Academic Fragments, Part 3

What follows is a review and/or the beginning of something that I wrote about Michael Chabon's Fountain City.  I am not charitable to the book and I do not remember it fondly.  I have always tended to like Chabon's novels but haven't found them to stand up particularly well to re-reading.  I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay the first time I read it, but was less enchanted by it the second time around.  I still liked the book well enough, but it just didn't have the same spark that it did the first time around.  I have not edited this at all:

Fountain City, by Michael Chabon

When I was in graduate school, I happened upon this anomaly by Michael Chabon.  It was part of a boxed set from McSweeney’s that was painted to look like a human head.  I still have the box around somewhere, but I don’t remember the remainder of the contents.  I was in the middle of writing my dissertation on the contemporary encyclopedic novel and had set Fountain City  aside because I thought that there was something in it that I could write about after I had completed my degree.  At the time I was very interested in narratology and I thought that there was something interesting about the form of this little book.

I keep avoiding calling Fountain City a novel because that is not an accurate description, by the author’s own words, even.  For him, it was an abandoned project that he picked up years later.  Although, Chabon did not pick the project up to finish it, but to “wreck” it - the word here being used in the sense of salvaging rather than of destroying.  Chabon supplies this definition (along with the more colloquial one) in a note to his text.  

At the time that I read this, I was very interested in the way that a flesh-and-blood author interacts with his or her own work of fiction.  Within narrative theory, there is an idea that there is a sort of divide between the fictional and the real that extends to the author.  An avatar of the author becomes evident in the text, but this is a re-creation of the author by the reader and is, therefore, a part of the fiction.  This idea seems both romantic and downright homey to me.  On one hand, the author gets to participate in the fiction.  There is a shading off from the reality of the world into the presented reality of the novel.  The reader can attempt to interpret where that difference lies but will never be able to know.  On the other hand, it is a book presented as being fiction.  Of course what is in it is fiction.  Just because an author pops up and says “Hi, it’s me!” doesn’t mean we need to believe it.  This is like believing a liar who tells you to just trust him.

Getting back to the form of the novel, Chabon does what I think a lot of writers want to do.  He takes his incomplete project and “completes” it by adding commentary to what is already there instead of finishing the narrative.  At least this is what the author claims in a preface.  But, as noted above, how do we know where the fiction begins and ends?  Should I trust Chabon that he actually wrote this in the past, or do I think that he just recently wrote this and doesn’t know how to end it or what to do with it?  Then I wonder whether this sense of doubt or incompletion is actually real and think that this whole thing was composed as it is supposed to be: a work of seemingly incomplete prose with commentary by a supposed author.  This wouldn’t be the first time a writer has played this trick, check out Pale Fire or a lot of Philip Roth’s work from the 1980s and 90s if you don’t believe me.

This is a very long preface to my very short take on this book.  I set this book aside for what is now 5 years in the hopes of making some hay out of it regarding the implied author, the edge of fiction, and all that stuff I mentioned a bit ago.  But, when I picked this up last week, I couldn’t get into it.  I read back through the preface and reminded myself about what interested me about it those years ago, but couldn’t pick that thread back up.

I don’t know if the idea, even if it were the authentic story that Chabon had attempted to salvage this abandoned work, was too precious or if I just lost my flair for that brand of literary theory.  Whatever the reason, I quit reading pretty quickly and didn’t even make it through the first explanatory note, which happened to be whether or not the author had dreamt up a line from Hawthorne or it was real: fiction or reality.  See?