Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel

Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor of English Language and Literature at The College of Wooster, USA. She is the author of Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (2004) and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America (Bloomsbury, 2011).

What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a part of a family? In Fictive Fathers, Debra Shostak exposes the fantasy of the American middle-class family as it gives way to the demands of the 21st century. This richly nuanced study of generational and gendered familial dynamics paints a provocative portrait of the shifting if often unsteady repositioning of patriarchal authority in response to the changing social and political landscape of American culture. In doing so, Shostak redefines the shape and scaffolding of the American family, exposing both the limitations and the seductions of the myth of the family in a culture that welcomes and at the same time resists such a re-envisioning of gender roles and the authority of the father.

• Acknowledgments1. IntroductionThe HauntingTheoretical FathersHistorical FathersStorytelling after the FatherThe Organization of the Book2. Anxieties of Influence and the Decline of the PatriarchJohn Irving’s Family Romances—The World According to GarpJonathan Franzen's Fallen Father—The Corrections3. Middle-class America at Mid-century Jane Smiley and the Father Dethroned—A Thousand AcresAnne Tyler: The Domestic Comedy of Home Economics and Homesickness—Dinner at the Homesick RestaurantPhilip Roth’s Late Fathers—Everyman, Indignation, NemesisMarilynne Robinson’s Earthly Fathers—Gilead, Home, Lila4. Desiring DaughtersJeffrey Eugenides and the Odor of Cooped-up Girls—The Virgin SuicidesMona Simpson: He Was Only a man—The Lost FatherCarole Maso: The Art of Losing—The Art Lover5. Searching Sons, the Word, and the FleshPaul Auster: The Body in/and the Text—City of Glass, Moon Palace, Mr. VertigoJonathan Lethem: Signifying Manqué—Motherless Brooklyn6. The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination—Part One: The EnvironmentDon DeLillo: The Genealogical Imperative as Toxic Event—White NoiseCormac McCarthy: "There is no Book and your Fathers are Dead in the Ground"—The Road7. The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination—Part Two: Politics and 9/11Philip Roth’s Orphans—The Plot Against AmericaJonathan Safran Foer and the Fathers’ Fall—Extremely Loud and Incredibly CloseClaire Messud and "Dad’s Thing"—The Emperor’s Children8. Postmemory after the Patriarch: Narrating the War in VietnamBobbie Ann Mason at the Tomb of an Unknown Soldier—In CountryTim O’Brien Among the Missing—In the Lake of the WoodsViet Thanh Nguyen and Traumatic Representation—The SympathizerNotesWorks CitedIndex