SOURCE: Fowler, Douglas. “The Short Fiction of Michael Chabon: Nostalgia in the Very Young.” Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 1 (winter 1995): 75-82.

In the following essay, Fowler discusses the themes of memory, nostalgia, and family in Chabon's short stories.

The heavy burden of the growing soul Perplexes and offends more, day by day; Week by week, offends and perplexes more With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’ And may and may not, desire and control. The pain of living and the drug of dreams Curl up the small soul in the window seat Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

—T. S. Eliot, “Animula”

At its best, Michael Chabon's fiction depicts the nostalgia his characters feel for their former lives, which they have seen severed from them through an aboriginal emotional catastrophe. This sense of an intense nostalgia permeating his fictional world is all the more striking since Chabon's subjects are almost...