The lost adventure of childhood

Did you run into any particularly big challenges in pulling this thing off?

What was hardest for me was that I had so many characters. I needed to get the number of characters up to where they could have a baseball team, nine players. It was a lot. I struggled with that, to make sure that I introduced the characters in good time, that I kept the pace going and also that when they did get introduced they'd be unique and interesting even though they couldn't all be main characters. I still wanted them to feel vivid and alive. That was the hardest. But it wrote itself pretty quickly. This was the most fun, easiest writing that I've had in a long time.

Why do you think that is?

Partly because it had been sitting around inside me for so long waiting to be written. When I started letting it out, it just came out and it was ready. Also maybe because I was working on the screenplay for "Kavalier and Clay" at the same time and that was very hard, often tedious, repetitive, going over the same material, the same characters I'd been living with for four and a half, five years at that point. I'd finish a draft of that, which was always labor, and then turn to "Summerland" and it just felt so liberating. There was a sense of liberation that came from writing fantasy, too, I have to say. It was really hard to write the novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" because there are plenty of people around who were there and remember what New York was like in 1940 or '44. I had to measure up to those people's knowledge.

And that's the kind of body of knowledge that some people are totally fanatical about. They'll be all over your case if you say that the cellophane on the toothpicks at a particular deli was red when it was actually green.

Exactly, and I sweated that stuff a lot. With "Summerland" I got to make it up. People have asked me, "Isn't that hard when you have to make everything up?" and I say, "No, that's easy. Making stuff up is easy. Getting it right is hard."

One thing I loved about "Kavalier and Clay" was the way the characters created heroes for their comic books whose superpowers compensated for the ways they felt inadequate in their own lives -- the Escape Artist was invented by a man who couldn't get his family out of Nazi Germany. Was there anything in "Summerland" that served that purpose for you?

There's this appeal in stories with the idea of people being chosen. Especially in the Susan Cooper book "The Dark Is Rising" -- which I think is the best of the sequence. It's all about how this kid Will is really one of the Old Ones, even though he's never known it until this moment.

Or Harry Potter.

Yeah, Harry Potter's another one. The idea that you're the special one, even though that seems so unlikely and you've never known it. That has a very strong appeal for a certain kind of kid, and maybe since Harry Potter has been so successful, for a lot of kids. That old fantasy of mine is definitely part of what's going on in "Summerland," with the idea that Ethan Feld is a secret champion even though everyone, even the person who's scouted him to be a champion, is somewhat skeptical about it.

You have him go through this whole process with it where it doesn't just happen. First he hears about it, then he thinks he's failed at it, then he has to make it happen. He has an almost postmodern relation to the idea. It's not an unexamined theme for him.

I guess it wouldn't be that way. I have a lot of respect for what J.K. Rowling's done in her books. They're very pleasurable and enjoyable, but if I had a criticism of them it would be that Harry is too good and too talented too quickly and seems to take to the idea that he's the special one too easily. It's always about Harry winning. That's what he does again and again, and if he ever gets into trouble it's not because he's weak or ineffectual and not up to the task, it's because his opponents are so evil, or someone betrays him so he doesn't stand a chance. I couldn't do that. I couldn't imagine that character because it's not enough my own experience of childhood.

Especially if you're writing a book about baseball, a game where there's so much failure involved as a matter of course.

Right. Baseball is a game of failure. It just all fit. Ethan made the baseball work. For example, at the very beginning, when he's railing that the fact that they keep track of errors in baseball seems so unjust to him. And yet I felt that was perfectly appropriate for Ethan Feld that this would be the sport that he would become involved with.

How about the missing mother theme, which is so prominent in this book and so many kids books? There's Harry Potter, and Nancy Drew.

That's why that Kelly Link story is so wonderful. I guess I felt it was part of the tradition, but people have pointed out to me that it's been part of almost every one of my books. Joe Kavalier leaves his parents behind and they're gone, and Grady Tripp in "Wonder Boys" is an orphan from childhood, and Art Bechstein in "Mysteries of Pittsburg" -- his mother is dead. It might be that I was so deeply steeped in children's literature and the whole idea of the absent parent that that was just inevitable. But what I really think is going on is that it's just one less character to have to write.

That's terrible! The structuralist explanation: It's all about the lazy novelist.

But also, you know, a character works best when that character has a wound that needs to be healed, and one of the deepest, longest-lasting wounds that a person can have is to have lost a parent. I didn't lose either of my parents, thank God. They're both still living. But I guess because they were divorced when I was young -- that's a lesser wound but it's given me access to imagining the greater wound.

Next Page: There's no free space for kids to disappear into anymore

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