Edited byRuth Maxey

21st Century US Historical FictionContemporary Responses to the Past

21st Century US Historical Fiction

RuthMaxeyEditor

21st Century USHistorical FictionContemporary Responses to the Past

EditorRuth MaxeyDepartment of American & Canadian StudiesUniversity of NottinghamNottingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-41896-0 ISBN 978-3-030-41897-7 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to SpringerNature Switzerland AG 2020This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by thePublisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rightsof translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction onmicrofilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage andretrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodologynow known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that suchnames are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free forgeneral use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neitherthe publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, withrespect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have beenmade. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published mapsand institutional affiliations.

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In loving memory of my grandparents, Fritz and Margaret Hillenbrandand

William and Margaret Jordan

Acknowledgments

This collection has its origins in a one-day symposium, “Historical Fictionin the United States since 2000: Contemporary Responses to the Past,”held in March 2017. I wish to thank the Faculty of Arts, University ofNottingham, UK, for its generous funding of this event. I am grateful tothe team at Palgrave for all their assistance in publishing this book. Aboveall, I thank the contributors to this volume for their energy, enthusiasm,and patient commitment to the project. Their inspiring work takes thisfield forward in new and exciting ways.

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Contents

1 US Historical Fiction Since 2000 1Ruth Maxey

Part I Imagining 19th-century America in RecentHistorical Fiction

2 Folklore, Fakelore, and the History of the Dream:James McBride’s Song Yet Sung 17Judie Newman

3 To “Refract Time”: The Magical History of ColsonWhitehead’s The Underground Railroad 33Michael Docherty

4 Growing Up Too Quickly: The Cultural Constructionof Children in Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham Trilogy 53James Peacock

5 “Everyone, We Are Dead!”: (Hi)story and Power inGeorge Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo 73Clare Hayes-Brady

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Part II Representations of the 20th-Century UnitedStates

6 “We Cannot Create”: The Limits of History in JoyceCarol Oates’s The Accursed 95Rachael McLennan

7 “Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens”:The Historical and Narrative Function of Music inE. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley 111Villy Karagouni

8 Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in TwoContemporary American Bestsellers 129Aimee Pozorski

9 Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War inContemporary American Fiction 149Ruth Maxey

10 Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in VietThanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer 171Debra Shostak

11 Queering the “Lost Year”: Transcription and theLesbian Continuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman 191Rebecca Martin

12 The Contemporary Sixties Novel:Post-postmodernism and HistoriographicMetafiction 209Mark West

13 “What’s the Plot, Man?”: Alternate History and theSense of an Ending in David Means’ Hystopia 229Diletta De Cristofaro

CONTENTS xi

14 “To Avenging My People”: Speculating Revenge forUS Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres 245DeLisa D. Hawkes

Index 265

Notes onContributors

Diletta De Cristofaro is a Teaching Fellow in Contemporary Litera-ture at the University of Birmingham and a specialist in temporality andwritings responding to twenty-first-century crises and anxieties. She haspublished widely on the contemporary apocalyptic imagination, includingher first monograph, The Contemporary Post-apocalyptic Novel: CriticalTemporalities and the End Times (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Michael Docherty is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Englishand Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent. He has alsoworked as a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at California State Univer-sity, Long Beach. His research principally explores intersections betweenrace, masculinity, and mytho-history in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century American literature.

DeLisa D. Hawkes is Assistant Professor of African American Litera-ture and Culture and an affiliate faculty of the African American StudiesProgram at the University of Texas at El Paso. She has articles forth-coming in MELUS and the North Carolina Literary Review, and herresearch and teaching interests include nineteenth-century to twenty-first-century African American literature, critical race studies, historical fiction,passing novels, and visual culture.

Clare Hayes-Brady is a Lecturer in American Literature at UniversityCollege Dublin and the author of The Unspeakable Failures of David

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Foster Wallace (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, now available in paper-back). She is editor of the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies. Herresearch interests include medical humanities and narrative medicine,adolescence in contemporary fiction, and dystopian narrative.

Villy Karagouni is a Lecturer at the Academy of Music & Sound inGlasgow. A classically trained musician, she has a Ph.D. in English Liter-ature from the University of Glasgow. She has published on Jean Rhysand her current research centers on the relationship between music andtext. She is also involved in a number of contemporary musical projectsin Glasgow.

Rebecca Martin is a graduate of Ryerson University’s Literatures ofModernity M.A. Program in Toronto. She is currently a Research Fellowat Ryerson’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Her writing has appeared inThe White Wall Review and The Yellow Nineties Online.

Ruth Maxey is Associate Professor in Modern American Literature at theUniversity of Nottingham. She is the author of South Asian Atlantic Liter-ature, 1970–2010 (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) andUnderstandingBharati Mukherjee (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) and co-editor (with Paul McGarr) of India at 70: Multidisciplinary Perspectives(Routledge, 2019).

Rachael McLennan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature andCulture at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of DevelopingFigures: Adolescence in American Culture, Post-1950 (Palgrave, 2008);American Autobiography (Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and InDifferent Rooms: Representations of Anne Frank in American Literature(Routledge, 2016).

Judie Newman, O.B.E. is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at theUniversity of Nottingham and Honorary Fellow of the British Associationfor American Studies. She has published 11 books and more than 100critical essays on American and postcolonial fiction. Her ContemporaryFictions: Essays on American and Postcolonial Narratives is forthcomingfrom the Modern Humanities Research Association/Legenda in 2020.

James Peacock is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatureat Keele University. He is the author of Understanding Paul Auster(University of South Carolina Press, 2010); Jonathan Lethem (Manch-ester University Press, 2012); and Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary

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Urban Community in a Global Age (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currentlyresearching contemporary fictions of gentrification.

Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English at Central Connecticut StateUniversity and co-editor of Philip Roth Studies. She has authored Rothand Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (Continuum,2011); Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature(Bloomsbury, 2014); and AIDS-Trauma and Politics (Lexington, 2019),and edited or co-edited volumes on Philip Roth, American Modernism,and HIV/AIDS representation.

Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor Emerita of EnglishLanguage and Literature at the College of Wooster. She is the authorof Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (University of South Carolina,2004) and Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel (Blooms-bury, 2020), and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The HumanStain, The Plot Against America (Continuum, 2011).

Mark West teaches at the University of Glasgow where he researchestwenty-first-century American historical and ecological fiction. He haspublished articles on such contemporary North American writers asJoseph O’Neill, David Foster Wallace, and Emily St. John Mandel, andhas work forthcoming on Lauren Groff. Currently at work on his firstbook, he is also an editor for the Glasgow Review of Books.

CHAPTER 1

USHistorical Fiction Since 2000

Ruth Maxey

Historical novels in English belong to their own long tradition but inrecent years the genre has enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and com-mercial popularity, reflecting “our current hunger for historical fiction”(Park 2018, 112). As Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou(2015) contend, “while the ‘history turn’ in the humanities has assumedan astounding variety of forms, the new prominence of history in con-temporary literature is without doubt one of its most significant andintriguing manifestations” (1). Hilary Mantel, the British author oftwo Man Booker prize-winning historical novels—Wolf Hall (2009)and Bring Up the Bodies (2012)—devoted her 2017 Reith Lectures todiscussion of the genre, contending: “facts and alternative facts, truth andverisimilitude, knowledge and information, art and lies: what could bemore timely or topical than to discuss where the boundaries lie?” (quotedin Quinn 2017). Mantel’s allusion to the Trump administration’s cham-pioning of false claims as so-called alternative facts can be linked to thesubject of 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses tothe Past—namely, the suspicion and skepticism toward “truth” of many

R. Maxey (B)Department of American and Canadian Studies, School of Cultures, Languagesand Area Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UKe-mail: ruth.maxey@nottingham.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2020R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_1

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American historical novels published since 2000. As a genre, the historicalnovel invariably raises questions of evidence, authenticity, veracity, andauthority (Stocker 2012, 309–10), issues that overlap with the narrativiz-ing, sense-making work of the professional historian (compare Slotkin2005, 223; White 2005). These questions are of particular interest at thepresent political and technological moment: if “historical novels are alwayspolitical in their implications” (Slotkin 2005, 231), then we also live ina digital age where different forms of information—and “truth”—are soabundantly available that they should be appraised even more closely.

21st Century US Historical Fiction speaks directly to these issues, fulfill-ing the particular need for scholarly research into what Elodie Rousselothas termed “neo-historical fiction.” Discussing contemporary British writ-ing, she argues that the neo-historical novel “consciously re-interprets,rediscovers and revises key aspects of the period it returns to …theseworks are not set solely in the past, but conduct an active interrogation ofthat past” (2014, 2). Rousselot also discerns “clear continuities” betweenthis subgenre and “the historiographic metafiction which emerged in the1960s and 1970s …[through] similar postmodern preoccupations withquestioning prevalent cultural ideologies” (1–2). Historiographic metafic-tion, as defined by Linda Hutcheon (1989), comprises

novels whose metafictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders theirimplicit claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic …Historio-graphic metafiction works to situate itself within historical discourse with-out surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of seriously ironicparody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take onparallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textualpast of both the “world” and literature. (3–4)

The “neo-historical” turn that Rousselot identifies can be distinguishedfrom this well-known model in that the contemporary fiction sheexamines is less “overtly disruptive …[and] carries out its potential forradical possibilities in more implicit ways” (2014, 5). For Rousselot,such neo-historical novels—with their inherent paradoxes and contra-dictions—occupy an ambiguous position vis-à-vis nostalgia, voyeurism,commodification, and consumption, offering a privileged First Worldreader a kind of “escapist fantasy” from the anxieties of a globalizedpresent-day world through “a perception of the past as inferior …si-multaneously an object of allure and repulsion, fascination and rejection

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…[an] otherness as …‘spectacle,’ to be observed and enjoyed at adistance, and without accountability” (7–8).

Many of these “neo-historical” characteristics can be applied to twenty-first-century American historical fiction. After all, contemporary US writ-ers employ an authorial mode that is questioning and skeptical, anti-positivist and distrustful of so-called master narratives of history. Theirwork is also formally playful and often strongly intertextual. At the sametime, it seems reductive to confer too specific a designation upon the richpanoply of recent US historical fiction, whether that be “historiographicmetafiction” or the “neo-historical novel.” As Paul Wake (2016) notes,“while much recent critical commentary has been dedicated to the genrein its postmodern iteration, the historical novel demonstrates a range ofcharacteristics and is itself subject to numerous subdivisions” (82). It is abranch of fiction known for its “formal hybridity …[where] little consen-sus exists about the principal forms [it] …has taken even within the samecultural and/or geographical context” (Harrison and Spiropoulou 2015,2–3).

Beyond this agreed formal hybridity, what, then, is distinctive aboutUS historical fiction produced since 2000? As for earlier American writersworking in this genre, the fictive subject matter is most often drawn fromAmerican history (compare Savvas 2011, 1) and reflects what Lois Parkin-son Zamora (1997) terms an “anxiety of origins.” According to Zamora,this phenomenon

impels American writers to search for precursors (in the name of com-munity) rather than escape from them (in the name of individuation); toconnect to traditions and histories (in the name of a usable past) rather thandissociate from them (in the name of originality) …its textual symptomsare not caution or constraint …but rather narrative complexity and linguis-tic exuberance …Their search for origins may be ironic and at the sametime “authentic,” simultaneously self-doubting and subversive. (1997, 5–6;emphasis in original)

Pace Zamora, the continuing bid to create a usable past comes from ananxiety that is richly generative. In many contemporary US historical nov-els, that past is a twentieth-century one, as writers grapple with modernityand rapid technological change. Within this twentieth-century timescale,they are more likely to turn to the 1960s than the 1940s—the latterdecade being more characteristic of British historical fiction—and they

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interrogate issues of race, war, and trauma in particularly American, butalso more transnational ways: US fictions of elsewhere, such as novelists’imaginative responses to global conflicts in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam.And as Mark West argues about the 1960s novel in Chapter 12 of this col-lection, “post-postmodern writers” in the United States approach recenthistory in more intimate and less ironic ways as they confront a past thatalso, in some sense, represents their own personal memory and lived expe-rience. In other words, their fiction uncovers a distinction between “thepast …[which] is ontological …and history [which] is epistemological”(Savvas 2011, 2). That history is of course mediated through the lensand lessons of today’s world. Indeed, the novelistic emphasis upon war-fare (see Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 13 of this volume) reflects what JosephDarda (2015) calls “the narrative logic of permanent war” (82)—that is,decades of uninterrupted US warfare overseas.

The fraught, complex, racially diverse roots of the contemporaryUnited States also require further excavation as writers fruitfully return tothe nineteenth-century nation: to the antebellum and postbellum periodsand to the cities of an industrializing North, especially New York (seeChapter 4). In so doing, many of the American novelists considered inthis collection complicate traditionally dominant conceptions of nationalidentity by foregrounding minority voices and the vulnerable figure ofthe child. Thus they counter the erasure of marginalized peoples byexposing and recuperating hidden histories through fiction. This alsoleads to new forms of memorialization. US writers in the twenty-firstcentury continue to question enduring mythologies since “at the coreof culture is a continuous dialogue between myth and history, ‘plaininvention’ and the ‘core of historical fact’” (Slotkin 2005, 229). Hencea number of the writers examined here critique white privilege, especiallywhite male privilege. Some also question “compulsory heterosexuality”in Adrienne Rich’s phrase (1980; see Chapter 11). American historicalfiction continues to be compellingly relevant because “writers …prob-lematize issues by identifying the historicity of behaviors, motives, andbeliefs …suggesting that presentist approaches are part of the suppressionof underlying reality” (Byerman 2005, 9). Contemporary US historicalnovels are also exciting thanks to their formal experimentation, as manyof the chapters in this collection reveal, and these literary techniquesare, of course, inextricably connected to the ways in which particularthemes are unsettled and contested. Polyphonic narration and a rangeof other narrative devices are engaged here to suggest the restoration of

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lost voices, while some writers also play with chronology, upsetting read-erly expectations of any putatively straightforward—linear, sequential,teleological—temporal framework. The energetic use of intertextualityenriches these works further and—recalling some of the characteristicsof historiographical metafiction (Hutcheon 1989)—results in subversivecounternarratives that write back to US political and cultural hegemonyat home and abroad (see Chapter 10).

A number of scholars have recently produced monographs or editedcollections on contemporary works of historical fiction in English, reflect-ing the significance of the genre and its ever-growing appeal to differ-ent audiences. It is notable that these academic studies are primarily con-cerned with British novels.1 By contrast, some important scholarly worksconsider recent US historical fiction but they examine different writ-ers and texts from the present study.2 In other words, there remains aclear gap in the currently available scholarly literature on recent histor-ical novels from the United States and it is this gap that 21st CenturyUS Historical Fiction fills. Providing some of the first critical insights intovery recently published and prize-winning US works, some by first-timenovelists—while also looking at the fiction of well-established Americanwriters—leading and emergent scholars from the United States, Canada,Britain, and Ireland analyze key examples of the US historical novelfrom recent years. Their essays ask how American novelists are examiningthe past and investigate the periods they are exploring. They also ques-tion why writers favor particular historical eras—for instance, antebellumAmerica or the long 1960s—over others.

The 13 main chapters in this volume are organized chronologically,beginning with fiction set in the 1840s and ’50s. These chapters con-cern recent novels by canonical writers such as the late E. L. Doctorowand Philip Roth, and well-known literary figures including Susan Choi,Jennifer Egan, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Joyce Carol Oates, andGeorge Saunders. They also consider such new novelists as David Meansand Viet Thanh Nguyen and tackle some of the most prominent andprovocative contemporary illustrations of US historical fiction: for exam-ple, Anthony Doerr’s World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See(2014); Nguyen’s Vietnam War narrative, The Sympathizer (2015); andColson Whitehead’s reclamation of US slavery, The Underground Rail-road (2016)—all recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—and the crit-ically lauded neo-Victorian fiction of Lyndsay Faye.

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Part I, “Imagining 19th-Century America in Recent Historical Fic-tion,” begins with Judie Newman’s chapter on James McBride’s novelSong Yet Sung (2008). Set in 1850 on Maryland’s eastern shore, the noveldissects the relation between history and popular myth, and the legitimacyof African American folklore as an empowering, imaginative resource.Controversially, in plot and symbolic structure, McBride exploits the“Quilt Code,” the secret instructions supposedly sewn into quilts to aidescaped slaves. Although roundly condemned by academic historians as ahoax, the Quilt Code remains an example of fakelore, a synthetic prod-uct claimed as an authentic oral tradition and used as the basis of class-room lessons, museum exhibits, public artworks, and children’s literature.Newman argues that if McBride mythologizes, he also demythologizes byrecreating two women from American folklore: the Dreamer, an escapedslave based upon Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad;and Patty Cannon, historically notorious stealer of free blacks, operat-ing an Underground Railroad in reverse. Newman contends that whileMcBride questions both official and oral narratives, his novel validatesthe vital role of the imagination in historical critique.

In Chapter 3, “To ‘Refract Time’: The Magical History of ColsonWhitehead’s The Underground Railroad,” Michael Docherty examinesthis acclaimed 2016 novel, contending that Whitehead challenges us torethink definitions of the “historical novel,” since—embedded within afamiliarly “real” setting, the antebellum South of historical record—hecreates an underground railroad that is a literal subway and events thatare frequently (and deliberately) inaccurate historically. Through thesespatiotemporal anomalies, Whitehead “shape-shifts and refracts time andhistory” (Winfrey 2016). Docherty asks whether Whitehead’s creative,flexible approach to history generates a usable past (or projects a future)from its subject matter in ways that more “conventional” historical fic-tion could not. On this basis, however, he also wonders if Whitehead’snovel can or should be regarded as historical fiction at all, suggesting thatthe author instead offers what one might call “magical history.” This leadshim to consider the significance of genre—“popular” historical fiction ver-sus “elite” literary fiction—in Oprah Winfrey’s public championing of TheUnderground Railroad and to a discussion of the paratextual apparatusthat shaped the novel’s early critical and popular reception.

James Peacock’s chapter examines Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham tril-ogy of bestselling historical thrillers set in New York City in the 1840s.

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Each offers the reader an appetizing mixture of Grand Guignol violence,political intrigue, sentimentality, and apocalyptic conflagration. Peacockanalyzes the depiction of childhood in the trilogy, arguing that the ambi-guities of these representations reflect both the vicissitudes of thinkingabout children through history and the inherent tensions of the historicalnovel in its need to speak simultaneously to past structures of feeling andto the contemporary moment. If children have long been sites of ideologi-cal contestation—variously conceived of as precious innocents, Dionysianvessels for original sin, and morally superior creatures—then Faye’s fic-tional children, imagined post-Freud within a pre-Freudian social envi-ronment, are pulled in many directions. They move between myth andmaterial reality, innocence and experience, sentimentality and commod-ity, between—in the context of the historical novel—their present andthe contemporary present of the readership, and so between multiple,competing constructions of childhood in different historical periods. Pea-cock argues that the time of the historical novel is also vulnerable: Faye’smid-nineteenth century exists in an uneasy dependent relation, perhapsinevitably, with the post-9/11 era of the novel’s writing and readership.

Completing this first section is Clare Hayes-Brady’s chapter, “‘Every-one, We Are Dead!’: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln inthe Bardo,” which explores Saunders’ award-winning first novel as both awork of historical fiction and an experimental tour de force. Hayes-Bradyargues that, although Lincoln in the Bardo was critically received as aradical departure in form and focus from the familiar working-class late-capitalist lens of the author’s short stories, it actually continues the themesand strategies of Saunders’ earlier work, offering at its heart a sharplycontemporary vision of a divided society. After situating the novel in thecontext of contemporary historical fiction, this chapter offers a close read-ing of the novel’s unusual construction, demonstrating that its symphonicnarrative structure posits and reinforces the work’s central thematic con-cerns. By foregrounding so many voices, and effectively leveling everyutterance, Saunders invites us to consider history, memory, and truthin the context of death: the unavoidable event that universalizes humanexperience. Yet he simultaneously demonstrates that even in death, thereare vestigial striations of privilege and power mediated through languageand narrative control.

Part II, “Representations of the 20th-Century United States,” startswith two chapters by Rachael McLennan and Villy Karagouni. In

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McLennan’s chapter, she argues that in Oates’s baffling, enormousnovel The Accursed (2013), the undecidability of genre is key toan understanding of the text, which employs, deconstructs and par-odies a number of conventions of historical fiction in its recount-ing of seemingly supernatural events. Responding to the lack of crit-ical attention this ambitious novel has received, McLennan contendsthat Oates’s genre-defying exploration of mysterious happenings in earlytwentieth-century Princeton, New Jersey, is conducted in order toexplore some of her most central concerns—principally the explicit andimplicit violence of power as it relates to gender and race in Amer-ica—as these concerns complicate or compromise the act of telling sto-ries about history. And she shows that through such concerns, thenovel can be read as a cautionary message to twenty-first-century Amer-ica.

In Chapter 7, “‘Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens’: TheHistorical and Narrative Function of Music in E. L. Doctorow’s Homerand Langley,” Karagouni argues that music is a system of central his-torical and narrative signification in Doctorow’s 2009 novel. She positsthat Doctorow brings together popular and highbrow musical styles andtheir corresponding ideologies, exploring the multilayered relationship ofsound to the moving image and highlighting the interplay between differ-ent forms of narrativization. In the novel’s closing pages it is revealed thatthe blind narrator-protagonist Homer Collyer’s narrative has in fact beenrecorded in writing with the help of several Braille typewriters. Moreover,it emerges that the written word has come to replace Homer’s activeengagement with music in his final years, as his hearing diminishes andeventually deteriorates altogether. Karagouni demonstrates that—far frombeing a mere stylistic or allusive feature—music emerges as a pivotal nar-rative motif and explicit intertext in Homer and Langley.

The next three chapters—by Aimee Pozorski, Ruth Maxey and DebraShostak—examine recent US fictions of war. In Chapter 8, “ArchiveFuture: Trauma and the Child in Two Contemporary American Best-sellers,” Pozorski notes the “third-generation survivors,” a generationremoved from the Holocaust and drawing upon archival research intheir fictional writing. Her essay develops this question of the Holo-caust archive in relation to two recent American bestsellers aboutWorld War II: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014)and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale (2015), novels grounded inhistorical research: a process both authors emphasize in their book

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tours. What does it mean for authors from the Midwest and the WestCoast, respectively, to pursue the Holocaust as the topic of their fiction,fiction that depends upon the scholarly enterprise of the past and a hopefor the memory of the Holocaust into the future? Through close readingsof the novels’ achronological representations of time and the figure of avulnerable child, Pozorski argues that these twenty-first-century Americanbestsellers reflect a cultural trauma we have yet to confront: trauma thatgrows out of both willful ignorance during the early parts of the Nazigenocide and a failure adequately to help refugees upon the war’s end.

My own chapter, “Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean Warin Contemporary American Fiction,” asks why such different writers asPhilip Roth and Chang-rae Lee have produced fictional responses to theKorean War in the past 10 years. Comparing the US-centrism of Roth’scampus novel Indignation (2008) with Lee’s much lengthier, intergen-erational Korea-based novel The Surrendered (2010), this essay exploresthe diverse literary strategies used to render the war and its aftermath.While Roth and Lee address the conflict by writing about it through aspecific ethnic and racial lens, they display a fundamental discomfort withrepresenting the war itself. Roth depicts it as an absent presence throughsuch techniques as prolepsis, analepsis, ellipsis, metonymy, and experimen-tal narration. Lee’s novel also handles the Korean War with caution anddetachment, deploying the events of 1950–1953 as a framing device totell a larger, transnational, post-conflict tale of US imperialism, expatri-ation, and the white American adoption of Korean children. I questionwhat kind of usable past these writers create through their Korean Warnovels and to what extent they shed new light on the so-called forgottenwar.

In Chapter 10, “Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in VietThanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer,” Shostak argues that a white, West-ern father’s failure to recognize his “illegitimate,” “half-breed” son inNguyen’s satirical The Sympathizer (2015) allegorizes the untold Viet-namese story of the Vietnam War in American fiction of the postwarperiod. She explores the manner in which the unnamed, unreliable nar-rator, son of a French missionary and a Vietnamese woman he raped,uses his doubleness/duplicity to construct a riddle of sameness/othernesswithin the discourse of his life story, allowing Nguyen to illuminate theproblem of representation at the core of the violence perpetrated againstthe Vietnamese, deprived of authority over their identities and traumatichistories. Shostak’s chapter traces Nguyen’s thick texture of allusion to

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American high and popular culture, within which the narrator rewritesthe novel of recent American history through irony and parody—in akind of displaced oedipal patricide—as revenge against and reparation formisrepresentation and lack of recognition.

In considering works that re-imagine the long 1960s, Rebecca Martinand Mark West use their chapters to assess the recent return to this periodby Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Christopher Sorrentino, and Dana Spiotta.Martin’s chapter, “Queering the Lost Year: Transcription and the LesbianContinuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman,” analyzes Choi’s 2003novel and its reimagining of Patricia Hearst’s (the fictional Pauline’s) “lostyear” from the perspective of Wendy Yoshimura (fictionalized as JennyShimada). As the characters in Choi’s novel live in symbiotic isolation,their images circulate widely in the public sphere. Drawing from Rich’sessay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence,” as wellas Jack/Judith Halberstam’s essay “Shadow Feminisms,” Martin exam-ines the intense bond of survival that develops between Jenny and Paulinewithin a fugitive space. She argues that, by foregrounding the difficultiesof attempting to connect to another person through mediated forms suchas letters, photographs, or even acts of violence captured on film, Choireveals the problematics of connecting through any language. In Ameri-can Woman, the most potent relationship in the novel is the queer onethat exists beyond definitive borders or marked history.

West’s chapter, “The Contemporary Sixties Novel: Post-postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction,” charts the attempt byrecent American writers to reappraise and historicize the social, political,and cultural upheavals of the 1960s, particularly the extended periodbetween John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the end of the VietnamWar. Although this period has attracted writers from different genera-tions, West’s essay focuses upon authors whose sensibility and attemptsat temporal experimentation might be described as “post-postmodern.”Offering brief accounts of novels by Egan, Spiotta, and Sorrentino, Westconsiders their work in the context of recent scholarship on neo-historicalfiction, showing how their treatment of the period reveals their under-standing of history and temporal experience and arguing that a returnto the 1960s becomes a way to reassess postmodernism and tentativelymark out a “post-postmodern” aesthetics.

Turning to alternative historical and speculative fiction, Diletta DeCristofaro and DeLisa D. Hawkes offer chapters that investigate recent

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novels by David Means and Dwayne Alexander Smith respectively. DeCristofaro’s “‘What’s the Plot, Man?’: Alternate History and the Sense ofan Ending in David Means’ Hystopia” situates this 2016 novel within thecontext of critical debates and theories about alternative historical fiction.Set in a world in which President Kennedy survives several assassinationattempts and pursues the Vietnam War in his third term, Means’ novelprovides a fertile example of the relationship between alternate historyand the postmodern turn in historiography. De Cristofaro argues that inforegrounding the narrative nature of history, Hystopia shows how priv-ileging certain historical narratives as objective over others can prop upand legitimize power structures. She maintains that the novel exposes theconstructedness of history as orderly and meaningful by drawing atten-tion to the mode of emplotment based on the sense of an ending andexposing how this retrospective deterministic patterning of the temporalsequence undermines historical agency.

In the last chapter, “‘To Avenging My People’: Speculating Revengefor US Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres,” Hawkesexplores Smith’s 2014 thriller which pushes against traditional histori-cal and speculative fiction by questioning which realities are possible ifpeople try to “fix” rather than merely critique history. Black rage, or“black noise” in the novel, represents a psychological extension of USslavery in the twenty-first century that results in adverse realities for blackAmericans. The only way that the characters in Forty Acres can be curedfrom “black noise” is to return to the moment where the illness beganby avenging their ancestors who were captured and enslaved through theestablishment of a secret society of successful black men who kidnap andenslave white people. Drawing on legal theories of revenge and retribu-tion as empowerment strategies, Hawkes’ essay examines Forty Acres asa “speculative revenge narrative” or one that imagines a solution to his-torical problems that fall out of line with current legal and social under-standings of the real world. She asks how one can decide who is a worthyrecipient of punishment, how Smith engages with speculative fiction totell this story, and how the text considers US slavery and its complexaftermath.

No collection of this kind can hope to be comprehensive. There are,for instance, no chapters covering Native American or Latinx fiction.And rather than revisiting the heavily researched historical fiction of ToniMorrison, William Styron, or Cormac McCarthy, to name a few notableexamples, contributors turn their attention to post-2000 novels that have

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received little scholarly notice to date, yet compel further reading andinterpretation. These are literary works that push US historical fiction innew directions, both formally and thematically. Investigating periodiza-tion, theoretical terms such as “post-postmodernism,” and notions ofgenre, the scholars in this collection demonstrate the emerging canonof contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse array ofkey American writers. As an original, groundbreaking, and wide-rangingcollection of essays, 21st Century US Historical Fiction offers a uniquecontribution to this growing academic field through its particular combi-nation of writers and texts and, as a collection, through its specifically USfocus.

Notes1. See, for instance, Wallace (2005), Boccardi (2009), De Groot (2010),

Adiseshiah and Hildyard (2013), Mitchell and Parsons (2013), and Rous-selot (2014). Cooper and Short (2012) also consider Australian and Cana-dian writers, as does Hulan (2014), while Brantly (2017) provides a Euro-pean focus.

2. These studies include Byerman (2005), Swirski (2009), Gauthier (2011),Nunes (2011), and Savvas (2011). Only the works by Swirski and Sav-vas contain any overlap with this collection since they offer chapters onPhilip Roth and E. L. Doctorow respectively. But the Roth and Doc-torow novels considered by David Rampton in Swirski’s edited volume (seeRampton 2009) and by Savvas (2011) in his monograph are earlier ones:Roth’s American trilogy—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Commu-nist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—and Doctorow’s The Book ofDaniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), and The March (2005). De Groot (2010)makes reference to several US historical novels, but his textual examples areagain quite distinct from the ones in this collection; Boulter 2011 discussesPaul Auster, but no other US writers; and in Rousselot (2014), there is justone essay on an American writer, Michael Chabon.

Bibliography

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PART I

Imagining 19th-century America in RecentHistorical Fiction

CHAPTER 2

Folklore, Fakelore, and theHistoryof the Dream: JamesMcBride’s Song Yet Sung

Judie Newman

James McBride’s commitment to historical writing is evident rightthrough his literary career, beginning with his prize-winning memoir,The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996)which spanned the 1920s to the 1990s and revealed that his motherRuth began life as Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, the daughter of an orthodoxrabbi in the American South, an immigrant from Poland. When shemarried an African American in 1942, she was immediately treated asdead by her family. McBride was her eighth child, born after his fatherdied, and raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn, eventually one of 12 children.The memoir alternates between McBride and his mother and was animmediate bestseller, partly because of its utopian post-racial message.When McBride asks his mother whether God is black or white, she repliesthat “God is the color of water” (McBride 1996, 51), which, of course,does not have a color. When interviewed, McBride himself argued that“we’re all pretty much the same” (quoted in Trachtenberg 2008). His

J. Newman (B)Department of American and Canadian Studies, School of Cultures, Languagesand Area Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UKe-mail: judith.newman@nottingham.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2020R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_2

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