Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  Inbar Kaminsky’s “Solving the Jewish Case: Metaphorical Detection in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” is a guide for how one might produce powerful literary criticism via close reading. In studying the novels as both detective tales and tools for addressing ethnicity, Kaminsky illuminates “how the generic subversions of the classic and hard-boiled detective story help to explore the implicit roles of the protagonists and their analogy to the plots of The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in relation to Jewish identity.”

  In “Not Growing Old but Growing Up: Appropriate Masculine Identity in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys,” Alex Hobbs looks at Wonder Boys as a novel and film in assessing how Grady Tripp transforms. She explains, “The novel, then, is both Bildungsroman and picaresque, centered on the changing masculine identity of its protagonist. Grady has entered a period of transition: it no longer seems appropriate to continue his quasi-adolescent existence but he is unsure whether he is ready to commit to a more mature, or age-appropriate relationship.” Comparing and contrasting the two versions of Grady leads Hobbs to determine that the childlike character changes gradually into “a more traditionally acceptable identity.”

  Josef Benson offers a detailed assessment of one of the most critical and confusing aspects of Chabon’s work in “Queer Masculinities in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Manhood for Amateurs.” By placing the author’s first novel in its historical context, particularly via contrast with the best-selling Iron John by Robert Bly, Benson brings to light the conflicting images of masculinity in that era. Chabon, he concludes, “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.”

  The final section of the book is “Chabon’s American Expression.” These chapters tackle Chabon as a writer, adding insight into central themes critical in comprehending his work. In “Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and Therapeutic Creativity,” David McKay Powell provides an entirely new framework for analyzing Chabon and his trek from first to second novel. In this vein, he concludes, “Writing Wonder Boys, the story of a foundering writer passing the torch to the next generation, allowed Chabon to pass the torch from his first career—Chabon writing veiled renderings of his own experience—to his second—Chabon unbound, writing whatever he very well pleased.”

  In “American Prowess Deconstructed: Michael Chabon and the Merger of Naturalism and Fantasy,” Jake Sudderth shows how “Chabon’s writing incorporates this balancing act between naturalism and dreaming.” This link between realism and fantasy, he explains, allows Chabon access to “America’s special corners and forgotten districts; naturalism deconstructed, from Pittsburgh to Berkeley, as he relies on the great American duality: naturalism and fantasy, a Hollywood tradition depicting real and fantasy simultaneously—where people’s warts are exposed while they dream of better days ahead.”

  The final chapter in the collection, Matt Kavanagh’s “‘Hope Unfulfilled, Not Yet Betrayed’: Michael Chabon’s Nostalgia for the Future,” is a broad examination of nostalgia as it unfolds repeatedly in Chabon’s work. According to Kavanagh, the focus is “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.” Kavanagh pays particular attention to the role of Chabon’s failed novel—Fountain City—on his thinking and its consequences on the novelist’s career. As a result, he explains, “I focus on this episode in order to discover how the author learned to write about nostalgia without simply being nostalgic.”

  As intellectual history, Kavanagh’s chapter urges the reader to consider how Chabon’s art has transformed over time as he embraces “the values of reflective nostalgia, a process that has deepened and enriched his sense of Columbia’s legacy.” The attempt at creating a utopia on the outskirts of the nation’s capital infused the youthful Chabon with formative ideas, including notions of race relations, wonder, and creativity.

  * * *

  As a writer and public intellectual, Chabon is acutely attuned to life in contemporary America, providing a kind of history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in novels ranging from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh to the recent best seller Telegraph Avenue. Like his literary forefathers, Chabon writes effectively across multiple genres, including the young adult literature novel Summerland and the essay collection Manhood for Amateurs. Chabon has also taken high-profile writing jobs as a Hollywood screenwriter, magazine columnist, book editor, and comic book writer. His many-faceted career makes him an ideal representation of how a successful writer carves out a livelihood, utilizing and underscoring the role of popular culture in our culture- and web-infused world.

  In interviews, when discussing writing and other writers, Chabon’s deeply intellectual look transforms to a playful grin and radiant smile. What one takes away from this display is that Chabon is a book lover as well as proud member of the writing guild. This effect mirrors the reaction one has when reading him—that this is the work of a profound talent.

  As scholars interested—like Chabon—in illuminating the world via literature, the writers comprising this collection urge readers to engage deeply with his work, not only for its stylistic precision and deft use of words, but to explore and interrogate the American condition. As scholar Maxine Greene explains, “We need to hold in mind the fact that the arts are almost always inexhaustible. There is no using up of a painting or a concerto or a poem. If they have any richness, say destiny at all, they are inexhaustible; there is always more” (206–7). The notion of “more” is central to Chabon’s writing. His work is expansive, compelling, and life altering.

  Works Cited

  Greene, Maxine. Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on

  Aesthetic Education. New York: Teachers College P, 2001.

  Updike, John. Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1991.

  Chapter 1

  Real Maps of Imaginary Worlds; or, Michael Chabon, Shadowtail

  Jesse Kavadlo

  Summerland, Michael Chabon’s young adult novel, features an unlikely, ragtag cast of characters making their way through an equally unlikely series of magical lands, each based on a different mythological system. Yet unlike the at-first similar universe of Harry Potter, where wizards traverse magic worlds by means of magic trains, magic cars, magic buses, magic motorcycles, magic objects, magic animals, magic fireplaces, and the occasional magic spells, in Summerland, the transportation depends solely on a kind of magic travel agent:

  “It takes a special kind of creature to guide you from one world to another,” Uncle Mo said. “A regular person just can’t manage the trick.”

  “A shadowtail,” Ethan said.

  “It’s something neither fish nor fowl, you know. A little of this, a little of that. Always half in this world and half in the other to begin with.” (123)

  Protagonist Ethan takes Uncle Mo literally, believing that they need a werefox, but his friend Jennifer T. knows better, realizing that the description also matches their idiosyncratic friend, Thor Wignutt. “Neither fish nor fowl” and “a little of this, a little of that,” of course, just as readily describes Summerland itself, a young adult novel that is not just for young adults and that challenges the conventions of its genre. Summerland, like its shadowtails, belongs in more than one world: it draws upon seemingly incompatible traditions—English fantasy stories, ancient world mythology, American folklore, and America’s national pastime, baseball—for an epic battle of good against evil that, I will argue, helps us to understand Chabon’s philosophy of storytelling itself. And while the novel deserves analysis for its own mer
its, it also manages the trick of guiding readers—or, to mix Chabonian metaphors, provides a map and legend—to understanding Chabon’s approach to genre and imaginary places in his other, purportedly adult novels.

  Still, Summerland received mixed reviews upon publication. Writing in the New York Times, Robert Lipsyte calls the story “bewilderingly busy,” claiming that characters’ “frantic conversations and skirmishes seem more like the novelization of an animated action film than the freed imagination of a writer so many have found so beguiling.” AV Club critic Noel Murray writes, “Summerland’s early chapters are long and packed with detail, loaded with a thicket of funky names and folklore that’s hard to negotiate, as well as sudden bursts of action often too frenzied to follow.” In keeping with the above, the novel received a B from the School Library Journal. On the other hand, Summerland has found a wide audience, winning over adults and children alike to become one of Chabon’s best-selling books (Timberg).

  Indeed, Summerland is arguably not a work of young adult (YA) literature at all, but rather an excellent example of YA scholar Philip Nel’s statement that “children’s literature is literature” (Lee). Chabon feels the same way: “I think a really great [children’s book] . . . is simply a great book. It’s simply a great novel. It is a great novel whether you are 11 years old or 72 years old. It’s got all the virtues of great literature” (Hansen). For me, Summerland’s strength comes from the very qualities its critics fault: its busyness, its detail, and its prodigious narrative information, a word I will return to at this chapter’s conclusion. While Scholastic’s Book Wizard web page assigns it a grade-level equivalent of 7.3, in many ways Chabon does not treat Summerland as a YA novel. He does steer clear of the subject matter of his other novels, explaining, “Your kids are always saying to you, ‘Daddy, when are you gonna write a book that I can read?’ You always have a sense that you’re letting them down by writing these stories about people with pot habits who cheat on their wives” (Lacayo). His pyrotechnic syntax is sometimes tamed. But like Chabon’s other long novels, Summerland brings seemingly disparate characters, conflicts, and categories together enthusiastically, but not seamlessly, since Chabon likes when the seams show.

  Summerland seems a Narnia-like tale of talking animals and an impending apocalypse that only a plucky band of human children can avert, but he borrows more than these obvious conceits from C. S. Lewis. Often overlooked by readers but highlighted by the 2005 film adaptation, the opening page of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe places its fantasy in the context of the real-life bombing of Britain, so that the battle that emerges in Narnia between the White Witch and the Pevensie children mirrors the one they were powerless to fight on earth. Chabon updates this conceit to reflect the contemporary reality of American pluralism. Summerland’s children are diverse and not siblings. Ethan Feld is Jewish, Jennifer T. Rideout is mixed race, and Thor, until we learn his true origin late in the story, seems to have some undiagnosed disability. Each experiences hardship—Ethan’s mother died of cancer; he struggles with the vicissitudes of life as he struggles with baseball, a sport his father loves but that Ethan would abandon at the risk of abandoning his father as well. Jennifer T. excels in baseball as a girl in what others still consider a boy’s game, and they both, along with Thor, struggle for family, peer, and social acceptance. Their battles are consistently internal; their wars are not global but personal. Unlike the climactic scenes of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter, and the majority of YA fantasy novels, Summerland does not conclude with a last battle at all, but rather with a ninth inning in a last baseball game.

  The shift is crucial. In its simplicity and accessibility, baseball seems the perfect plot device for YA literature; yet, unlike magic, baseball has not had recent impact on the genre. Instead, it has been the consistent trope of America’s most canonical novelists, even if they often appropriate it in ironic or experimental ways: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. In Summerland, however, Chabon sees the ways in which the structure and symmetry of the baseball game can impose order on his wide-ranging story, organizing the book’s sections into First Base, Second Base, Third Base, and Home. In doing so, he transforms baseball into a hero’s journey of departure, initiation, and return, the bases as the basis of the narrative by creating suspense and escalating tension in the story, just as moving across the bases does in the game. (Many graphic representations of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth depict it in a way that could easily overlay a baseball diamond.) Chabon even structures the novel in the dramatic style of the three-act play: First Base is the setup; Second Base, the confrontation; and Third Base, the resolution. (Home is by far the shortest section and is labeled an epilogue.)

  More than recognizing baseball’s potential for narrative organization, though, Chabon points toward the symbolic language of baseball as well. On the novel’s second page, Ethan expresses frustration over the game: “‘I made three errors in the last game,’ Ethan reminded his father” (4). But it is not just the errors themselves that Ethan is upset by—it is also “the whole idea of counting errors” (5): “I hate it that they even count errors,” he continues. “What kind of game is that? No other sport do they do that, Dad. There’s no other sport where they put the errors on the freaking scoreboard for everybody to look at. They don’t even have errors in other sports. They have fouls. They have penalties. Those are things that players could get on purpose, you know. But in baseball they keep track of how many accidents you have” (5). Chabon’s earnest italics underscore Ethan’s indignation, the preadolescent pain of having one’s flaws broadcast.

  Comedian George Carlin famously lampoons baseball in his “Baseball and Football” stand-up routine, again dwelling on baseball’s language more than the game itself. Live, Carlin’s pronouncements about football are inflected in a masculine baritone, while baseball’s terminology gets a goofy, high-pitched squeal: “In football, you get a penalty; in baseball, you make an error.” His vocal delivery makes it clear that, contrary to what Ethan thinks, penalties are far more severe than mere errors. Ethan’s father, however, sees the distinction differently than Ethan and George Carlin, answering, “Errors. . . . Well, they are part of life. . . . Fouls and penalties, generally speaking, are not. That’s why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that’s all I do in life, keep track of my errors” (6).

  Carlin concludes his routine by emphasizing that football is grim, masculine, and solemn, compared with carefree, boyish baseball:

  And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different. In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.

  In baseball, the object is to go home! And to be safe! I hope I’ll be safe at home!

  But if Ethan’s father is correct, even if football is war, baseball is life. When life is good, as Ethan understands later in the novel, “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day” (332), not for dwelling on the minutiae of errors. But until that point, rather than seeing “safe at home” as trivial, Summerland, in keeping with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Peter Pan (for Wendy, not Peter), The Wizard of Oz, and other YA fantasy, sees the return home in mythic terms, so that only after the team has figuratively gone home by winning the final cosmic game may they literally return home to Clam Island. Contrary to Carlin, the stakes are very high.

  Coyote, the novel’s villain, is trying to bring about what the book refers
to as “Ragged Rock.” Ragged Rock at first seems another eschatological, Christian-inflected apocalypse, in keeping with Narnia’s Last Battle and the clash of good versus evil wizards that concludes the Harry Potter series. But the name is presumably derived from Ragnarök, the great battle in Norse mythology that results in the deaths of the gods. And it is not quite about good triumphing over evil. As Uncle Mo explains to the kids,

  “Ragged Rock is a day, the last day. The last day of the last year. The last out in the bottom of the ninth. . . . They say when the Story finally ends.”

  “What story?” Ethan said.

  “The Story. All stories. All the stories, all of them that anybody ever lived or told or experienced or heard about. All these long years, Coyote’s been working to make that day come.” (119)

  Coyote, as Uncle Mo explains, wants to destroy all of the “galls,” or intersections between worlds on the Lodgepole, or Tree of Worlds, in another appropriation of Norse mythology, Yggdrasil. As Cutbelly the werefox explained to Ethan earlier, “Well, with a tree as old and tangled-up as the Lodgepole, and with the Winds of Time blowing as stiff as they like to blow, you are bound to have some pleaching [the joining or waving together of two parts of a tree] here and there. By now it’s been going on so long that these galls are all over the place” (52). And these galls are not just places where “worlds flow together,” but where, getting back to Uncle Mo’s explanation, “travelers tunnel through and come out the other side. And they get into all kinds of yarns and escapades. Voyages and misfortunes. So for a long, long time now, Coyote’s been going around cutting these knots. Trying to bring all the little stories to a stop so that he can put a stop to the one great Story, the one about you and me and all the creatures that ever lived. He’s tired of things the way they are. He’s been tired of them almost since they first got this way, which they only did thanks to him” (119–20).