After dinner, James having again drunk too much and passed out, Tripp traipses about the Warshaw family grounds, eventually deciding it to be a fit place to bury the corpse of Doctor Dee, still in his trunk. Finding a shovel and appropriate plot of ground, he begins to dig, and in so doing is reminded of the great number of literal holes in his fiction. All of his novels have ended, in one way or another, with a character digging or entering into the earth, burying evidence, living in basements, canoeing into underwater caverns. He thinks about his stories, how they “were all,” like Van Zorn’s, “about the horror of emptiness,” and reflects that Van Zorn had “put a pistol to his temple because in the end there were too many whistling black holes in his room in the McClelland Hotel” (234). “This was the writer’s true doppelgänger,” Tripp considers, “not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work . . . whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life’s very course” (234).
In his attempt to bury the dog’s corpse, he falls short of breath, his heart too labored, and after a few minutes realizes “[his] career as a character in one of [his] own books was over” (236); he’s lost his doppelgänger. He thinks about the holes that characters in his own work have dug: monstrous holes, basements, caves, holes to bury human bodies. But those holes, symbolizing the emptiness of those characters, existed only in the life of the mind. Whereas their emptinesses had been epic, substantial in the scope of their vacuum, Tripp’s own is not even deep enough to represent the gap in his soul where his own novel should be. He realizes he is no longer a novelist; the heady abandonment to insubstantiality that had characterized his work is no longer there. Perhaps it is the fetus in his lover’s womb or the fact that he now has a meaningful attachment to one of his students—Tripp never mentions having had a relationship like what he was experiencing with James Leer—but he has lost his Zen, his meaningful emptiness. Now he is merely empty.
After James had passed out and Tripp began to question the professional ethics of what he had exposed his student to, he had called James’s parents. James’s parents retrieve him, and Tripp wonders whether he had done the right thing by calling them. After all, he thinks, “people [James’s] age were allowed to get drunk and pass out. I might even have argued that they ought to be required to do so” (240–41). But of course, Tripp had involved James in much more than intoxication. The previous evening’s events had included a blurred variety of characters and outlandish events. As Tripp mused on the ride to Kinship, James had “engaged, the night before, in activities as diverse as being dragged bodily and giggling from a crowded auditorium, committing grand larceny, and getting a hand job in a public place” (160). Guilty about having called in the parental ambush, Tripp finds the manuscript of James’s novel, The Love Parade, and reads all 250 pages straight through without stopping. He is pleasantly surprised that James seemed to have “abandoned [the] silly experiments with syntax and punctuation” that had caused derision among his writing workshop peers, and Tripp notes that “like most good first novels it possessed an imperturbable, mistaken confidence that all the shocking incidents and extremes of human behavior it dished up would strike new chords of outrage and amazement in the reader” (249). In broad terms, it is the typical first novel, melodramatic and confident in a voice it does not fully understand—perhaps a bit like Chabon’s own Mysteries.[3] Apparently, James has grown as a writer (and, by extension, as a person). James, prior to his weekend adventures with Tripp, was a static individual, caught up in an illusory, idealized golden age of which he was never a part. “Why The Love Parade?”[4] Tripp wonders, noting that it, like most of Leer’s titles, found its provenance in bygone cinema:
James seemed to have chosen it, as usual, more for its status as a title than for any evident connection to the plot or characters of his story. There was a kind of sympathetic magic in the way James titled his fictions, as if by producing works called Stagecoach and Greed he hoped to make of himself not simply a writer but an entire studio; to raise, on the patch of vacant scrub that was his life, a teeming city of costumers, soundmen, hoplites, buccaneers, and Kickapoo Indians, where he could be producer and director, screenwriter and gaffer and makeup artist, the walk-on destined for stardom and the leading lady at the peak of her career. (251)
James, like Tripp, is using his writing to make himself feel more complete, a new American Adam capable of creating an infinite number of new republics. In James’s character, there are many empty places: his preoccupation with Old Hollywood is escapism; likewise, he lies about most aspects of his life to make them sound more exciting; and in his fiction he hopes to find some power, to be able to assert dominance over some environment, even if that environment lives only in his mind and the mind of his readers, the signatories of James’s psychic constitution.
Having read The Love Parade, Tripp sets it aside and thinks that perhaps he “was not the fairest possible judge of what James Leer had done.” “In my heart,” he muses, “I knew, I was jealous of the kid: of his talent, although I had talent of my own; of his youth and energy, although there was no point in regretting the loss of those; but mostly of his simply having finished his book” (250). By finishing his book, James has made something and through that has become something. He was now god of the Love Parade universe. But James’s novel had been finished before any of the previous evening’s bizarreries had commenced and before James would admit to still feeling “like . . . nothing” (282). In the philosophy of reflexive self-attainment, whereby the student writes so that he or she might better come to know the literal self, the process of writing might have failed him as it had failed Tripp; the sad, implicit coda to this is that James might face the same future as Tripp, Vetch, or Fahey. When Tripp wonders whether he was “the fairest possible judge” of his student, perhaps what he means is that he knows that in the attempt to fill the void writing is meant to fill, the excavation can make the hole larger.
Tripp returns from Kinship alone to find his house overrun with an impromptu party thrown by Crabtree as an underground social corollary to the apparently tame, official WordFest events. It is full of local writers, prompting Tripp to make a dig at the local color: “There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworks and the Bessemer converter of love” (256). Clearly, he has lost his adolescent awe of the writer-figure. He calls Crabtree aside, informs him that he has handed James over to parental authority, and Crabtree, who in the previous twenty-four hours has developed both a sexual curiosity and career interest with regard to James, revolts. After discussion, the two agree to spring James from his parents’ home. Among the various tales that James has concocted to represent his personal history is the fact that his parents (note: he claims that they are actually his grandparents and that he was sired by his grandfather, which happens to parallel the plot of The Love Parade) keep him locked in their basement in the family mansion. The absurdity of the notion that two grown, professional men might break a postadolescent out of his family home is not lost on Tripp: “I had always, consciously and by some unthinking reflex of my heart, taken it as an article of faith that escapades like the rescue of James Leer from his Sewickley Heights dungeon, or the retrieval of the missing jacket, were intrinsically good: good for the production of literature, good for barroom conversation, good for the soul. Chaos!” (323). It is the absurdity of the act that attracts Tripp, an extreme act that might very well be a plot point in one of his novels. After this act of practical fantasy, the three of them return to Tripp’s home, where Crabtree and James retire together to consummate the relationship that had begun the previous evening. While Tripp has himself been staring down the incipient crash of his career and persona throughout the
course of the novel, the union of Crabtree and James Leer represents the beginning of an outward rather than inward crisis. Now, his prize pupil has taken up with a Manhattan book editor; the teacher has lost his charge, and the longtime friend and editor has found a new rising star.
Along the way, Hannah, the student to whom Tripp rents a room, has taken the copy of Wonder Boys that Tripp has accidentally left sitting out and read it. She is unimpressed, asserting that while Tripp’s prose is beautiful, the narrative is simultaneously “all spread out” and “jammed too full,” that he was injudicious in electing which details to include and which to leave out—ultimately, that the novel lacked identity—further implicating Tripp’s personal identity crisis with the composition of his book (301). Her infatuation subsequently fades. He falls further when, the next morning, he realizes that Crabtree has likewise lost what admiration he had had for Tripp, realizing Crabtree now sees in him “only the pot-addled author of a bloated, boneless, half-imaginary two-thousand-page kraken of a novel, a hoax whose trusting and credulous pursuit had cost him tens upon tens of thousands of dollars and, seemingly, his career” (298). “All male friendships are essentially quixotic,” Tripp muses later in the novel, “they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure” (326). Crabtree and Tripp’s dual adventure in their fading La Mancha is over. And the realization that they have found themselves in the real world is not one that can be undone.
Along with Crabtree’s reappraisal of his friend, there are other clues that the real world begins to intrude in other ways. The rightful owner of Tripp’s Galaxie was an odd-looking man they had first seen in the R&B club and around whom they had built a wide-ranging mythology. His name was Vernon Hardapple, they said, and he had been a mob-connected jockey who accidentally facilitated the assassination of his brother, incidentally causing his present addiction to painkillers. When “Vernon” eventually steals his car back (which at that point was carrying James’s novel and Marilyn’s pilfered jacket), they try to remember what actual facts they knew about him. But they are at a loss, and Crabtree notes that they “kind of made the whole guy up.” Tripp replies, “No wonder he fucked us over, then” (299). This is the revenge of the real upon the fantasist. But more important is the subsequent loss of Tripp’s manuscript. In their attempt to retrieve The Love Parade and the jacket, Wonder Boys, which Tripp had taken to protectively carrying about, is jettisoned from a speeding car, caught in the wind, and deposited in the Monongahela River. The fantasy that had consumed Tripp, and his last-ditch effort to create for himself an adequate vault for whatever lay inside him, is irretrievably lost.
The abrupt demise of his “two-thousand-page kraken” of a novel is the end of Grady Tripp, author. At the novel’s conclusion, though Tripp continues to write while teaching at a different college, he notes that students occasionally “dig up” his novels in the library stacks, suggesting his work is of the past, not the present. But the end of his authorship—or his identity being tied up in being an author—does not result in suicide as it did with Fahey and Vetch. They had persisted and the frustration of their efforts drove them to take their own lives. But the crushing realizations as to who he was and who his friends believed him to be have been allowed Tripp to release himself from the burden of authorship, both in the literal sense and in the sense that he was “authoring” his own life—he no longer will need to measure himself by the standard of his conception of what an author should be. And along with having passed his torch to another, James, the fact that he and Sara have a contribution to make to the actual world together seems to release him of the need to be an author. Tripp has completed his reflexive quest and has come to understand his relationship to the world. Tripp’s story likewise seemed to have allowed Chabon to understand himself and his writing. As Chabon describes it in the Gentlemen afterword, it “saved” him, enabling him to widen his scope beyond the fates of the typical contemporary protagonist, to head out in search of a little adventure.
Notes
Works Cited
Chabon, Michael. Gentlemen of the Road. 2007. New York: Ballantine, 2008. Print.
———. Manhood for Amateurs. New York: Harper, 2009. Print.
———. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. 1988. New York: Harper, 2005. Print.
———. Wonder Boys. New York: Random, 2008. Print.
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.
Robert, Marthe. Roman des origins et origins du roman. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972. Print.
Tobias, Scott. “An Interview with Michael Chabon.” The Onion 36.42 (2000): n. pag. Web. 24 Feb. 2013.
1. An adumbration of Chabon’s The Final Solution, which features Sherlock Holmes against the Nazis.
2. Chabon eventually published the Tripp/Crabtree/Van Zorn story under the pen name August Van Zorn as “In the Black Mill,” which is included as the final item in Werewolves in Their Youth.
3. Chabon might well have had his own first novel in mind. In fact, the opening of The Love Parade (“On Friday afternoon his daddy handed him a hundred wrinkled one dollar bills and told him to buy himself a sportjacket for the Homecoming Dance. He rode the Greyhound over to Wilkes-Barre and spent the money on a pretty chrome gun” [125]) and of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (“At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business” [9]) sound familiar: father, son, and “vague” but dangerous business.
4. The Love Parade (1929), starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, is commonly touted as the first true movie musical—i.e., the first to integrate speech with musical numbers that meaningfully move the plot forward. It bears little resemblance to either Leer’s The Love Parade or Chabon’s Wonder Boys except that all three entail minor, fairly outlandish plots involving pistols. The film also includes singing dogs, though there is unlikely a reference in the ill-fated Doctor Dee.
Chapter 15
American Prowess Deconstructed
Jake Sudderth
Michael Chabon and the Merger of Naturalism and Fantasy
Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, a syndicate managed by four famous migrants, Chandler, Whitley, Lankershim, and Van Nuys, who discovered wealth in Southern California, purchased copious parcels near the City of Angels in the early twentieth century. One of their investors, Times publisher General Harrison Gray Otis, acquired 550 acres in the middle of a massive subdivision (Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng 324). Eventually, Otis sold his land to imaginative author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The pulp king’s favorite character rose to life at his ranch. Nearby settlers voted to name their community Tarzana in honor of the fictional son of a British lord and lady raised by great apes (“History of Tarzana”). American real estate demands powerful marketing.
“Adventure fiction as we most commonly understand it is about imperialism in one degree or another,” mused author Michael Chabon when fielding a question about modern film. “All the great archetypes, the prototypes from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and John Carter, H. R. Haggard, and all the way up to, even the western novel, The Virginian, all the way through to James Bond—they’re all about empire—the interaction between empires and colonies as they are colonized” (Lupoff). Chabon, master of naturalism and fantasy, is expert in such matters. He proved his expertise when penning a script based on Burroughs’s creation, Carter. His recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, imagines an idealized, polyethnic American neighborhood, a dreamscape the denizens of Tarzana would understand.
The Tarzan era mirrored bawdy, adolescent America and established the combination literature, naturalism, and fantasy, which Chabon admires. Two massive wars and political reshaping propelled the nation into international leadership, the least damaged of the major powers. Before national adulthood, American novelists mastere
d and tested realism via literary naturalism. The fundamental forces are still with us, infiltrating common conversation, advocating that social class, environment, and heredity shape lives. Like subjects of the British Empire in previous centuries, Americans realized that world leadership requires protection (defense), self-promotion, and resource management. Chabon turns American naturalism upside down, inquiring whether technology and self-actualization really made life better. The author’s thoughts matured during his youth in Columbia, Maryland, a “new city” which he refers to in interviews as “utopian.” Planning neither guaranteed a better way of life; or one bereft of problems. However, Chabon still longs for the idealism of the period. This chapter explores his illumination of 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. Chabon’s writing incorporates this balancing act between naturalism and dreaming.
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