SOURCE: Gowen, Anne. “Author Creates Vanished World of Nostalgia, Colorful Things.” Washington Times (29 April 1991): F3.

In the following favorable review, Gowen considers the role of nostalgia in A Model World.

Early on in one of Michael Chabon's stories, young Nathan Shapiro finds himself in the middle of what will be his family's last vacation to Nags Head, N.C. Staying at a rustic hotel called the Sandpiper, his parents about to separate, he is filled with a strange, inexplicable feeling brought on by the sight of an old bottle-dispensing Coke machine.

“The sight of the faded machine and of the whole Sandpiper,” Mr. Chabon writes, “filled Nathan with a happy sadness, or, really, a sad happiness; he was not too young, at ten, to have developed a sense of nostalgia.”

Nostalgia is a favorite word in A Model World. The sadness of things lost, or perhaps never attained...