10 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

Arthur M. Saltzman, Understanding Raymond Carver (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1988).
A frequently cited comprehensive study of Carver’s work, including an excellent
biographical section. Saltzman critically analyzes Carver’s stories and some of his
poetry.

Michael Trussler, “The Narrowed Voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver,”
Studies in Short Fiction, 31 (Winter 1994): 23–37.
Uses the “maximalism versus minimalism” debate to analyze Carver’s fiction, in
particular, “Why Don’t You Dance?”

—Steve Rucker

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Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures

of Kavalier and Clay

(New York: Picador, 2000)

When Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was in
progress as his master’s thesis at the University of California at Irvine, his adviser,
Donald Heiney (who writes under the pen name MacDonald Harris), sent the
unfinished manuscript to his own literary agent, who negotiated an advance of
$155,000, an extraordinary amount for a first novel. A best seller, it is a first-
person coming-of-age story set in the summer after the protagonist’s graduation
from the University of Pittsburgh, Chabon’s own undergraduate alma mater. The
main character has a sexual relationship with a man, leading Newsweek to publish
an article hailing Chabon as one of the best new gay novelists. Chabon corrected
this, but now says he is grateful for the mistake, because it brought him a loyal
gay readership.
Chabon was born on 24 May 1963 to a pediatrician father and lawyer
mother, both Jewish. He grew up in Columbia, Maryland, in a planned com-
munity and then, after his parents divorced when he was eleven, split his time
between Maryland and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He describes himself as a
comic-book geek until the age of sixteen, when music became his passion. He
says of his two summers before graduating from the University of Pittsburgh
that they “rattled my nerves and rocked my soul and shook my sense of self—but
in a good way. I had drunk a lot, and smoked a lot, and listened to a ton of great
music, and talked way too much about all of those activities and about talking
about those activities. I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to
love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to
sleep with him.... those summers... had shocked the innocent, pale, freckled
Fitzgerald who lived in the great blank Minnesota of my heart” (“My Back
Pages,” in Maps and Legends, 2008). He married poet Lollie Groth in 1987,
the year he graduated from Irvine; they divorced in 1991. In 1993 he married