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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
It's a tragic thing.
It is. It's always had this tragic element that's carried me through a lot of crass, ridiculous, callous behavior on the part of owners and players over the years. There's some essential sadness in the game for me.
Why did you make Ethan someone who doesn't like baseball? Was he a stand-in for all the readers like me, who at first thought, Oh, great. Why don't you just write a fantasy novel about bridge?
Yes. [Laughs] Hey, why didn't I think of that? Well, there's always a sequel. It was a way of handling what I expected would be a certain amount of reader resistance. I have this sense that kids today aren't into baseball at all in the way they used to be, just as they're not into comic books the way they used to be. Since this book was going to be for children, I thought, statistically speaking, that probably most of the kids who would read it might not really be into baseball. I thought that if I had a character who was a huge baseball fan that would be too hard to identify with. So I decided I'd have him not like baseball.
Listen to the interview with Michael Chabon here
The instant I made that decision, all this other stuff clicked into place. His father would have to be a huge baseball fan, and he's disappointing his father and that's why he keeps doing it because his father wants him to.
But then I do have [Ethan's friend] Jennifer T. Rideout, who is a huge baseball fan, and that gave me the opportunity to approach the game from a kid's point of view that was also very sympathetic to baseball.
Do either of your own kids like baseball?
Well, my daughter is almost 8 and I think 8 is the age when a kid really starts to like baseball. Because it's hard to understand: It's illogical, it's complicated. There's math involved. So 8 is the age and so far it doesn't look like she's heading toward baseball. My son is 5. I have hopes for him.
But my daughter played an important role in this book because she is extremely prejudiced against fiction that doesn't have strong female characters. She hates books where the girl is just being rescued over and over again. She won't let me read them to her and she won't read them herself.
What books are like that anymore?
Well, you'd be surprised. Lloyd Alexander's books. I loved them and brought them to her, but she always had a hard time with the figure of Eilonwy. She always speaks her mind and that's good, but that's about it. Other than that, she's always in trouble, always needing to be rescued.
So with Jennifer T. Rideout I really tried to create a character that would get past her.
And what does she think?
She thought it was all right. I had this wonderful moment when I was reading to her and there was a sentence in there, which I should be able to quote verbatim, but it's something like, "A baseball game is nothing but a great contraption to get you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer afternoon." I read that sentence and paused before going on to the next paragraph and in that little gap she said, "Nice."
I don't think that at 8 I would have known what the word "cadence" meant. But kids are not as put off by things they don't understand as adults are.
They leap over it. Or else they ask. It used to be a real pleasure for me to ask my parents what a word meant, because they usually knew and I liked that, that they would know the answer.
Did you worry about some aspects of the book being hard to understand? Did you write in a different way?
I tried to be conscious of vocabulary and to keep it more simple, relatively.
You've always chosen from a broad palette of words.
Yes, so I did narrow it, but not that much. I was aware sometimes of choosing a word that might not be superfamiliar, like "cadence," but I just went with it. It wouldn't have bothered me when I was 11, so I'm just trusting that it'll be OK.
Along the same lines, there are more references to sex and ...
Bodily functions?
Yes, and body parts, like the breasts of the Bigfoot character. Several characters notice them and are aware of them without dwelling on them. "Summerland" is a lot earthier than many children's novels. Was that a deliberate choice?
I just felt that that's how I write. I thought, if I'm an 11-year-old kid and I'm confronted with this big 9-foot female Sasquatch, I'm going to notice her big black breasts. I'm just going to notice them. I noticed them on pictures of gorillas when I was that age and I notice them now. Everybody notices them, so what's the point of not talking about them? And I was thinking that if I wasn't allow to do that, someone would tell me but nobody said anything.
There's also alcoholism, a dead mother and a mother who runs away -- elements that you think of as turning up more in nonfantasy fiction for kids, the kind of book that deals with issues. But this doesn't feel like "issue fiction."
You mean the kind of book where they say, "Now here's the lesson about shoplifting"? Exactly. As a kid I loved fantasy, even out and out fantasy with no ties to the world around us at all, but I also liked realistic fiction like "Harriet the Spy" or "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler." And what I really liked was stuff like Susan Cooper, where she does both at once. She has these very contemporary (for the time) British children having these adventures in this world of Celtic and Arthurian romance.
