Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
The Haunting
Theoretical Fathers
Historical Fathers
Storytelling after the Father
The Organization of the Book
2. Anxieties of Influence and the Decline of the Patriarch
John Irving’s Family Romances—The World According to Garp
Jonathan Franzen's Fallen Father—The Corrections
3. Middle-class America at Mid-century
Jane Smiley and the Father Dethroned—A Thousand Acres
Anne Tyler: The Domestic Comedy of Home Economics and Homesickness—Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Philip Roth’s Late Fathers—Everyman, Indignation, Nemesis
Marilynne Robinson’s Earthly Fathers—Gilead, Home, Lila
4. Desiring Daughters
Jeffrey Eugenides and the Odor of Cooped-up Girls—The Virgin Suicides
Mona Simpson: He Was Only a man—The Lost Father
Carole Maso: The Art of Losing—The Art Lover
5. Searching Sons, the Word, and the Flesh
Paul Auster: The Body in/and the Text—City of Glass, Moon Palace, Mr. Vertigo
Jonathan Lethem: Signifying Manqué—Motherless Brooklyn
6. The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination—Part One: The Environment
Don DeLillo: The Genealogical Imperative as Toxic Event—White Noise
Cormac McCarthy: "There is no Book and your Fathers are Dead in the Ground"—The Road
7. The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination—Part Two: Politics and 9/11
Philip Roth’s Orphans—The Plot Against America
Jonathan Safran Foer and the Fathers’ Fall—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Claire Messud and "Dad’s Thing"—The Emperor’s Children
8. Postmemory after the Patriarch: Narrating the War in Vietnam
Bobbie Ann Mason at the Tomb of an Unknown Soldier—In Country
Tim O’Brien Among the Missing—In the Lake of the Woods
Viet Thanh Nguyen and Traumatic Representation—The Sympathizer
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Promotional Information

Investigates the unstable construction of white masculinity in the United States through close analysis of father-child relationships in the novels of 18 American writers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

About the Author

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).

Reviews

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.
*Victoria Aarons, O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature, Trinity University, USA, and editor of The New Jewish American Literary Studies (2019)*

Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel is by far the best book in its field. It offers nuanced, revelatory readings of a wide range of contemporary American fiction while at the same time making a vital contribution to our understanding of the key issues of our time: class, race, gender, and the relationship between personal and national politics. It will be essential reading not just for students and scholars of contemporary fiction but for anyone interested in fatherhood and masculinity in post-war America.
*David Brauner, Professor of Contemporary Literature, The University of Reading, UK, and author of Contemporary American Fiction (2010)*

Fictive Fathers is an exemplary study of a fascinating subject. Shostak displays the critical acuity typical of all her work in this analysis of missing and flawed fathers in postwar North American fiction. Wide ranging in its choice of texts but firmly focused on its central argument, this is a persuasive, engaging, and authoritative account of the ways in which the myths of fatherhood shape contemporary masculinity and family dynamics.
*Sarah Graham, Associate Professor in American Literature, University of Leicester, UK*

Informed by a sophisticated deployment of psychoanalytic theory backed with a supple sense of history, Debra Shostak’s important Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel addresses an impressive array of American novels to explore and challenge the hetero-normative fantasy of normative Western manhood as the symbolic center of the social order. A true feat of daring critical range and virtuosity, this work is one of the best studies available of the American novel in the post-World War II, postmodern era.
*Timothy Parrish, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis, USA*