Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  This is not to say that the story is inane. Chabon writes wonderfully complex narratives in which characters must navigate the postmodern condition as they try to discover one another. His interest in broken significations and such inanities, then, has everything to do with how these characters relate to one another and how humans find their way in such a world. In “Admirals,” young Nathan is negotiating a molting relationship with his father. In a world in which signification is broken, what hope can he have of having genuine connection with his postdivorce father while under the threat of the new girlfriend? It is important that the story is about a meaningless and insipid road trip because it is precisely in this environment—absent of distracting meaning and yet rarified from the everyday patterns and relationships of home—that Nathan can make sudden and new discoveries about his father and their relationship.

  Furthermore, the excess and spectacle of the trip is inflected with all the implications that choices imply. For example, the power to choose to opt out of marriage renders divorce. The leisurely mobility that enables tourism culminates in empty gestures and broken signification that cloaks the insignificance and consumptive nature of the itinerary. The story ends with a final image that Nathan has of himself, floating like Moses below his parents who sing “We Love You” as he floats, but does not move, in a little basket in the water. His containment in this basket is a soothing contrast to the claustrophobic entrapment of the rear seat at the opening of the story.

  The 1966 Ford Galaxie LTD 500?

  In “The Lost World” the depiction of the car is slightly different. Rather than immediately disrupting the traditional symbolic meaning of the car in American culture, at the beginning of the story the brash “banana-colored Ford LTD” (33) appears to signify American exceptionalism, outsizedness, independence, and freedom. In this story Nathan has moved to the spacious front seat. The car is “huge” (33). He is not confined inside the cabin and the reader is shown an exterior, rather than an interior, snapshot of it at the outset.

  Identifying it as a Ford LTD is relevant in that it evokes not only the heyday of 1960s American muscle cars, but a car specifically known for its size and, in its day, top-of-the-line trimmings. Furthermore, it interacts with Chabon’s subsequent novel, Wonder Boys, in which Grady Tripp drives a “fly-green ’66 Galaxie ragtop . . . a stylish old yacht . . . with a balky transmission, bad wires, and a rear seat of almost infinite potential” (29). It is ultimately the trunk, and not the rear seat, of this Galaxie that promises infinite potential as the characters evocatively store a tuba, a dead snake, and a Marilyn Monroe jacket in it. This ’66 Galaxie is technically a Ford LTD, which begs the question, is the Ford LTD of “The Lost World” a Galaxie? It was the next year—1967—when the LTD and Galaxie were separated into distinct vehicles, the latter becoming a lower trim line. Chabon may have been merely sentimental in his decision to invoke this car in “The Lost World,” “Mrs. Box,” and Wonder Boys, but the LTD signifies in distinct ways, a fact I will attend to in the subsequent discussion of “Mrs. Box.”

  The spacious and airy largesse of the LTD in “The Lost World” is crowned by the fact that Nathan rides in it liberated of his clothing. His friend, Buster, is driving. On this excursion, Nathan doesn’t know initially where they are going, and perceives them to be “lurching aimlessly” about the town of Huxley. Nathan discovers that Buster is taking them to the house of a girl, Chaya, whom Nathan has known, from a distance, since he was six years old.

  The moment of the story is one when Nathan’s mom has just remarried, his stepmother has become pregnant, and when “[Nathan] was old enough to regard these changes as the inevitable outward expansion, as of an empire or an ice cap” (33). This imperial expansion of acquisition and discovery prefigures the boys’ aspirations and destination. The operative metaphors for this expansion are references to historical and planetary time that bridges to how in “Admirals” Nathan, as a younger child, conflated vast tracts of history, asking when he was four, which came first, “the dinosaurs or the old-fashioned cars. It still seemed to him that the things that happened before he was born—Pearl Harbor, hieroglyphics, catapults, the day his parents fell in love—were equally ancient and interesting, cryptic and gone” (37). The practice of empire, its wars and histories, expansions and catapults, constitute the ideology that gives shape to Nathan’s lived experiences, Pearl Harbor inscribing his experience of family and this surprise attack on Chaya’s home in cryptic hieroglyphics. The American car, and how it is represented in Chabon’s work, figures into this as well. Robert Brake describes in his article “Space, Motion, and Comfort in the Contemporary Automobile” how “Manifest destiny (bigger is better) [has] prevailed” (160) in the automobile industry. The Ford LTD is the quintessential manifestation of this impulse to largesse and expansion, or growth, and it is the dream of Chaya’s sexuality that lends purpose to the aimless lurching of the boys in this car. Chaya, however, will prove to be unavailable in any meaningful way, as she is to be sent away the next morning by her father on a trip that sounds more like exile than the leisurely trip of a family.

  As in “Admirals,” signification is disrupted in this story and Nathan is torn by feelings of nostalgic loss. Just before arriving at her house, he thinks back to one of the only moments that he shared with Chaya when they were children. In Edenic tall grass they played a game of Chaya’s invention, in which Nathan was an “intergalactic cast-away” on the Planet of the Birds. She drew its map in the dust, gave the planet an ironically prescient name, Jadis—an agile French word that is difficult to translate and which signifies temporal displacement, something in the past—and talked of one day writing a book about its “oceans and aeries” (33). Jadis ultimately then is a simulacrum of a simulacrum, being such in its first evocation, and a hope for a future that never comes, which, in that present, gives rise only to nostalgia for the previous forward glance.

  While the Ford LTD dominates the opening of the story, it is the trope, possibility, and threat of travel that takes over the narrative. Nathan’s stepfather, Ed, in contrast with his father’s girlfriend in “Admirals,” is very well traveled and “had been to Antarctica and Peru and Novaya Zemlya and returned with all sorts of hair-raising tales and queer stones” (33). The stepfather sounds like an outsized adventurer from another century. Meanwhile, Chaya is about to be exiled to Israel by her father, who disapproves of some aspect of who she has become and wants her to “learn to be an Israeli” (36). While the invocation of travel might hold promise of escape or engagement with the world for the protagonist, the two travelers are only emblems of inevitable encroachment and yet more disappointment in the disappearing possibility of intimacy. Nathan is described in this story as feeling “unmoored, at once so angry and nostalgic” (33). This state of flux, of not being at home, evokes the sense of loss emphasized by temporal distance—jadis—and figures ironically in the Ford LTD, a make of car that is a harbinger of loss in “Mrs. Box” as well. Chaya’s trip—she is being exiled by her father and hasn’t chosen to go let alone go “all alone” (36)—is a distancing event. In “Admirals,” figures were constantly disappearing behind Nathan’s Orpheus-like back. Here, Chaya disappears on him, just at the moment when he has looked back over his shoulder at their memory of an intergalactic game that, back then, looked forward to the promise of a future in which it would be narrated.

  In “Admirals” Nathan is in the middle of a trip while in “The Lost World” he is in Chaya’s home for most of the story, the former a story of mobility and the latter, seemingly, stasis. Nevertheless, a sense of flux prevails and the setting resembles Clifford’s sense of a traveling chronotope of culture in which intercultural travel is the default mode (Clifford 25). While Clifford asks his reader to consider something like a hotel lobby as this figure, in this story, Chaya’s bedroom is not unlike a waiting area from which, within a few hours, she will be departing on her trip. The dwelling fails as such. There is a poster of Jerusalem on the wall of the b
edroom, invoking again the reader’s sense of the simulacrum. Nathan imagines her operating a crane in the desert. Chaya promises she will write him a letter from Jerusalem, gets his address, and, before he can leave, writes him a letter, slips it into an airmail envelope, addresses it, hands it to him and states, “‘There, I wrote you a letter from Jerusalem” (37). This space, ostensibly a home, is like Clifford’s hotel lobby—an intercultural traveling chronotope in which people do not dwell but are always already traveling.

  The Black Then Orange LTD

  In “Mrs. Box,” as we will see, this notion of always already traveling prevails: The protagonist’s, Eddie’s, marriage to Dolores is described as a failed “expedition for which they had set out remarkably-ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travellers” (38). Of course, blaming the equipment of the metaphor, as he blames the optical equipment upon which he has bankrupted himself, helps defray his own culpability. At the start of the story Eddie imagines that a Sikh driver of a black LTD is trying to repossess his Volvo, confessing in this declaration not to paranoid delusions, but to “a debilitating tendency to hope for the best” (36). This LTD is immediately identified as a predatory presence, one that threatens to dispossess Eddie of his mobility and much of his identity. Nearly everything he still owns is stuffed into the Volvo, although Eddie’s last morbidly dysfunctional connections to a life and family are contained in the grim briefcase that he takes with him. It is filled with the literal manifestation and embodiment of his failures:

  all the grim documents and bitter receipts of his financial and marital dismantlement, the importunities of the creditors of his failed practice, the sheet that divorced him from Dolores, as well as an expensive satellite-uplink telephone pager that had not uttered a beep for several months, a well-thumbed copy of the April issue of Cheri, and the remains of a three-day-old Deluxe hamburger from Dick’s, wrapped in a letter from the bankruptcy law firm of Yost, Daffler & Traut. (36)

  This strange collection is all the more strange for being contained in a briefcase. It isn’t clear why he needs this paperwork if he is heading into exile. The collection of detritus begs more questions than it provides clear answers. Is the hamburger thus wrapped so as to rot the bankruptcy letter?—or is the letter preserving the hamburger? Whose issue of Cheri is that?—and why is it well thumbed? The detailing of the (chaos of the) contents of his briefcase, a gift from Dolores’s parents, emphasizes the lack of regard he must have held for them but also characterizes how they must feel about him. The briefcase is effectively a trash bin that signifies disregard and incompetence if not outright impotence.

  The Volvo at the start of the story represents Eddie’s mobility—he is “headed for someplace like Mexico or Queen Maud Land” (36)—and enables him to travel to Oriole’s apartment. More than that, however, it signifies his belonging—both specifically, to Dolores and her greater family, and abstractly. Jean Rosenbaum writes that the car “is more than a convenience; it is a symbol . . . of belonging to a group, and it brings group recognition” (2). The power that the car represents in this formulation isn’t located in the capacity to travel at will, but status and belonging. The playboy in “Admirals” can choose to belong wherever he cares to because everyone is seeking him out. Buster, Nathan, and Tiger’s shared community in “The Lost World” is embedded in the reality of the LTD. Finally, the Volvo comes to represent and contain both Eddie’s tenuous and fraying connection to his old life and the (unlikely) possibility of forging forward to a new beginning.

  Eddie is running away in this story and it is only when he stops moving that he loses the car. Roger Casey, in Textual Vehicles, describes the car as “escape agent” (153) in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. He notes that the car is also a figure of deception, sometimes enabling physical escape, but seldom emotional escape. “Though the car has promised escape and deliverance, those promises remain unfulfilled. The union holds; the promises fail. This is where we are in America” (170). Yet in this story, it’s Eddie’s failings that drive the lack of fulfillment. He has failed on his promises. The depths to which he has sunk and the measure of his depravity are measured by his decision regarding Oriole’s jewelry box. Even though he “already” regrets deciding to steal it, he gets most of the way through the theft when he finds Oriole in the living room. She is looking toward her old house with field glasses and describing it to him. He is struck with empathy and returns her jewelry box to her bedroom, but it is precisely at this moment that she discovers her missing necklace, which has fallen to the floor. She accuses him of having stolen it. He sees and recovers her necklace, sparing him from unseemly and ironically accurate accusations, because he trips over his briefcase and himself falls to the floor. His misfortune is his salvation in this story. This parallels how late in the story a glimmer of pathos—the traumatic center of the story suddenly looks back to the fact that he and his wife lost a child—operates to temper his vilification. He “escapes” twice from being caught and accused of theft and has made one ethical decision and had one instance of good luck when he then thinks of escaping to Rosario, driving straight through.

  This is not to be, however, as the black LTD shows up, lit orange in the light of the parking lot. Eddie watches down from the apartment as the Sikh enters the car, starts it, and drives away with his old photographs, clothing, stolen merchandise, legal documents, and records. Eddie is paralyzed as Oriole continues to talk on the phone with Dolores, who has just told her that their home has sold, and makes definitively clear that she has no idea who he is, asking Dolores about her husband (Eddie). Eddie’s insignificance has crystalized, his identity has been swept from him, even his ability to escape has been taken, and he is only left with the reminders of his moral turpitude and downfall. He no longer exists in the world. The trip has been interrupted, and in the moment when it is clear that he has become a castaway here with a woman who fails to recognize who he is, even his ability to move fails.

  Service Roadside

  In “Along the Frontage Road,” travel and the excursion have been relegated to the pararoadways. The trip is oblique and will not achieve escape as it might have along the interstate itself. Yet father and son find something here “along roads where anyone else would have found nothing at all” (“The Lost World” 33). While Nicky and his father are not tourists in this story, they are consumers out looking for a pumpkin. Nicky’s father begins the story by narrating his nostalgia for the pumpkin patches of his youth, which he does not remember. That farmland is contrasted with their drive to a vacant lot where “there is nothing but gravel, weeds, and the kind of small, insidious garbage that presents a choking hazard to waterfowl . . . so devoid of life . . . from January to October . . . no one sees it at all; it ceases to exist” (74). The space is not so much the pseudospace of tourism as much as it is a nonplace. What is not divulged at the outset of this story, and which is in fact the turn and revelation later in the story, is that this excursion is an act of escape as much as it is the ritual of father and son.

  Although Nicky’s father seeks to purchase something for him, the dynamic is radically different from the tourist consumption of “Admirals.” First of all, Nicky wants the pumpkin. More importantly, perhaps, the entire trip is structured around the purchase. Nicky gets to choose the pumpkin, and ultimately, is even allowed to name it and decide whether or not to cut it and put a candle in it.

  This ritual, while tainted by the father’s reflections on what it might be ideally, is less plagued by it being an idealized and false copy, and more by its gritty reality. Despite the father’s profound objection to “the disjointed urban almanac . . . [Nicky] loves the place. There is something magical to him in the sight of the windswept gray waste transfigured by an anomalous outburst of orange” (75). It is Nicky’s imagination that salvages the trip, while his father’s nostalgia threatens to stifle it. Nicky’s imagination also reveals the fact that they have come out, without Nicky’s mom, in order to simultaneously escape and allow her t
o rest. Her pregnancy has come to an end in a manner in which they “were given no real choice in the matter” (77). They were going to name the baby Kate, which is the name that Nicky wants to give to his strange little red pumpkin.

  Nicky and his father are never depicted in nor about their vehicle, and the only car represented in the story is a “beer-cooler red” Firebird (75). A boy named Andre waits in the car. His father is in and out of a bait shop at the edge of the lot. Nicky and his father meet Andre when he comes over, intrigued by the pumpkins. Andre’s relationship with his father contrasts with Nicky’s, but more importantly, Andre and his father disappear, driving away in the red Firebird with a backward-looking glance “as reproach. I had abandoned him to a hard fate” (77). Nicky’s father, feeling distressed and guilty about the terminated pregnancy, reads Andre as an emotional double. It is the Firebird—an iconic, sporty, and definitively not-family-friendly vehicle—that signifies, again, not escape, but loss. Both Nicky and his father have had an epiphany in the brief moment on the margins of the margins of their urban existence. The epiphany, seemingly, could only be had by having left the house.