Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Michael Chabon, author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," talks about his new kids book, "Summerland," and the freedom he fears is vanishing from children's lives.
Oct 22, 2002 | Michael Chabon's new novel, "Summerland," is meant for kids, but it's just as rangy, eccentric, dreamy and funky as his books for adults. Chabon, an avid reader in his own childhood of classic children's fantasy series by such authors as Susan Cooper and C.S. Lewis, decided he wanted to try his hand at the genre and bring to it a set of American mythic motifs. "Summerland" takes baseball as its theme, a game full of heroism, but one also redolent of nostalgia and the sting of inevitable failure. The novel's hero, Ethan Feld, is a reluctant player trying to please his baseball-smitten widower dad on a small island off the coast of Washington state. When he's enlisted by a supernatural scout to help rescue this world and the magical world called the Summerlands from the schemes of the trickster god Coyote, Ethan has to step up to the plate in more ways than one. He gathers the necessary entourage of friends and sidekicks and sets off on an epic journey across the Summerlands, encountering thunderbirds, giants, ferishers (a roughneck breed of fairies), Sasquatch and a half-dozen tall-tale folk heroes along the way.
Chabon kicked off his literary career with the dazzling "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" (1988), helped adapt his 1995 novel "Wonder Boys" into an acclaimed film in 2000 and won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." He had been intending to write a book like "Summerland" for almost 30 years, but the many new fans the novel is sure to earn him won't have to wait quite so long for the sequels. He recently signed a contract to write two of them. Chabon dropped by the Salon offices recently to talk with us about the creation of the Summerlands, his passion for baseball and the vanishing adventure of American childhood.
I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed this book because when I started it I wasn't sure about the baseball angle. You're nodding your head as if you've heard that before.
Yes, I'm used to it. In a way it was similar to what happened with "Kavalier and Clay." When people heard that was about comic books, I got a lot of "Oh, really? 'Cause I thought I might be interested until I heard that." I was aware there was going to be some initial resistance from some people.
Listen to the interview with Michael Chabon here
I know you wanted to write a children's fantasy novel that was grounded in America in the way classic British children's fantasy is grounded in the land and mythology of that area. Tell me how you got to the baseball theme and some of the other elements of the novel.
I had the idea to do the fantasy part of it first. That had been with me for some time, since I was a kid. When I was 10 and 11 years old and deciding I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, the kind of books I wanted to write were something like Susan Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising" sequence. That inspired me to want to write, and to write books like that. I wanted then to do with American mythology and folklore what she does in those books with Arthurian and Celtic mythology, but I went on to other things and never wrote it.
Then when I had kids of my own and started reading to them aloud at night I rediscovered a lot of those books that I loved so much, and started thinking again about writing fantasy for children. And I had this other idea of writing something about baseball because I could never find a book about baseball for kids that communicated what I thought was important about baseball and what I love about it. Most kids books that aren't just out and out sports books -- like "Batter Up!" or that sort of thing -- use baseball as a backdrop or as window dressing for the story, but they didn't get at baseball. I had these two ideas, and as soon as I started thinking about the fantasy and using American mythology it just seemed to me that baseball was part of that and was a natural fit. Somehow the novel was going to work in this world that was an American mythological universe and also a baseball universe.
Was it hard to put those two things together?
No, it just happened. It came very easy. In fact, baseball has an origin myth, like the city of London. There's a myth of this guy, Abner Doubleday, who became a Civil War general, drawing lines in the dirt in Cooperstown, N.Y., and telling his friends where to stand. That's just complete fabrication. There's a mythic quality -- which is something people have often said about baseball, but I think it's really true. You have things like Cool Papa Bell, the great Negro Leagues player who they said was so fast that he could get in bed under the covers after turning off the light but before the light actually went out. That's like something they'd say about Hermes. It just felt natural.
When you decided to base the book on an American mythology, what kinds of elements did you gather together? Did you already have in mind everything that you wanted to include?
It just grew. I've always loved the tall tales, the stories of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill and Old Stormalong and John Henry. As a kid, I started with "D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths," then I read their "Norse Gods and Giants" and then it seems like the next book I read was a huge book whose title I can't remember, a treasury of American folklore. Those stories all completely blurred and blended in my mind. I didn't really distinguish among them, and I have to say comic book superheroes were in there, too. When I was maybe 7 years old, there wasn't too much difference for me between Superman, Paul Bunyan and Hercules. It was all part of the same thing. That putting together of popular stuff and classical stuff and American stuff, that's how this book came to me. It wasn't an artificial thing.
I think the only stuff that I deliberately introduced was the figure of La Llorona, the Southwestern figure [a ghostlike mother spirit who can be heard wailing for her lost children]. She wasn't something I knew about as a kid. I just started reading about her about 10 years ago. All the other elements, as disparate as they seem, really come from the same place in my memory or my history as a reader, but she's a recent addition. She worked her way into the story because she had to do with Ethan's dead mother and his mourning for her. The rest of it just emerged from Ethan Feld, who is not that different from how I was at 11.
Except that he's not interested in baseball.
No, not at all.
And were you?
I was a big baseball fan, but I was no more skilled on the field than he is. In fact, I was probably worse. The narrator says of Ethan that he was not a terrible klutz, and I was. I loved baseball. My father is a baseball fan. He grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. There was an early taste of disappointment in my exposure to baseball. You'd think that would have discouraged me, but for some reason it didn't. The first team I loved was the Washington Senators (I grew up in the D.C. suburbs), and they were taken and sent to Texas. They became the Texas Rangers when I was about 9 or 10. That just broke my heart. Then I transferred my love and affection to the Pittsburgh Pirates, particularly Roberto Clemente, their great player, and two years after that he was killed in a plane crash.
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