Contemporary American Fiction, Volume 3

Description

Contemporary American Fiction, Volume 3 is a collection of scholarly essays and recent reviews of the best of contemporary American literary fiction, including the following titles:

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green


• News of the World by Paulette Jiles


• Moonglow by Michael Chabon


• The Sellout by Paul Beatty and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead


• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Modern
• Dólar
• América
• Literature
• Contemporary history
• Modern history
• American
• United States
• Contemporary
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• US
• Novel
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438181998
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contemporary American Fiction, Volume 3
Copyright © 2019 by Infobase
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Facts On File An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-4381-8199-8
You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Chapters Young Adult Cancer Story Review of News of the World by Paulette Jiles Michael Chabon Flirts with Truth and Lies in Moonglow Injuries and Usurpations: The Sellout & The Underground Railroad An American Sutra: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders Interview with Amor Towles (Author of A Gentleman in Moscow) Support Materials Acknowledgments
Chapters
Young Adult Cancer Story
2014
On the Monday when The Fault in Our Stars was the #1 movie in America, I spent the morning at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven learning about the intricate physics of intersecting radiation beams and marveling at an animated scan of the inside of my friend Ash's body: a Rorschach image of irregular black-and-white shapes that each emerged and grew and shrank and vanished as we moved down from her shoulders through her healthy heart, spotted lungs, scarred gastro-esophageal junction, stabilized liver, and newly enlarged lymph node.
It was the lymph node's fault that Ash and I couldn't go see The Fault in Our Stars together that week as we'd planned. The node wasn't responding to treatment, which meant that Ash was headed to the city for a second opinion at Weill Cornell Medical College plus some quality time with her friend Ritu in Brooklyn.
Ritu and I, along with Ash's friends Annette and Sarah, had read The Fault In Our Stars this spring at Ash's insistence. During a rough bout of chemo when she could barely eat or drink, Ash read it ravenously, immersing herself in the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager who has incurable Stage IV cancer, a hot boyfriend, and a distinctively wise and nerdy voice combining perceptiveness and snark. Afterwards Ash bought extra copies to give away. "You have to read it!" she kept telling us.
Ash, Annette, Ri, and I once had a conversation about what makes writers different than other people. We concluded that non-writers worry that writing about their lives will get in the way of actually experiencing their lives, whereas writers worry that if they don't write about something then they'll fail to fully live it. By this definition and many others, Ash is a born writer, and thousands of people have been moved by her ability to write about her cancer through images of lit-up leaves, sunsets streaked and broken like egg yolks, and the swift-moving shadows of birds in flight. Like Hazel's, Ash's illness has always been text as well as flesh; ever since her first chemo spring when she would write at the infusion center with the toxins flowing in and the words flowing out as she sat and scribbled by a sunny window that overlooked a graveyard.
Most of Ash's experiences with cancer can't be shared: even when we are with her, her cells and side effects remain hers alone. But we try to share what we can, and so we've all been reading and watching The Fault In Our Stars. Ritu read it on her Kindle in New York while she was visiting another loved one with cancer, and went to see the movie with her husband a few weeks later. Sarah listened to the audiobook at home in Minnesota while nursing her new son and then saw the movie with a friend. Annette eagerly borrowed my copy when she came to visit and afterwards we saw the movie "virtually together": she went to an afternoon matinee in Illinois the same day I went to one in Connecticut.
Personally, I read The Fault In Our Stars the way its protagonist Hazel Grace Lancaster falls in love with Augustus Waters: slowly, and then all at once. I started out reading it a chapter at a time in between the papers I was grading, and then I gave up on grading and read straight through till dawn.
I have no idea how I would feel about The Fault in Our Stars if I were one of the millions of teenagers who have filled the theaters for a month and kept the book on the best-seller list for the last two years and flooded the internet with TFIOS memes, fan-fiction, selfies, and hashtags. I also have no idea how I would feel about the story if I were actually sick. I only know what it's like to read it as a woman in my mid-30s who is friends with a woman in her mid-30s who, like Hazel Grace Lancaster, has incurable Stage 4 cancer. 
Lately there's been a debate about why adults read YA novels. It's impossible to generalize, but I suspect that we read them for many of the same reasons we read any other kind of literature: we are looking for new or familiar aesthetic experiences; for intellectual challenges, or escape, or equipment for living. And when we are reading fiction about an affliction that is rewriting the story of our own lives, we read both for the simple consolations of identification with the characters and for the more complicated consolations of a perspective on our experience that is not already ours.
For Ash and many of her friends, The Fault in Our Stars has served all these purposes and more. Though we are unalike and far apart, TFIOS has become a common text that connects us across the miles. As we've read it, each of us has felt our own experiences with cancer being expressed, confirmed, challenged, and given back to us in different words.
For Ash, it has provided a cultural shorthand for explaining what she is dealing with — a situation that doesn't fit the common cancer tropes of combat or triumph. She is constantly asked unanswerable questions like "You're beating it, right?" or "When are you done with treatment?" Ash will never be done with treatment, and she does not experience her life as a battle. Now that TFIOS is everywhere, she can explain, "I have a diagnosis kind of like Hazel's." But beyond that, TFIOS dramatizes an urgent truth she wants the world to know: that people with this diagnosis can have stories that are not just the story of their disease, and that their most ardent adventures can happen while they are sick.
Annette is in med school, and one of the things that stood out to her was the careful specificity of the book when it talked about different cancer experiences, and its unsparing descriptions of how illness and death physically look and feel. This descriptive specificity prompts a deeply uncomfortable kind of empathy. I too felt a particular shock of vicarious recognition, a flicker of illness, whenever Hazel described parts of her body as having a recalcitrant and alien volition of their own: "My lungs were acting desperate, gasping, pulling me out of the bed trying to find a position that could get them air, and I was embarrassed by their desperation, disgusted that they wouldn't just let go ." Sickness is feeling that your body is not you, but still feeling everything it feels. 
Sarah, a public health professor who researches the relationship between the media and health policy, was especially impressed by the book's take on social media and mourning. She loved Hazel's critical response to the endless overwrought elegiac posts on a dead boy's Facebook wall, especially her evisceration of the cliché "you'll live forever in our hearts." As Hazel explains, "That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever!" The novel helps us see how the virtual immortality of social media can obscure the fact of death, just as a healthy person's illusion of immortality can become yet another barrier between the sick and the well, the living and the dead.
Ritu works at an education non-profit where she spends a lot of time thinking about teenagers, and she was struck by the novel's moving portrayal of the deep mutual love and annoyance that exists between Hazel and her parents. They share an intimacy that constantly comes up against the limits of their ability to understand what it is like to have or not have metastatic cancer. Hazel is exasperated and deeply comforted by her mom's unflagging attempts to make things better: "She never stopped trying, my mom.