Novelist reinvents mythical past for children

BERKELEY, Calif.

At age 39, author Michael Chabon appears well placed in the great, grown-up world. He is married, has three children and lives on a leafy side street in a scenic, high-priced city.

But once he steps inside the cottage behind his house, time rewinds. Old baseball photos and sketches of cartoon heroes cover the walls and a turntable sits near his computer. The cottage serves as his office, but it could be mistaken for a reconstructed clubhouse.

"I definitely have a few toys up here," he says with a laugh during a recent interview. "To me, it's like Superman's fortress of solitude or the bat cave, a place where trophies of my various campaigns are kept."

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," Chabon receives seven-figure advances for his books and got comparable money for a "Kavalier & Clay" screenplay, to be produced by Scott Rudin of "Addams Family" fame.

He is currently working on a novel, set in Alaska, but home life directed him to an additional project. Reading "Charlotte's Web" and other classics to his kids made him want to write a children's book himself.

"Summerland" is a 490-page tale of environmental peril and old-fashioned Americana, with such favored Chabon themes as baseball, superheroes, fathers and, curiously, failure. Miramax Books is giving the fantasy novel a first printing of 200,000, and has already signed up Chabon for two sequels.

The hero of "Summerland," 12-year-old Ethan Feld, is billed by Chabon as "The Worst Ballplayer in the History of Clam Island." Banished to baseball's version of Siberia -- deep right field -- Ethan is so hopeless a hitter that he never lifts the bat from his shoulder. The boy "was mortally afraid of striking out swinging," Chabon writes. "Was there any worse kind of failure than that? Striking out."

Chabon's sensitivity to failure -- well documented in the novel "Wonder Boys" -- should by now be well-exorcised. But like a self-made millionaire ever afraid of losing his fortune, Chabon identifies with what can go wrong.

"Being a good father is probably my major ambition in life," he says, "and yet I think there's not a day that goes by that I don't feel I failed in some way or another. I didn't pay attention when I should have paid attention. I missed a cue my kid was giving me and there was a problem to deal with. It's just an endless failure."

A native of Washington, D.C., Chabon has lived out a common contemporary story, marked by his parents' divorce and the breakdown of faith in the basic myths of American life.

"Davy Crockett and Paul Bunyan and the golden spike and all those iconic images were still very much around in the media in the world I grew up in," Chabon says. "But I knew by the time I was 13, and we were into the whole bicentennial celebration, that it was all somehow a bust."

Chabon liked baseball and movies as a child and his father, with whom he spent summers in Pittsburgh, made him memorize all the presidents of the United States, in order. Interested early on in worlds beyond this one, the author also liked the fantasy novels of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

At age 10, Chabon created his first story, in which Sherlock Holmes joins forces with Captain Nemo. Around the same time, he also wrote a fantasy about America's tricentennial, when the last remaining unused melody must serve as a theme song.

A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Chabon was his in mid-20s when he emerged as one of the country's most promising writers, admired for an expansive but playful vocabulary and a feeling for both wonder and despair. Several publishers bid for his first book, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," a melancholy novel about romantic and filial love reviewers compared to the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger.

Chabon's novel had professional and personal consequences. His narration of an affair between two men raised questions about his own sexuality, including one from his future second wife, author Ayelet Waldman, whom he met soon after publication.

"A gay love story dedicated to his (first) wife is kind of a problem when you're going on a blind date," says Waldman, whose own books include the mysteries "Nursery Crimes" and "A Playdate With Death."

Acclaimed first novels mean both the chance, and the pressure, to produce something even better. Some authors spend years writing books compared unfavorably to the first (Norman Mailer, who debuted with "The Naked and the Dead"), or never finish another (Ralph Ellison, author of "Invisible Man").

Chabon can make you believe that he conjures up stories with a magic wand, but he had such a hard time with his next novel that he ended up writing "Wonder Boys." Published in 1992, the novel reads like the life Chabon feared for himself: an aging prodigy, Grady Tripp, with nothing to show but an ever-growing manuscript.

Somewhere in Chabon's mind, Tripp is probably still typing away, but the author's own career moved along nicely. He completed "Kavalier & Clay," a 600-page celebration of comic book and real-life heroes set mostly in the 1930s and '40s, and then turned to writing "Summerland."

In both books, Chabon explores, and reinvents, American folklore. Just as the narrator of "Mysteries of Pittsburgh" tells of "swallowing an entire system of bad taste ... and then finding it beautiful and fun," Chabon looks to a past he still misses, even if he doesn't believe in it.

"In 'Summerland,' characters keep saying, 'It used be like this, but it's not anymore.' Everything is reduced. There's a sense of regret over that," he says.

"All the things that I had loved and weren't true I acquired a certain cynicism about. Now I appreciate them for their qualities as a story, as myth. I don't need them to be true to be interesting."

EXCERPTS FROM 'SUMMERLAND'

"For a long time -- so long that men were born, grew up, and died in the arms of the game -- baseball flourished on Clam Island. There were a dozen different leagues, made up of players of all ages, both male and female. Times had been better on Clam Island in those days. People were once more partial to eating raw shellfish than they are now. An ordinary American working man, not so long ago, thought nothing of tossing back three or four dozen salty, slippery bivalves at lunch."

---

"They said nothing for a long time. Ethan felt the last sparkling residue of being a prophesied hero drain away. But as it departed he found he was left with a strange kind of thoroughly unmagical resolve. He was not the wanted one. Well, that was fine. He might not be the one to save the universe. But he was going to save his father."

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"The speed of a home run shot is determined not only by the velocity of the bat at the moment of impact, but by the speed the ball is traveling toward the hitter. So it had been the combination of Ethan's pain-driven, father-haunted, wild desperate swing, and a truly scorching hummer thrown by the Changer of the Worlds, that produced the magnificent shot that rocketed off the bat of Ethan Feld."