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List of contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
The Haunting
Theoretical Fathers
Historical Fathers
Storytelling after the Father
The Organization of the Book
2. Anxieties of Influence and the Decline of the Patriarch
John Irving’s Family Romances—The World According to Garp
Jonathan Franzen's Fallen Father—The Corrections
3. Middle-class America at Mid-century
Jane Smiley and the Father Dethroned—A Thousand Acres
Anne Tyler: The Domestic Comedy of Home Economics and Homesickness—Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Philip Roth’s Late Fathers—Everyman, Indignation, Nemesis
Marilynne Robinson’s Earthly Fathers—Gilead, Home, Lila
4. Desiring Daughters
Jeffrey Eugenides and the Odor of Cooped-up Girls—The Virgin Suicides
Mona Simpson: He Was Only a man—The Lost Father
Carole Maso: The Art of Losing—The Art Lover
5. Searching Sons, the Word, and the Flesh
Paul Auster: The Body in/and the Text—City of Glass, Moon Palace, Mr. Vertigo
Jonathan Lethem: Signifying Manqué—Motherless Brooklyn
6. The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination—Part One: The Environment
Don DeLillo: The Genealogical Imperative as Toxic Event—White Noise
Cormac McCarthy: "There is no Book and your Fathers are Dead in the Ground"—The Road
7. The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination—Part Two: Politics and 9/11
Philip Roth’s Orphans—The Plot Against America
Jonathan Safran Foer and the Fathers’ Fall—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Claire Messud and "Dad’s Thing"—The Emperor’s Children
8. Postmemory after the Patriarch: Narrating the War in Vietnam
Bobbie Ann Mason at the Tomb of an Unknown Soldier—In Country
Tim O’Brien Among the Missing—In the Lake of the Woods
Viet Thanh Nguyen and Traumatic Representation—The Sympathizer
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor of English Language and Literature at The College of Wooster, USA. She is author of Philip Roth—Counterlives, Countertexts (2004) and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America (Bloomsbury, 2011).
Summary
Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel explores the unstable construction of heteronormative white masculinity in the contemporary United States by focusing on relationships between fathers and their children.
Debra Shostak reads the novels of 18 North American writers publishing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as allegories of cultural conflict and change within the nuclear family; the authors considered include Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, John Irving, Jonathan Lethem, Carole Maso, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Claire Messud, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tim O'Brien, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, Mona Simpson, Jane Smiley, and Anne Tyler. These novelists portray father figures who, often literally or figuratively absent from the family scene, disrupt the familial order and their family members' identities. Shostak's close readings illuminate unexpectedly conservative, even subversive, ideological positions at the heart of these fictions.
Fictive Fathers traces the eroding myth of paternal authority that sustained a patriarchal model within real American families and their literary representations.
Foreword
Investigates the unstable construction of white masculinity in the United States through close analysis of father-child relationships in the novels of 18 American writers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Additional text
Informed by a sophisticated deployment of psychoanalytic theory backed with a supple sense of history, Debra Shostak’s important Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel addresses an impressive array of American novels to explore and challenge the hetero-normative fantasy of normative Western manhood as the symbolic center of the social order. A true feat of daring critical range and virtuosity, this work is one of the best studies available of the American novel in the post-World War II, postmodern era.
