Michael Chabon's Summerland

Michael Chabon is a storyteller. That separates him more than a little from his fellow successful literary novelists, most of whom, it seems, have decided that the style, substance or even texture of a novel is more the thing. That's made for some pretentious and hard-to-read acclaimed novels. Although, maybe it's the idea that Important Things That Need to Be Written can be woven into a linear story in a single voice that's far-reaching. It's a Hollywood conceit. Especially when a writer's topic is broad?America, let's say?acting as if it can be addressed by way of storytelling is to risk coming off like yet another blockbuster formula hack.

Chabon, though, is a good storyteller. He maximizes the nonanalytic pleasure of reading. His narratives open like an accordion and fold you up inside. He's funny. A deeper humor wells up from the reader's mind during a Chabon story. This is the comedy that only arises from situations on the page, cultivating a living structure from your own memories?a mode of feeling to which movies barely ever give rise. The drama of a reader and a writer together unfurling a marvelous tale is more ancient and intimate than any but a master storyteller can really control. The story is biggest.

Chabon is not a master, but he's shaping up to be one. His fresh-out-of-college novel was a very good collegiate story (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), and he followed it up with an even better collegiate story (Wonder Boys?much funnier than the movie version, in which Michael Douglas was tragically miscast). Wonder Boys was set in the minor leagues of professional storytelling, and much of its action concerned visiting scouts from the majors. It conveyed the deep truth about writers grappling with stories that dwarf them. The narrator's main problem is that the one he's trying to write is literally too big. The one he's living, meanwhile, seems unlikely and unimaginable enough, exactly, to be true.

Having explicated by way of a story what storytelling means to storytellers, the author's third step was to try to show what storytelling means to?yep?America. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay found Chabon a little out of his depth, but what he lacked in experience with sprawling historical novels and New York City narratives he made up for with a story that actually did what it set out to do. Kavalier won a Pulitzer, and for its extrapolated diagram of the emotions that birthed our pop culture, it deserved the honor, particularly because the prize is so strongly associated with journalism. The book's reportorial contributions, embedded in engaging fiction about a pair of comic book entrepreneurs, eclipse its handful of literary flaws.

Chabon's fourth novel, Summerland (Hyperion/Miramax, 510 pages, $22.95) is a fantasy novel for young adults?young American adults especially. It concerns baseball and an alternative universe where the game is far more important than it is here. From the setup, the archetypal is localized: 11-year-old hero-to-be Ethan Feld, a boy who hates baseball but is strongly encouraged to play by his widower father, and Jennifer T. Rideout, his skilled but unbalanced pal, are recruited for action across the magic divide. The recruiter is a 109-year-old scout named Ringerfinger Brown, who logged 378 career victories in the Negro Leagues. He gives Ethan a baseball handbook that reveals the sport's marvelously stated "fundamental truth," discovered on the other side, which is that "?a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day." Chabon's guide is a "werefox" (one of several variations on North American rodents Ethan and Jennifer meet on the adventure) and his portal a technique of outdoor "scampering" like from one high tree branch to another, because a tree, in fact, is the true shape of the universe.

Their destination is the Summerlands, which shares a name and a precarious border with the western edge of Ethan and Jennifer's home, Clam Island, a Pacific Northwestern vacation isle. Because of the magic border, it doesn't rain during summer on planet Earth's Summerlands. So the locals put a baseball field there (which they really would, wouldn't they?), and it's there that Ethan and Jennifer are scouted. Soon they meet a famous representative of the foot-high folk from the real Summerlands (Cinquefoil, an active slugger who has hit 72,954 home runs), and he explains about Coyote, the trickster of Native American lore, who in his capacity as the book's villain is trying to end all the worlds ("?all stories," is how Chabon puts it). He kidnaps Ethan's father, an engineer who invented and hoped to market a little dirigible for family usage. The blimp skin Mr. Feld developed is what Coyote needs to poison the well that nourishes the Lodgepole?the tree that is the universe.

Later, there're other Native American stories?Jennifer is part Indian, and the book contains a great scene in which her chainsmoking great-aunts and great-uncles try to remember what they used to know about Coyote and the Summerlands. There are sunglasses that are left behind but continue to show whatever their owner is looking at. There are tantrum-throwing giants, and a rough town full of characters from tall tales, the Big Liars of Old Cat Landing, who have a formidable baseball team. There's plenty of high-stakes baseball?the heroes repeatedly play for their or someone else's freedom. Ethan and Jennifer are surprised to learn that they're best at positions they'd never even played before. There's also a Sasquatch named Taffy. When the heroes meet her, and Jennifer calls her "Bigfoot," Chabon writes, "Taffy did not look pleased. 'Look at my feet,' she said, in a low, steady, angry voice. 'Do they look inordinately large to you?? Relative to the rest of me, of course.'"

There's really enough for a trilogy. It might appear to be too much for children, until you consider how many trilogies (wasn't Chronicles of Narnia a double-trilogy, plus?) have been cherished by children. And most of those were European, and so even more challenging. Was the challenge part of the fun? Chabon provides plenty for kids with his MFA vocabulary, which seems barely reined in. The word "vulpine" shows up on page seven (it's defined in the following sentence, but still?vulpine?). He does manage to make Summerland his first novel in which none of the characters turns out to be gay. There is, however, a coming-out-of-the-closet-drama. But it's ingeniously disguised, nonsexual and certain to go over every young reader's head.

Summerland is at least as absorbing as Chabon's previous novels. As in Kavalier, the plot gets unwieldy in places, and the book is longer than it needed to be, but I can't think of any characters or scenes that I wouldn't mind seeing cut. Because the sense of storytelling enchantment is constant, extra pages translate to bonus time spent good-book space. It's easy to see Summerland as a light step, following the heavy step of Kavalier, along Chabon's path to a second masterpiece, next time of a much higher order than Wonder Boys. It's difficult to imagine how the author can approach a bigger topic than what it means to cherish the totality of American stories.

If Summerland is itself cherished, this children's book could be judged a major work, rather than a modest landmark on the way to one. That's the only prize that can bring Chabon glory this time. If American youngsters of all stripes curl up inside this story and forget themselves, and hear it ringing true, and feel it forming an impression that seems reflected in the world outside, it will mean that Ethan and Jennifer's coming-of-age has the sort of poignancy that was already in the air and only needed to be written. In that case, the story isn't make-believe at all.