Chabon, Michael - Douglas Fowler (essay date Winter 1995)

Douglas Fowler (essay date Winter 1995)

SOURCE: “The Short Fiction of Michael Chabon: Nostalgia in the Very Young,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 75–82.

[In the following essay, Fowler examines Chabon's prose style in the collection A Model World and Other Stories as well as his portrayal of adolescent love, loss, and disillusionment.]

The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

T. S. Eliot, “Animula”

At its best, Michael Chabon's fiction depicts the nostalgia his characters feel for their former lives, which they have seen severed from them through an aboriginal emotional catastrophe. This sense...

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