyone,” muses Chabon. “And yet here I am—here I have always been for as long as I can remember knowing anything about myself—feeling like a stranger” (“Imaginary Homelands,” in Maps and Legends 170). Such feelings of estrangement are as universal as they are intensely personal. What characterizes identity in the age of modernity is the sense that we are radically incomplete. Nostalgia is the way we relate to this experience, which is to say, by naming it as an absence or loss. Restorative nostalgia promises to return what has somehow gone astray by filling the gap. It indulges us in fantasies of fullness while also providing a narrative that purports to explain how we came to find ourselves lacking. In its revanchist forms, restorative nostalgia even dabbles in conspiracy theory in order to ascribe blame to those who “took” from us. Reflective nostalgia, in contrast, recognizes that the experience of ourselves as limited is precisely what creates the illusion of a beyond.[9] Our partial nature makes us susceptible to dreams where we are intact and unmarred, but reflective nostalgia recognizes these for what they are, which is to say, a mirage—if no less indispensable for being illusory. It is an ethic that accepts our incompleteness as fact and celebrates identity as mutable, an unfinished project or improvisation. “I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things,” says Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys, en route to the realization that he never will (45).

  Against Monuments

  Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), a bisexual coming-of-age story set in Pittsburgh, fairly luxuriates in its description of the fondly remembered summer when protagonist Art Bechstein becomes a man by falling in love (twice) and standing up to his father. But it also registers no small amount of authorial anxiety about this self-conscious process of mythologization, best captured in its pensive final line: “The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything” (297). Over the course of his career, the author’s approach to nostalgia has evolved from the youthful mistrust of embellishment that permeates his first effort to the more tolerant perspective evident in his most recent work. In the interim, Chabon has learned to appreciate ambiguity, to accept that the contradictions inherent in nostalgia can occasionally be suspended if never resolved, and to assent to the fact that we only have access to history through the myths we tell about it. Crucially, he has come to recognize that the contrast between “true remembrance” and nostalgia’s “ruinous work” is a false opposition: that the former is always mediated through the latter. It’s a mature insight, one that speaks to the tempering of precocious intellect by bitter experience. Such wisdom is precious precisely because it is hard won, in this case coming at the expense of Chabon’s second novel.

  Flush with critical acclaim for his debut and a sizeable advance for his next effort, Chabon set to work on a novel that he would eventually abandon, but only after squandering years of effort and fifteen hundred manuscript pages, not to mention his first marriage. Originally entitled The Lost World (later, Fountain City), the novel stubbornly resisted being found by its author.[10] In contrast to his first book, which “was liberally furnished with people, experiences, and memories drawn from the author’s own life,” Chabon was determined to break new ground: “I was already aware of an ambition to try something that would stand at a greater remove, at least on the surface, from my own biography” (“Fountain City” 26). However, he doesn’t stray far from home. The novel opens with the protagonist, Harry Klezmer, returning to his family in Huxley, a planned community very much like Columbia, Maryland, where Chabon himself grew up:

  Although over the course of twenty years the planned, integrated, enlightened and ecumenical city of Huxley had come to seem nearly indistinguishable from the ninety-nine other suburbs strung along the freeways from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., and its school system had abandoned Open Classrooms and Team Teaching, and its candy-striped electric minibuses, which took you anywhere in the town free of charge, were sold off to a Christian theme park in West Virginia, the geodesic Interfaith Plexus remained as a testament to the turned-on, Great Society–era egalitarianism of its planners. (It was Harry’s peculiar destiny, and perhaps his entire problem in life, to have been raised and educated in Utopia.) (7)

  Grief stricken by his sibling’s suicide and broken up by his parents’ broken marriage, Harry has been away for a year, “an aimless ramble across the United States in his dead brother’s Alfa Romeo” (1). He arrives back home in Huxley only to discover his family is elsewhere. His childhood home is up for sale, his mother is in Belize as part of an ecoprotest group, and his father, a formerly liberal rabbi whose faith has been tested by the death of his eldest son, is about to embark on a pilgrimage to Israel where he will work with an expansionist group bent on restoring the Temple to the greater glory of Eretz Yisrael. Harry himself is eventually bound for Florida where the author hoped to contrast Huxley with another magic kingdom, Disney World, but beyond the suggestive juxtaposition of planned community and amusement park, Chabon himself was not clear regarding what he wanted to say, or what the novel was for. “It was a novel about utopian dreamers, ecological activists, an Israeli spy, a gargantuan Flor
ida real estate deal, the education of an architect, the perfect baseball park, Paris, French cooking, and the crazy and ongoing dream of rebuilding the Great Temple in Jerusalem,” he explains (“Diving into the Wreck” 159). Fountain City may have been about all of these things but the problem, Chabon admits, is that in the end “they didn’t all belong in the same book together” (“Diving into the Wreck” 159).

  As it turns out, Chabon required several books to find the proper home for the various enthusiasms discovered during the composition of Fountain City, aspects of which have resurfaced in his subsequent work. To take but two examples: baseball figures prominently in his first children’s book, Summerland (2002), whereas a plot to restore the temple in Jerusalem drives much of the action in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). More to the point, however, there’s the case of Wonder Boys (1995), the novel that Chabon began on what would become a permanent hiatus from his slog through Fountain City. In it, rather than borrow elements from Fountain City, he dramatizes his own situation as a hopelessly frustrated author in the character of Grady Tripp, a onetime literary wunderkind whose own long-awaited follow-up to earlier success is nowhere in sight. Grady eventually loses the massive manuscript that squats on his desk, a tremendously cathartic moment in the novel (and likely for Chabon, who was here metaphorically heaving the uncooperative draft of Fountain City out the window), but not before hearing the bitter truth from one of his readers, Hannah, his student, tenant, and ongoing source of temptation: “‘Grady,’ she said, sounding more than a little horror-struck. ‘You have whole chapters that go for thirty and forty pages with no characters at all!’” (Wonder Boys 302).

  Aside from being an excellent comic novel in its own right, Wonder Boys is quite suggestive in explaining how Chabon overcame his writerly funk. In several respects, it reads as the solution to the problems posed by Chabon’s experience with his failed project; in particular, the invention of Grady Tripp serves as an illustration of the very lever Chabon invented to extract himself from his creative impasse in Fountain City. By inhabiting the perspective of a grizzled older man, the twenty-something Chabon establishes some distance from his own writerly persona. He even makes Grady a goy, with Jewish former in-laws whose customs he observes from the outside looking in: “They weren’t my family and it wasn’t my holiday [Passover], but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get” (144). Given the author’s commitment to exploring his Jewish heritage elsewhere in his work, it is another instance where adopting Grady’s point of view allows Chabon to figuratively stand at a remove from his own life—at least, much more so than in Fountain City, which is, after all, concerned with the adventures of a suspiciously familiar figure: a “poetically sad young man” (“Fountain City” iii). One such creature does appear in Wonder Boys, Grady’s talented but unstable student James Leer, but his role in the novel is as a quirky catalyst who forces his reluctant mentor out of his comfortably constricted routine. Grady is baffled, amused, and sometimes horrified by the compulsions of his youthful charge, an attitude that is easy to ascribe to the author in recalling the still-smoldering wreckage of Fountain City and his own obsessive banking of the flames.

  The key, Chabon explains, was not only the discovery of Grady Tripp’s voice, but also his decision to compress events into a manageable frame (the novel takes place over a weekend) and return to a familiar setting: Pittsburgh, “the true fountain city, the mysterious source of so many of my ideas” (“Diving into the Wreck” 160). In stark contrast to Fountain City’s shifting locales and uncertain duration, Wonder Boys is a marvel of containment. It is also future oriented, where the former text is set adrift in the past. Declaring that “he was to be forevermore only his brother’s heir” (“Fountain City” 25), Harry Klezmer is consumed with mourning, whereas Grady, against all his expectations, is caught up in the business of living. There is the matter of his invigorating if unorthodox tutelage of James Leer, but more importantly, the surprising news that he is expecting a child—and with his married lover Sara Gaskell, not his wife. The narrative hinges on whether he will accept this fact—he initially wants Sara to have an abortion, precisely so that nothing will have to change—but regardless of his decision, the news itself is the final straw for his own marriage, which he realizes he has been thinking about in the past tense for a long time: “It was a love that felt an awful lot like nostalgia” (Wonder Boys 30).

  Grady’s initially grudging, ludicrously inept, and nonetheless heartfelt decision to embrace change allows him to move on from a foundered marriage and exit what is, technically speaking, a fucked manuscript. And by telling Grady’s story, Chabon manages a similar feat. What separates Wonder Boys from its precursor is the author’s realization that a story is not, and cannot be, a monument. However fantastically elaborate Chabon’s reconstructions of his childhood may be in Fountain City, the novel remains surprisingly inert, a failure, because of its resistance to change. The static nature of its narrative and lifelessness of its main theme—restoration—is best captured in the mission of Earth Five-O, the eco-activist group that Harry’s mother joins during his absence from Huxley. “The name was derived from the group’s stated goal of returning the earth by 2050 to its level of global pollution in 1950, and by 2150 to that of 1850” (15). This vision doesn’t simply suggest the future is predictable, it renders it as progressively indistinguishable from the past, a reflection mirrored in the present. But if tomorrow is identical to yesterday, nothing ever changes and nothing ever will. There is no room for the new, the unexpected, or surprising. The promise of restorative nostalgia is that you can go home again, but the unspoken corollary is that once you get there you can never leave.

  The Noble Developer: An American Rouse-au

  In the twenty years since Chabon finally put Fountain City behind him, Columbia has never been far from his mind. If not forgotten, the sting of his parents’ divorce has lessened, allowing his memories of other formative experiences to come to the fore. Sifting through them, the author finds himself as nostalgic as ever but no longer transfixed by the frozen image of a happy home.[11] Instead, what he has increasingly come to cherish are the feelings that he associates with growing up in a certain place and time: the radical sense of possibility, of potential, of openness afforded to an American boy of the 1970s, those glimpses of utopia that Svetlana Boym describes as “the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete” (xvi). Chabon’s nostalgia, in short, has taken on a reflective tone. Before evaluating the most recent results of Chabon’s reflective nostalgia in Telegraph Avenue, I’d like to take a closer look at the role of Baltimore real estate developer James Rouse, the unlikeliest of muses, in this transformation.

  Lauded as a “master planner” on the cover of Time magazine (24 August 1981), Rouse was famous for building the first indoor mall on the East Coast in 1958, participating in urban renewal projects in Baltimore as well as his pioneering use of festival marketplaces to revitalize downtowns hollowed out by the flight of small businesses and chain stores to suburban strip malls. But it was Columbia that really put him on the map. Rouse had previously experimented with controlled environments (malls) and planned communities (the Village of Cross Keys in Baltimore), but Columbia with its projected population of 120,000 was something else entirely: a city ex nihilo, which would be several orders of magnitude greater in complexity than Rouse’s earlier efforts. In the spring of 1963, Rouse—using a series of cutouts and dummy corporations to disguise his intent and avoid inflating a property bubble—began to secretly buy up thousands of acres in Howard County, a then-predominantly agricultural area situated between Washington, DC, and Baltimore (Olsen 136–39).

  Suburban development was too often uncoordinated and underfinanced in postwar America. Local governments frequently proved ill equipped to envision the needs of the towns and cities they were in the process of becoming. Planning, then, consisted of little more than a mad scramble among builders who were more intereste
d in raising the next row of anonymous and interchangeable tract homes than they were in figuring out how the various developments fit together and what sort of community would result. Rouse’s solution to the arbitrary and haphazard nature of postwar development was massive capitalization (his venture was backed by the deep-pocketed Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, now part of CIGNA) and careful planning. Indeed, the former enabled the latter. By developing on a large enough scale, Rouse afforded himself the latitude necessary to revolutionize the planning process, the goals of which he laid out in an address delivered at Berkeley, at the fountainhead of Telegraph Avenue, that belatedly came to be seen as his vision for Columbia itself.

  Entitled “It Can Happen Here,” his speech laid out the challenges posed by urban decay on the one hand and suburban sprawl on the other. Citing, among other things, the prevalence of slums, inadequate public transportation, and the indifferent provisioning of social services, Rouse concluded that “our cities are already oppressively out of scale with people” (2). The car-centric suburbs weren’t much better. Consisting of impersonal and nondescript subdivisions that were oblivious to both their natural setting and the importance of well-planned public spaces in creating a sense of community, suburbia didn’t so much rise to the challenge of postwar urbanism as ignore it in favor of headlong growth. Recognizing this, Rouse used his Berkeley address to insist that “people grow best in small communities where the institutions which are the dominant forces in their lives are within the scale of their comprehension and within reach of their sense of responsibility and capacity to manage” (6). Columbia was thus an ambitious experiment designed to restore a sense of proportion to the urban experience.