Ebook: Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel

Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel explores the unstable construction of white masculinity in the contemporary United States as illustrated in the novels of 18 North American writers – 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.
Publishing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, these novelists portray father figures who, because they are literally or figuratively absent from the family scene, disrupt the familial order and their family members’ identities. Debra Shostak examines the novels as allegories of cultural change, bearing witness to how the myth of paternal authority eroded during the 20th century to challenge the patriarchal model that dominated real American families and their literary representations. With attention to narrative form as well as subject matter, the chapters closely analyze depictions of father-child relationships as both generations respond to the fathers’ fall from a position of power. The portraits that emerge register melancholy, regret, and nostalgia and tend toward ideological contradiction. The novels often express ambivalence even when they welcome the passing of power from the father as a corrective to the oppressive ideology that long structured the ideal of the conventional white nuclear family.
Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel explores the unstable construction of white masculinity in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by analyzing father/child relationships in the novels of eighteen North American writers: 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. Their novels portray father figures who, literally or figuratively absent from the family scene, disrupt the familial order as well as their family members’ identities and allegiance to a culturally dominant father fantasy. Fictive Fathers examines these examples of postwar American fiction as allegories of cultural change, charting how the myth of paternal authority eroded to challenge the patriarchal, masculinist ideal that structured real American families and their literary representations. Grouping authors thematically, the chapters closely analyze the narrative construction of postpatriarchal father/child relationships as both generations respond to the fathers’ absence, impotence, and fall from a position of authority, authenticity, and patrilineage. Registering melancholy, regret, resistance, and nostalgia, the portraits that emerge tend toward ideological contradiction, expressing ambivalence over the passing of power from the father even when they acknowledge such change as a useful corrective to the myth structuring the white, heteronormative nuclear family in the United States.