It's
Superman! |
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Twenty years ago, Tom De Haven published Funny Papers, a gritty, riotous bon-bon of a historical novel about the early days of newspaper comics. Along with Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies, its canny sequel, it seemed to mark the beginning of a career in the mold of T.C. Boyle’s, dedicated to the marriage of the vulgar and the literary and to the creation of rich, smart entertainment. Instead, De Haven has spent the intervening years willfully ignoring that early promise; except for Dugan Underground, the minor third installment in his comics trilogy, he has spurned literary fiction, turning instead to unalloyed genre work: sword and sorcery pulp, trashy young adult fantasy and the graphic novel. It’s Superman!, his new book, smells something like a comeback, a return to that early trajectory. It is a novel that again attempts to reimagine popular material. Unlike De Haven’s earlier works, however, which dramatized both the makers of comics and their characters, It’s Superman is content merely to novelize the Superman origin myth. There is new stuff—young Clark Kent goes on the bum with Willi Berg (a sort of cousin to Funny Paper’s Georgie Wreckage), Lois Lane is vampier, Lex Luthor becomes a sort of MacHeath-like politico and real historical figures are peppered throughout—but there is nothing radical in De Haven’s reworking of this material. The book suffers from restraint, timidity. De Haven possesses an anarchic, opulent imagination and he once gleefully piled on evocative detail. He is now far stingier, for whatever reason, and the resulting writing is consequently thin broth in comparison. That thinness reveals certain flaws in De Haven’s style that were less obvious in his early novels, especially a persistent discomfort with narrative summary, much of which is handled through improbable internal monologue. It’s Superman! avoids the pedantry and sprawl of Chabon’s Kavalier and Klay, to which it has inevitably drawn comparison, but is otherwise inferior, lacking in gravity, lyricism and invention. It is better than much of De Haven’s recent work, but it continues to fall far short of the author’s potential. -J.D. Chapman |
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_________________________________________________________________ J.D. Chapman was born and raised in Southwest Virginia, where he works as a schoolteacher. His fiction has recently appeared in the Mid-American Review, and will soon appear in the Southeast Review and Shenandoah.
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