Michael Chabon's America
Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces
Edited by Jesse Kavadlo, Bob Batchelor
Publication date:
08 July 2014Length of book:
280 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442236042
Author Michael Chabon is acutely attuned to life in contemporary America, providing insight into the history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in novels such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), Wonder Boys (1995), and Telegraph Avenue (2012). The Pulitzer prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon follows in the footsteps of past stylists, writing across multiple genres that include young-adult literature, essays, and screenplays. Despite his broad success, however, Chabon’s work has not been adequately examined from a critical perspective.
Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces is the first scholarly collection of essays analyzing the work of the acclaimed author. This book demonstrates how Chabon uses a broad range of styles and genres, including detective and comic book fiction, to define the American experience. These essays assess and analyze Chabon’s complete oeuvre, demonstrating his deep connection to the contemporary world and his place as a literary force.
Providing a context for understanding the author’s work from cultural, historical, and stylistic perspectives, Michael Chabon’s America is a valuable study of a celebrated author whose work deserves close examination.
Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces is the first scholarly collection of essays analyzing the work of the acclaimed author. This book demonstrates how Chabon uses a broad range of styles and genres, including detective and comic book fiction, to define the American experience. These essays assess and analyze Chabon’s complete oeuvre, demonstrating his deep connection to the contemporary world and his place as a literary force.
Providing a context for understanding the author’s work from cultural, historical, and stylistic perspectives, Michael Chabon’s America is a valuable study of a celebrated author whose work deserves close examination.
Kovadlo and Batchelor have edited a thoughtful, worthwhile volume on novelist and essayist Michael Chabon. The book is divided into sections that situate Chabon in relationship to popular culture; genre conventions; ethnicity and gender; and Chabon as a writer, noting training and earlier literary movements that influenced him. The editors’ lucid introduction points out the paucity of scholarship on Chabon in comparison to such contemporaries as David Foster Wallace, Junot Diaz, and Jonathan Franzen, as well as to such forebears as Updike, Mailer, and Roth 'at similar points in their careers.' The volume is illuminating throughout. Batchelor, for instance, makes a persuasive comparison of Chabon’s flawed but likable protagonist Grady Tripp, from Wonder Boys, with counterparts in film (the Coen Brothers’ Jeff Lebowski) and in politics (Bill Clinton). Stephen Hock traces the pervasive influence of comic books on Chabon’s subject matter. Josef Benson examines 'queer masculinities' in Chabon’s fiction and nonfiction. David McKay Powell supplies a careful, close reading of Chabon’s Wonder Boys that locates possible parallels in the novel to Chabon’s development as a gifted writer with an expansive imagination. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.