Understanding Michael Chabon

Joseph Dewey

Description

An exploration of Chabon's career-long fascination with the consolations—and dangers—of the imagination

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon has emerged as one of the most daring writers of American fiction in the post-Pynchon era. Joseph Dewey examines how Chabon's narratives have sought to bring together the defining elements of the two principal expressions of the American narrative that his generation inherited: the formal extravagances of postmodernism and the compelling storytelling of psychological realism.

Like the audacious, self-conscious excesses of Pynchon and his postmodern disciples, Dewey argues, Chabon's fictions are extravagant, often ironic, experiments into form animated by dense verbal and linguistic energy. As with the probing texts of psychological realism by Updike and his faithful, Chabon's fictions center on keenly drawn, recognizable characters caught up in familiar, heartbreaking dilemmas; enthralling storylines compelled by suspense, enriched with suggestive symbols; and humane themes about love and death, work and family, and sexuality and religion.

Evolving over three decades, this hybrid fiction has made Chabon not only one of the most widely read composers of serious fiction of his guild but one of the most critically respected writers as well, thus positioning Chabon as a representative voice of the generation. Dewey's study, the first to examine the full breadth of Chabon's fiction from his landmark debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, to his controversial 2012 best seller, Telegraph Avenue, places Chabon's fictional sensibility, for all its hipness, within what has been the defining theme of American literature since the provocative romances of Hawthorne and Melville: the anxious tension between escape and engagement; between the sweet, centripetal pull of the redemptive imagination as a splendid, if imperfect, engine of retreat and the harsh, centrifugal pull of real life itself, recklessly deformed by the crude handiwork of surprise and chance and unable to coax even the simplest appearance of logic.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Las asombrosas aventuras de Kavalier y Clay
• América
• Cozy mystery
• Sympathetic character
• The Dissertation
• Picturesque
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
• American Pastoral
• Melodrama
• General officer
• The Great Gatsby
• John Cheever
• Waldman
• General
• American
• Jonathan Safran Foer
• Elmore Leonard
• Gatsby le Magnifique
• Michael Chabon
• William Styron
• Don DeLillo
• Fredric Wertham
• Ambrose Bierce
• Jonathan Franzen
• Michael Moorcock

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 22 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611173406
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING MICHAEL CHABON
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
Volumes on Edward Albee | Sherman Alexie | Nelson Algren | Paul Auster Nicholson Baker | John Barth | Donald Barthelme | The Beats Thomas Berger | The Black Mountain Poets | Robert Bly | T. C. Boyle Raymond Carver | Michael Chabon | Fred Chappell | Chicano Literature Contemporary American Drama | Contemporary American Horror Fiction Contemporary American Literary Theory Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926-1970 Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970-2000 Contemporary Chicana Literature | Robert Coover | Philip K. Dick James Dickey | E. L. Doctorow | Rita Dove | John Gardner | George Garrett Tim Gautreaux | John Hawkes | Joseph Heller | Lillian Hellman | Beth Henley James Leo Herlihy | David Henry Hwang | John Irving | Randall Jarrell Charles Johnson | Diane Johnson | Adrienne Kennedy | William Kennedy Jack Kerouac | Jamaica Kincaid | Etheridge Knight | Tony Kushner Ursula K. Le Guin | Denise Levertov | Bernard Malamud | David Mamet Bobbie Ann Mason | Colum McCann | Cormac McCarthy | Jill McCorkle Carson McCullers | W. S. Merwin | Arthur Miller | Stephen Millhauser Lorrie Moore | Toni Morrison s Fiction | Vladimir Nabokov | Gloria Naylor Joyce Carol Oates | Tim O Brien | Flannery O Connor | Cynthia Ozick Suzan-Lori Parks | Walker Percy | Katherine Anne Porter | Richard Powers Reynolds Price | Annie Proulx | Thomas Pynchon | Theodore Roethke Philip Roth | May Sarton | Hubert Selby, Jr. | Mary Lee Settle | Sam Shepard Neil Simon | Isaac Bashevis Singer | Jane Smiley | Gary Snyder | William Stafford Robert Stone | Anne Tyler | Gerald Vizenor | Kurt Vonnegut David Foster Wallace | Robert Penn Warren | James Welch | Eudora Welty Edmund White | Tennessee Williams | August Wilson | Charles Wright
UNDERSTANDING
MICHAEL CHABON
Joseph Dewey
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dewey, Joseph.
Understanding Michael Chabon / Joseph Dewey.
pages cm. - (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-339-0 (hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-340-6 (e-book) 1. Chabon, Michael-Criticism and interpretation. I . Title.
PS3553.H15Z69 2014 813 .54-dc23
2013032138
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Understanding Michael Chabon
Chapter 2 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Chapter 3 The Lost World Cycle
Chapter 4 Wonder Boys
Chapter 5 Werewolves in Their Youth and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay
Chapter 6 Summerland and The Yiddish Policemen s Union
Chapter 7 Gentlemen of the Road and Telegraph Avenue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are several people who have been instrumental in completing this writing project. First I would like to thank Jay Parini of Middlebury College who, more than fifteen years ago, through his editorship of the Scribner American Writers series, first introduced me to the wonder and power of Chabon s fiction. In addition I would like to thank Michael Cocchiarale (Widener University) and Scott D. Emmert (University of Wisconsin), who invited me to submit a reading of Summerland for their volume on sports fiction for the Critical Insights series (EBSCO). Although that reading went in a considerably different direction from the one presented here, both Michael and Scott offered helpful responses to my evolving reading of Chabon s fantasy baseball novel. I would also like to thank Michael Chabon s father, Dr. Robert S. Chabon, who graciously fielded a number of my no doubt intrusive email queries. And I would be remiss if I did not thank Chabon himself, who not only produced these marvelous fictions but who happily participated in an email exchange that helped shape the focus of the present study and encouraged me beyond words.
On a more personal level, I would like to thank my wife, Julie, who not only allowed me the time to work out this reading upstairs, where I was for more than a year in the computer than at the computer, but who, as the administrative assistant for the University of Pittsburgh Library System, was instrumental in helping me acquire a wide variety of materials, both in print and online, quickly and easily. I would like to thank my son, Mark, a computer software engineer, who patiently guided me through a number of computer near-catastrophes and kept the writing project on schedule and indeed saved me enormous time and trouble. And my daughter, Carolyn, and her husband, Andy, who in the middle of the writing of this study gifted us with our first grandchild, the pixieish Annabelle. Her easy laugh and impish smile showed me at a pivotal moment in the project the tender wisdom of Chabon s generous and compassionate humanism.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Michael Chabon
The imagination is the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something-one poor, dumb, powerful thing-exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties and inevitable failures of the greater Creation.
Michael Chabon, Kavalier Clay , p. 582
Nightly, under a tented blanket, a twelve-year-old Michael Chabon pored over a heavily creased map-one of those brightly colored cartoon souvenir maps that Disney distributes to its Orlando visitors to help them navigate the often baffling walkways of its magical kingdoms. Michael had brought the map back to his Maryland home from what would turn out to be his family s last vacation together, an excursion to the newly opened Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. Even as his parents marriage did its torturously slow-motion crash and burn into the apparently irrevocable sundering of divorce, the boy would be sustained by plotting an imaginary escape into a furtive magic kingdom of his own devising, an elaborate underground world of passageways latticed beneath Disney s massive theme park. I figured I could sleep during the daytime, in some forgotten garret of Cinderella s Castle [ sic ] or in the tangled and artificial wilderness of Tom Sawyer s Island, emerging at night to melt into the crowd, picking pockets and rifling handbags left unattended, feasting endlessly on frozen bananas and French fries. As young Michael conceived it, that subterranean refuge could shelter other desperate children hidden in the corners and stairwells and leafy shadows of Disney World ; children similarly blindsided by the unexpected; despite their tender years, children already nostalgic; children who had learned that the best times had somehow already passed and who now needed a refuge safe from the grim-faced men . . . who carried walkie-talkies and did not wear name tags ( Disney of the Mind ). The critical element of this adolescent fantasy would surely be familiar to readers of the bittersweet fictions of the grown-up Michael Chabon: the anxious tension between escape and engagement, between the sweet, centripetal pull of the imagination and the harsh, centrifugal pull of real life.
Since the publication of his first novel in 1988, Michael Chabon has moved to the forefront of the post-Pynchon era, writers born after 1960-among them Jennifer Egan, Nathan Englander, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, Richard Powers, Elizabeth Strout-who are in many ways the first generation of American writers produced almost entirely by universities, specifically by creative writing programs. As fledgling writers in university classrooms, they traded the easy charm of reading books and the coaxing pull of story and character for the intellectual rigors of analyzing texts. They studied dense avant-garde postmodern theories about narrative de/reconstruction, fashionable theories that questioned the very legitimacy of language and the viability of the