In its literature’s extensive history of reckoning with the strange aftermath of the founding, the United States may never have seen an author who takes nostalgia as his theme as seriously, enthusiastically, and explicitly as Michael Chabon. If one were compelled to articulate an overarching theme to the nation’s literature, a good case could be made for the notion that Americans are the perpetually disappointed heirs to a legacy of prosperity and fulfillment that may never have existed in the first place. And Updike embodied postwar nostalgia with Rabbit Angstrom, the aging high-school basketball great. Fitzgerald conjured Gatsby’s ever-receding green light, perhaps the most indelible image of American yearning and aspiration. Melville dreamed of the ships of his youth, symbols of the pre-imperial America being swept away by the fast-industrializing, fast-dividing nation that was his home. Fenimore Cooper had his wilderness, populated by noble savages. It’s a fertile absorption, each generation of authors locating new sources of longing and disillusionment to call its own. AMERICAN LITERATURE IS a literature of nostalgia, preoccupied, at least implicitly, with evaporated dreams and vanished Arcadias.
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