Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  The LTD and Loss

  The cars in these stories, as in Wonder Boys, prefigure and signify loss. Firebirds, fabulous cars, the LTD and Volvo, all drive away and signify the unrequited desire for familial connection and intimacy. While it is clear from the outset of “Mrs. Box” that such will be the case, the overwrought quintessentially American Ford LTD and Firebird evoke the nostalgia of a promise, hint at the possibilities of escape, but then attend and signify loss. Meanwhile, the roadways of these stories never give rise to grand narratives. The roadways are cul-de-sacs and frontage roads, not astounding mountain highways or coastal routes. Nevertheless, it is precisely in these marginal nonspaces and pseudospaces that the characters can have meaningful interactions that break with the everyday patterns they engage in at home. These traveling chronotope settings furthermore emphasize the flux and postmodern instability that attend that freedom of choice and independence that, in turn, attend the American symbol of car, travel, and being on the road.

  Works Cited

  Brake, Robert. “Space, Motion, and Comfort in the Contemporary Automobile.” Journal of Popular Culture 8.1 (1974): 155–61. Web. 27 Feb. 2013.

  Casey, Roger. Textual Vehicles: The Automobile in American Literature. New York: Garland, 1997. Print.

  Chabon, Michael. “Admirals.” New Yorker 14 Sept. 1987: 34–38. Print.

  ———. “Along the Frontage Road.” New Yorker 19 Nov. 2001: 74–78. Print.

  ———. “The Lost World.” New Yorker 20 Aug. 1990: 33–38. Print.

  ———. A Model World and Other Stories. New York: Harper, 1991.

  ———. “Mrs. Box.” New Yorker 18 May 1992: 36–39. Print.

  ———. Wonder Boys. New York: Picador, 1995. Print.

  Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Print.

  Fowler, Douglas. “The Short Fiction of Michael Chabon: Nostalgia in the Very Young.” Studies in Short Fiction 32.1 (1995): 75–82. Print.

  Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Print.

  Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Print.

  Mooney, James. “Bonhomme Richard.” Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. 29 Apr. 2004. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.

  Rosenbaum, Jean. Is Your Volkswagen a Sex Symbol? New York: Hawthorn, 1972. Print.

  Chapter 5

  “Guess Who I Am Now”

  Mike Witcombe

  On Communication and Childhood in Michael Chabon’s “Lost World” Stories

  Of Masculinity and Men

  Failure may seem a strange choice of topic to begin a discussion of a writer as celebrated as Michael Chabon—yet failure is the topic he himself chose to introduce his memoir Manhood for Amateurs, claiming that “a father is a man who fails every day” (7). Far from castigating fathers for any perceived inadequacy, Chabon celebrates inadequacy itself as a subject-position akin to that occupied by novelists, cartoonists, and musicians—all of whom, he argues, experience a desire for an identification with a mythical Other who never matches up to an idealized description. This search for identification, earlier described by Chabon as a “gesture,” reinforces the importance of failed communication, especially in a familial context, within the body of work published prior to Manhood for Amateurs (5).

  If a father “fails every day,” a son or daughter fails in a commensurable but distinctive way as the recipient of their intended gestures. For Chabon, who has been interested in the construction of masculinity throughout his body of work, this initial failure is the root cause of subsequent communicative failures—especially between men. The gender framework Chabon develops is ludic, performative, and antimisogynist, but is nonetheless unapologetically focused on masculinity. Men constantly develop images of idealized Others, often of those closest to them, and balk at the interpersonal gulf this process creates. This does not imply that women are not subject to similar processes but instead suggests that perspective varies depending on the context of gender identity.

  Take, for example, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—Chabon’s first novel and, among his work, still the work most explicitly based on a masculine rhetoric of interpersonal communicative failure. The failure of the narrator’s father, rooted in a desire to protect his son from the excesses of the criminal underworld, is somewhat less esoteric than that which Chabon discusses in relation to his own experience. As the text progresses, however, the mechanics of this process begin to look increasingly familiar. Art Bechstein replicates the process of mystification and idealization attempted by his father in his own interpersonal entanglements—he develops an initial image of the desired Other (be they male or female, lover or friend) and fails to overcome the biases these images generate.

  The resultant narrative bafflement is similar to that of Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, who pondered that it is “a wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other” (14). Chabon’s novel transposes this basic philosophical problem (the existence of other minds) to a hyperbolized American context, and describes the resultant collisions. The “mysteries” of Chabon’s title refer to the bonds between people as much as they do to any qualities associated with Pittsburgh itself.

  Manhood for Amateurs would continue to view the attempt at communication as more important than its inevitable failure. Chabon’s move from MFA to MFA (that is, from a master of fine arts thesis to Manhood for Amateurs) has been a complex one, but as the shared acronym implies, the vivid differences between texts may not tell the whole story. A conception of continuity in Chabon’s texts may seem to be contradicted by, for example, differences in genre—but such a perspective undervalues more subtle thematic connections.

  These ideas suggest the validity of approaches to Chabon’s work that explore the unique manner in which masculinity is depicted as both an impossible predicament and the foundation of self-identity. Having observed the early importance of this theme in one of Chabon’s novels, a reconsideration of its development in other works can be attempted, and a reevaluation of the significance of his nonnovelistic fiction can emerge. In this context, the most important of these fictions are a series of short stories in the book A Model World, grouped under the subtitle “The Lost World,” which have been overshadowed by the diversity and quality of subsequent work. Jonathan Franzen includes Chabon on a list of authors whom he believes to be “most at home, most undilutedly themselves, in their shorter work” (288); one doesn’t have to share Franzen’s vehemence to agree that there is interesting material in these short stories that is currently neglected in critical studies of Michael Chabon’s work.

  The Lost World stories consist of five separate short stories that trace the life of a character named Nathan Shapiro from childhood to late adolescence. Beginning with an account of a family holiday that ends prematurely after a parental argument (“The Little Knife”), the stories progress to show Nathan’s father struggling to explain his impending divorce to his son (“More Than Human”) and an account of postdivorce father-son relationships (“Admirals”). Changing perspective as Nathan moves in with his mother, the final two stories depict Nathan’s hopeless attraction to one of his mother’s friends (“The Halloween Party”) and his abortive romantic dalliance with a fellow teenager, Chaya, who moves to Israel shortly after (“The Lost World”). Divorce provides the initial narrative thrust of these stories, providing the texts with a fragmentary attitude toward romantic entanglements that can be traced in Nathan’s own tentative steps toward sex and selfhood.

  The sense of mutual failure between parents and their children is key to Chabon’s conception of masculinity but remains difficult to instinctively defend. Parenting is often codified in positive terms, a direct (albeit imperfect) transmission of know
ledge and influence from the older party to the younger. Psychoanalysis has helped deconstruct such narrowly deterministic views, with many critics highlighting the importance of misunderstandings in communication, especially those between a child and his or her caregiver. A brief foray into some of these ideas can help elucidate the unique character of knowledge and self-identity in these fascinatingly understated short stories.

  Psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein have been particularly influential in this respect. Klein’s work, which offers a sympathetic critique of Sigmund Freud’s original ideas, highlights the importance of early psychological processes in children’s development. In doing so, her work provides a means of demonstrating how Chabon’s emphasis on misunderstanding can be placed within a theoretical context. The child’s parent (usually, in Klein’s terms, the mother) is constructed through mistakes and misunderstanding, and only gradually, incompletely, becomes incorporated into a coherent whole. As Juliet Mitchell describes it, the child’s ability to reconcile differing perceptions of his or her mother as both nurturing and destructive “constitutes the nodal experience for the infant on which its subsequent relative normality or psychosis depends” (115). The child’s experience of parental influence as simultaneously positive and negative thus confers upon the child the evolutionary necessity of not getting something. Ideas taken to be permanent are exposed as pliable, and selfhood becomes dependent upon acknowledging the radical imperfection of one’s parental role model(s).

  As formative as such ideas have proven to be, Klein’s work is not the only resource for theorizing the absence of knowledge in childhood; in relation to the subject-position of Nathan Shapiro, her work is perhaps most useful as an introduction to ideas about not “getting it” that have been subsequently developed by Adam Phillips, a psychotherapist and literary critic fascinated by perceptions of absence and presence. Phillips, writing several decades after (but clearly inspired by) Melanie Klein, radically reconstructs the idea of knowledge acquisition to ask, “Why is it so difficult to enjoy not getting it? How does that child resist, what else can the child do, if anything, other than try to get it? And what happens to that aspect of the adult that doesn’t get it, and doesn’t want to?” (45). Phillips’s questions reconsider basic psychoanalytic paradigms to probe the nature of this communicative inadequacy, arguing that the failure inherent in parent-child communication may not be entirely negative. “Children are people who don’t get it, until they do” is the resultant formulation—“getting it” implying a range of knowledge-domains circumscribed by the culture the child inhabits (48). The desire to not get something becomes liberating, a means of undermining perceived truths. Phillips concludes by bringing on board the psychoanalytic project as a whole, which is seen as a science of unknowing, a constant mystification that nonetheless fails to diminish its therapeutic value. Sex remains beyond our understanding, and Freudian psychoanalysis serves mainly to tell us that “we have to ironize the knowing we do about our sexuality” (79). In short: we don’t “get” it, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

  Josh Cohen, a psychoanalytic critic contemporaneous with Phillips whose interests in many ways align with those of his elder colleague, extrapolates a similar sense of positive self-creation from the superficial negativity of denied or withheld knowledge. Discussing the notion of privacy as both a political phenomenon and a psychoanalytic concept, Cohen argues, “All the light of the sun and stars can’t alter the fact that you remain in the dark, private in spite of yourself or anyone else. That alone is what makes it possible to live in the light, to have a face you show to the world” (25). Both Phillips and Cohen return to a key caveat of the psychoanalytic method, the insistence on the absence of a definitive cure and the lack of belief in an objective equilibrium. Cohen’s celebration of the inability to understand ourselves as the foundation for public interaction may be of some relief to Nathan Shapiro, whose fear of misinterpretation (and being misinterpreted in turn) is at the core of his bafflement and anxiety throughout the Lost World stories.

  These critical perspectives emerge from the fringes of psychoanalysis, despite being sympathetic to many of its foundational precepts; as such, the ideas (particularly those of Cohen and Phillips) lend themselves to literary analysis more readily than many of Freud’s more clinical and diagnostic ideas. They provide a sympathetic counterbalance to the well-intentioned but frequently hapless actions of Dr. Shapiro, Nathan’s father, who works at a “small, private psychiatric clinic for children” (Model 144) yet is unable to fathom the less neurologically extreme thought processes of his young son. In doing so, they may allow for a reconstruction of the underlying sense of confusion that becomes the hallmark of Nathan Shapiro’s various experiences, keeping that character at the center of analysis. In Chabon’s work, what becomes apparent is that failure is a consequence of equivalent processes of not getting it. Words that were intended for one purpose are construed by another to mean something else, symbols that are interpreted in one fashion by one person are subverted by another’s interpretation and people, as a result, constantly misunderstand one another.

  The sense of misunderstanding theorized by critics like Klein, Phillips, and Cohen can help to unpack some of Chabon’s more enigmatic sequences. Nathan Shapiro himself is acutely aware of the transient nature of communicative understanding—in a scene in “The Halloween Party,” Nathan experiences a palpable sense of shame when his “conceptual” Halloween costume (“a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume”) is interpreted in humiliatingly nonconceptual terms by his would-be love, Eleanor Parnell (Model 175). The vocalizing of this process of not getting it, this inevitable failure to communicate, is more than Nathan’s fragile ego can bear. The reader is forced to squirm alongside Nathan as Eleanor attempts to “interpret” his costume—after she first guesses him to be a lamppost and then Thomas Edison, Nathan’s mother (who else!) finally intervenes and tells her the truth. The reader is placed in the middle of the (mis)interpretative process, and the passage becomes as cringe inducing as it is comically rich. Eleanor is now the one who doesn’t get it, and Nathan finds his position of being able to get it too much to bear—yet he ends the story relieved at his failed attempts to impress Eleanor, glad to not “get” the mechanics of adult sexuality. His final action in the story, covering Eleanor’s eyes with his hands and asking her “Guess who I am now,” treads a fine line between childish playfulness and ontological clarity; it remains one of the most powerful and ambiguous endings to be found in Chabon’s shorter fiction. Ignorance (or, to be more accurate, “not getting it”) may not be bliss, suggests Chabon, but it doesn’t have to be damaging. In accepting that he will never be able to control how he is interpreted or understood by others, Nathan is making his first tentative steps into adult ambiguity—because of, rather than despite, the failure of his precocious pickup line. To use Phillips’s terms, he ironizes the knowing that he does about his sexuality.

  Taking this interpretative strategy as its cue, this chapter will take several distinct but related approaches to these stories, aiming to contextualize and analyze them, respectively. It will first consider the placement of these stories, and the range of dialogues they have (often unwittingly) initiated. It will then offer a close reading that will demonstrate the unique construction of masculinity and the thematic complexities they give rise to. Finally, this chapter will briefly consider how the unique quality of these stories lends itself to more detailed comparative studies.

  Of Novels and Narratives

  The Lost World stories are unique within Michael Chabon’s shorter fiction for their coherent characterization and stable narrative perspective. The remainder of his shorter work features a broad range of characters, locations, and styles connected by a common thematic interest in failure and masculinity. The majority of these stories feature characters whose personal crises resonate with those in many of Chabon’s novels, yet they function primarily as self-contained fictions.

  This
idea may seem to be devalued by references to characters from Chabon’s short fictions being found in his longer work—yet this reuse of characters is rarely crucial to narrative understanding and functions more as a means of creating self-referential asides. The most well-known example of this process is the character Eli Drinkwater, the protagonist of the early short story “Smoke,” who is used as a mentor-author figure for the female coprotagonist Jennifer T. in Summerland. As an example of the inscrutability of success and failure (a baseball player whose natural talent is diminishing incrementally with age), Drinkwater is perfect foil to Jennifer T’s biological father, who is beset by his own miasma of personal failure. However inventive the connection on Chabon’s part, this textual relationship is not pivotal to the narrative mechanics of Summerland and serves primarily to remind a careful reader of the long-standing interest in the relationship between sports and gender identity in Chabon’s work.

  The Lost World stories occupy a position between the format of the novel and that of the short story collection, tied to neither format but taking influence from both—a model that earlier texts like Bernard Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman employ to great effect. A reader is invited to make comparisons by the subdivision of A Model World into two distinct sections: one focused on a range of unrelated stories—“A Model World”—and the other to those concerning Nathan Shapiro—“The Lost World.” The separation is striking and invites a reading of the Lost World stories as a distinct entity; yet as a coherent narrative, the Lost World stories are an entirely artificial construction. Chabon himself describes these stories as “a series of snapshots taken over time,” a phrase that suggests at once the unique variety of the method and the limited perspective it offers (qtd. in Benedict).