This mixing and matching works because fanciful elements focus on real-world problems that draw the reader back from the sky—like the parrot in Telegraph. Naturalism strives to depict everyday reality, as opposed to surrealism or romanticism, which rely on symbolism or supernatural assistance. Chabon takes real world crises (the Holocaust) and invents new ways to address the most disturbing elements of life: reactions by everyday people. He describes sexual insecurities, poverty, violence, and the highest of human crimes, extermination (pure naturalism), and places the tale within a parable. Chabon is not a complete naturalist because he does not focus solely on misery; he is most connected to the style of Charles Dickens and his modern pupil, John Irving. The former was a master of fantasy and realism and the latter often saddled with the term magical realism.
Imbuing the Real
Dickens loved eighteenth-century picaresque novels, which he found in abundance on his father’s shelves. According to biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd, the most important literary influence on him was likely the fables of The Arabian Nights, a source of inspiration for Chabon in Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure (Ackroyd 22–24, 29–30). The Dickens comparison would probably agitate Chabon, a skilled chronicler of Jewish heritage, because of the Englishman’s anti-Semitic character, Fagin. However, the Dickens awakening reads like a Chabon plot. After he sold his London home to Jewish banker James Davis in 1860 and listened to the complaints of his wife about the character, perspective shifted. In later editions of the book printed during his lifetime, Dickens removed 180 uses of “Jew” from the first-edition text and then revised Oliver Twist. In one of his final public readings in 1869, a year before his death, Dickens cleansed Fagin of all stereotypical caricature (Lodge).
Naturalism plays a part in genre literature that focuses on what makes specific cultures tick. Naturalistic authors groped to outline how heredity and environment influenced lives, including examining the way these factors impact a particular character and his or her community. “Most Naturalistic authors considered no detail too mundane to be recorded and often drew conclusions by applying the scientific method to each event they contrived” (Braman). Chabon freely acknowledges his connection with genres and Jewish themes. “Actually, you have hit on one of the secret motivations behind this book [when addressing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union], as well as behind my swashbuckling adventure, Gentlemen of the Road, and Kavalier and Clay and The Final Solution, too. Which is to look at some of the genres or ‘subtraditions’ of popular culture and make their Jewish roots or antecedents explicit; or where there is no strong Jewish tradition, to take that genre and Judaize it and see what happens. In the case of the hard-boiled detective novel, none of the great masters or key practitioners were Jews, as far as I’m aware. Chandler, Hammett, the MacDonalds, Spillane . . . goyim all. If you look at science fiction, you see Jews everywhere—Asimov, Avram Davidson, Robert Silverberg, Alfred Bester, Harlan Ellison. But in the American private eye tradition (with a couple of exceptions), not so much” (Hasak-Lowy).
Sparse, naturalist dream language is evident throughout The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Settings are plain in Alaska. Chabon is skilled enough to infuse language when faster paces are necessary, duality in setting. “A badge of grass, a green brooch pinned at the collarbone of a mountain to a vast black cloak of fir trees. At the center of the clearing, a handful of buildings clad in brown shakes radiate from a circular fountain, linked by paths and separated by quilted patches of lawn and gravel” (Yiddish 247). A chess rendezvous in Poland captures the social milieu of wartime migration and intercultural exchange. “They sat down together, the strapping war veteran in the bespoke suit and harsh good humor, and the stammering fifteen-year-old with a wall eye, a receding hairline, and a mustache that was often mistaken for a sooty thumbprint” (26). Duality in setting also emerges in The Final Solution when Mr. and Mrs. Panicker view London during World War II after years of absence and dour newspaper reports. “And now here he [Mr. Panicker] was confronted by not simply the continued existence of the city but, amid the smoking piles of brick and jagged windowpanes, by the irrepressible inhuman force of its expansion.” Changing perception is framed when Panicker reacts out loud, “‘Ashes,’ the old man said wonderingly as they passed a huge new area of emergency housing built by Mr. Churchill, like vast tilled allotment sprouting row upon row of little tin houses. ‘I had thought to see nothing but smoke and ashes’” (Chabon, Final 101).
In Wonder Boys, the author’s most classic book, Chabon uses talented (student writer) James Leer to show realism influencing stories and writing. When reading Leer’s manuscript, The Love Parade, Professor Grady Tripp, he of the never-ending manuscript, discovers: “It was a period piece, I found, set during the mid-forties. It opened in some anthracite black town in the barren Pennsylvania hinterlands of James Leer’s innermost soul” (Wonder 247). For Tripp, who really does suffer from a sad past, Leer’s invented life rings hollow after he discovers the actual living standards of his young student. As Tripp realizes that naturalist viewpoints do not need to be lived to be understood, his escapism subsides. Running from hard choices becomes unnecessary. Life is hard; fiction is just a story.
Determinism takes over. Fate drives his burgeoning relationship, his failing manuscript, and James Leer’s manuscript, which seems truthful because the young author believes in the material. Tripp’s recount of a particularly brutal scene in the mythical Leer novel is classic realism/naturalism language, brief and spartan, understandable without raw emotion to fool readers. “So the old man caught her like a pigeon by the neck. He forced her face into the dusty yellow mattress of his bed. All the breath went out of her. He had been down by the road picking blackberries and the ink was on his fingers” (Wonder 250). “James had taken the whole idea of small-town America implied and romanticized by the name Frank Capra, and carved it with a needle into his flesh,” commented Tripp (Wonder 252). In another ode to slim character development from a classic era of American literature when readers were forced to decipher motives and interpret the feelings of characters for themselves, a good-looking boy is invisible, but not in a Ralph Ellison sort of way; no, this camouflage comes from being too rock faced to describe. Chabon, writing as James Leer, opines, “He had the face of one of the Seitz company hat-forms. Nose like a shark fin. Lips red as a stop sign. Black eyes long-lashed and glassy like the eyes in the head of a deer on a wall. Nothing about his face lingered in the memory of people who saw it. Only a vague impression of handsomeness. In photographs it always looked like his head moved at the instant the picture was snapped” (Wonder 247). When literary agent Terry Crabtree tells Tripp, “I want to publish this,” and “It’s brilliant,” he proves that agents do have a strong sense of what is popular with the public. The irony came later when Wonder Boys was made into a movie starring many of the giants of the era, Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr., Katie Holmes, and Tobey Maguire. The film was lauded by initial reviewers longing for the feel-good Capra days, but the director was no longer alive to make the film and box office results were unimpressive.
Duality and mixes of genre also appeal to Chabon the consumer. His two favorite television shows provide dual insight, realism, and science fiction. When asked to name the best television series of all time, Chabon answered, “The Wire” for its strong characterizations and then flowed toward human emotion. “If by ‘best’ you mean ‘destined to occupy the deepest, most powerful precincts of the heart and to serve as the psychic lattice for all subsequent understanding of life and the universe’ then I really have to go with Star Trek” (“Michael Chabon Interview”). One of Chabon’s favorite short stories is “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” by Robert Hichens (about a supernatural visitation). Chabon’s preferred nonfiction artist is Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World and The Gift, who consistently blends creativity, imagination and poetry, and ultimately folklore (Hyde). When asked what he would write if provided a million dollars
to write long-form nonfiction, Chabon predictably chooses subject matter adopted from history and myth. “The false history of baseball (Doubleday, Cooperstown), the real history of baseball (town ball, Cartwright), all the colorful characters and hucksters and autocrats and players of which they’re both composed, and how the interplay of the deliberate lie and the obscured truth is so emblematic of American historiography in general” (Mechanic). Perhaps this duality derives from what is actually real? Chabon reads similar dual pieces in his spare time. “I’m sequentially reading all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books: I’m up to From Russia with Love now. So far Moonraker is my favorite. I love it, but it’s completely absurd” (Timberg). One can imagine Chabon producing a spy novel in the future, complete with otherworldly technology and very real, grounded, spy characters dating from the Cold War.
In Telegraph Avenue he integrates modern America. The avenue, the dividing line between hippie-progressive Berkeley and historically black Oakland, home of the Black Panthers, is where Brokeland Records is located. The novel introduces two store owners—“moonfaced, mountainous, moderately stoned” and black Archy Stallings, and white musician Nat Jaffe. Stallings is a thirty-six-year-old who can’t grow up. “Columbia,” Chabon once told National Public Radio, “was a planned community that was built in the 1960s and was intended to be a place where people of different races could live together, could find affordable housing and young families could grow up together. And when I grew up there, it did a pretty good job of hewing to those ideals” (Raz). Chabon’s discussion of the book’s characters leads him back to his hometown through an unlikely source, President Barack Obama. Chabon says Obama’s special cameo appearance in the novel, centering on his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, was inspired by personal memories and experiences. Chabon: “It’s what I heard Barack Obama, you know, when he gave that keynote address at the 2004 convention—what he was talking about, to me, was Columbia, Maryland. The America he was describing, was the dream of Columbia, the vision of Columbia, I had grown up believing in” (O’Hehir).
“It was this day when I walked into this used record store, Berigan’s Records on Claremont Avenue, that isn’t there anymore. I saw the guys working there, a black guy and a white guy, and the customers were a mix and I just had this little feeling of like, here’s a little tiny bubble that reminds me of that big bubble that I grew up living under, like a city under the sea. It just made me wonder: Why have black characters been so absent from my fiction, not to mention the circumstances of my life?” (O’Hehir). Of course the identity of the record store denizens is the duality the author craves. We all have images of what white and black middle-class kids are supposed to be like and these people cross the lines; malleable characters, similar to Burroughs creating a symbol of masculinity augmented by refined sensibilities.
Like Burroughs, Chabon intermingled cultural opposites. Instead of royalty and jungle in harmony, races merge via common goals. Tarzan is the son of a British lord and lady marooned on the coast of Africa by mutineers. His mother died of natural causes when he was an infant and his father was killed by Kerchak, leader of the ape tribe that adopts the young boy. Tarzan meets a young American woman, Jane Porter, as a young adult. She, her father, and other members of a party find themselves marooned at the same spot Tarzan’s biological parents were stranded twenty years earlier. When Jane returns to America, Tarzan leaves the jungle in search of her, his one true love (“Tarzan Series”). In The Return of Tarzan, they marry and in later books he lives with her for a time in England. They have one son, Jack, who takes the ape name Korak (meaning “the Killer”) (Burroughs). Eventually, Tarzan and Jane return to Africa, frustrated with modern civilization, making their home on an extensive estate, creating their own world; like Chabon does with his adopted hometown of Berkeley, taking a little spice from his favorite places.
Burroughs’s Tarzan is described as being Caucasian, extremely athletic, tall, handsome, and tan, with grey eyes and long black hair. More than just a pretty face, he is intelligent and learns languages quickly. Like Robin Hood, he often takes the position of the violated or weaker party (“Tarzan Series”). Barack Obama is a modern political symbol of similar ilk—capable of leading the richest nation, a symbol of success no matter the barriers. Both writers exalt American culture by selecting versions of the ideal citizen, combining homogeneity with spirit. “I know this is the biggest cliché in the world, but in thinking about Archy and Nat and their record store, I was thinking about Huck and Jim on the raft,” says Chabon (O’Hehir).
The vision is truly one of fantasy for most of us. Precious few people become iconic leaders, and Huck and Jim are not true equals. Personal experiences make his feelings more than simple fantasy. Chabon’s wife went to law school with President Obama, making his analysis more of an insider’s game than the average liberal citizen. Were he to rewrite Fountain City now, perhaps Roberto Clemente, a special player for the Pittsburgh Pirates years ago, would be the centerpiece of a baseball park novel, establishing the strong character he lacked the first time. “He first entered my life in 1971, the year our other local team, the Orioles—the Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer, Boog Powell Orioles—went to the World Series. Right away, I noticed that playing for Pittsburgh in right field was this marvelous, handsome, graceful, brown-skinned guy. He was strong, lean, serious. He ran hard, threw hard, and swung hard, but he always looked relaxed and unruffled. He was everything an eight-year-old boy could most devoutly wish to be” (Neyer). Chabon’s reflections indicate fantasy and imagination, medicate sad memories, make sense of things, and help his readers cope. Like Cain and Dreiser he takes us back in time, to settings buried in our imaginations.
This focus on comingling styles is reminiscent of a George Lucas script, whether the delightfully nostalgic American Graffiti or the republic government in space concoctions of the Star Wars saga. This style was evident when Chabon worked on the original screenplay The Martian Agent: “It was sort of my attempt to work with the John Carter material, the Burroughs, Barsoom material—but in my own way. Partly because I didn’t have the rights, but also because I wanted to play with it my own way. The screenplay was set on Mars in the 1890s, in an alternate reality where the British Empire, through superior technology, had conquered the entire earth—had reconquered the United States—was the unchallenged master of earth, and was now proceeding to the conquest of Mars. So it was about the British Empire trying to colonize Mars in the 1890s. That Mars was my version of Mars, but it was very much in the ERB, Percival Lowell style, with canals, and ancient civilizations, and strange creatures. I was also working with the same stuff of Victorian adventure as ERB. H. R. Haggard. All those great Victorian adventure novelists” (Lupoff).
Learning His Craft
Burroughs showed the way. “Then Burroughs has that incredible moment of insight: I’m going to set my adventure story on another planet. That let him use all the great conventions, tropes and gimmicks of adventure fiction—hair’s-breadth escapes, mistaken identity, kidnapped princesses, sword fighting, savage tribesmen, barbaric customs—yet open the playing field up by having it take place on another world, where the laws of science don’t even completely apply” (Martin). And like Lucas in Graffiti, Chabon is comfortable measuring idealism with the alternative: showing consequences if someone falters, classic naturalism. John Updike helped him refine this element of his work. Chabon remembers being blown away by the opening of Rabbit, Run “and writing something in shameless imitation of Updike after reading it. I just copied the writers whose voices I was responding to, and I think that’s probably the best way to learn” (Tayler).
With Summerland, Chabon purposely sought to write in fantasy language. “This is actually the oldest layer of Summerland: the ambition to write a fantasy novel using American myth and folklore, in the way that the works of Lewis and Tolkien, and Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander and Alan Garner use British and Celtic folklore, dates directly from the time when I was reading
those writers—around the time I was 10 and 11. And pretty much every book since has been inspired by a vision of something that never was—the Golem of Prague, a Yiddish-speaking Jewish home in Alaska” (Grant). Chabon’s interest in testing styles, mixing and matching with genre fiction, and accepting criticism without attacking reviewers is admirable. He is mislabeled constantly. Reviewers compared The Mysteries of Pittsburgh to time-honored standards of the American canon, The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye, but they missed the point (Benedict; O’Donnell). Pittsburgh and Berkeley are what Dubliners was for Joyce, a depiction of middle-class life in and around Dublin; in Joyce’s case, naturalism among his other novels that were labeled pillars of modernism.
Art Bechstein, the protagonist in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, never navigated a personal outpouring of desperation like Salinger. His story was not a fable of near greatness like Gatsby. Characters in those American classics were surprisingly capable of accepting grief, resigned to sadness and tragedy. Mysteries describes younger sensibilities: confusion and slacker, carefree behavior. Naturalistic, understated language pulls readers to the book’s conclusion and leaves critics searching for emotion, grasping. “Art [Bechstein] wasn’t up-tight about crying, but Mr. Chabon didn’t get far enough inside him to move us to tears—or even a lump in the throat” (Benedict). Similar references dawn in the naturalist classic McTeague. “Towards morning she died with a rapid series of hiccoughs that sounded like a piece of clockwork running down. The thing had been done in the cloakroom where the kindergarten children hung their hats and coats.” Two additional passages continue the mood. “Half way across the room one of them stopped and put her small nose in the air, crying, ‘Um-o-o, what a funnee [sic] smell!’ . . . Then the tallest of the little girls swung the door of the little cloakroom wide open and they all ran in” (Norris, 287–88). The morose beginning of chapter 23 in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, “Xanadu,” frames Bechstein’s mood, resigned to failure and obstruction from fun. “It seems I resisted arrest when Cleveland fell, and had to be violently restrained. I have no memory of this, or of the other things that happened before the sunny instant I awoke, among bed sheets stiff as white shopping bags, my name around my wrist, suffering from what I thought at first was an atrocious hangover but turned out to be the effects of two sharp blows to the head with a rubber truncheon” (Mysteries 287). Nor does Chabon turn humorous in the face of tragic circumstances. This skill shows up later, within works that rely less on foundational prose (“Wonder Boys Essay”). His description sounds like someone telling a tale as a disembodied force observing, without feeling. In this way he is comfortable summoning American prosaic, direct, skilled artistry, Updike lite. Chabon’s short story collection, A Model World and Other Stories, travels these paths, beginning with reality and moving into storylines.
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