by Kari Heil
Summerland (2002) by Michael Chabon is a young adult novel worth reading as an adult. Especially with summer coming on, with baseball season and little league and all, this book is a great read for anyone 10 and up who will appreciate a fantastical adventure in an alternate dimension all wrapped up in a story about baseball, family, and a broken but beautiful world.
Why am I recommending a young adult pick? I like Summerland, even though it’s supposed to be tuned to readers between the ages of 10 and 18, because it’s well written, intricately detailed, and a page-turner with a warm message about hope. Chabon’s book is, on the one hand, a lighthearted fantasy tale with some laugh-out-loud moments, but it also has the bite of hard, heavy reality to it – dysfunctional families, shattered dreams, destructive commercial development, not to mention the imminent end of the world. While it is primarily plot-driven rather than character-driven, which is typical of young adult literature, Summerland is built on so many layers of myth and such richness of setting that I didn’t miss complex inwardness in the characters.
In fact, Chabon does suggest a degree of growth in his main character, 11-year-old Ethan Feld, who travels for a season through Summerland, a world parallel to the human world, with an itinerant baseball team comprised of fairies (ferishers), a giant, a Bigfoot, and talking animal-people (were-creatures). Ethan must find his kidnapped father, a nutty inventor, and learn to believe in himself in order to be the hero that folks in Summerland inexplicably expect him to be. Ethan begins his journey tentative and awkward, but learns to trust his friends and his own instincts. In many respects, this is a classic coming-of-age story, marvelously set against a backdrop of imaginary places and non-human companions.
Ethan and his troop of misfits play baseball as they make their way through Summerland, but their main objective is to prevent Coyote, the trickster, the Changer, the charming and cunning devil, from poisoning the Tree that supports – that is – all life. Coyote is tired of the world and wants to end it. But Ethan and his friends still love the wretched and half-wrecked world; they want to keep trying, to continue playing the game, despite its unfairness, despite the hurt, grief, and loss that inevitably come with it. In the end, Ethan’s struggle through pain leads to restoration, reconciliation, and new hope for the bad old world.
Ironically, it is hapless, reluctant Ethan, the worst player on his little league team in his own world, who has the potential to save the universe from destruction – if only he can learn to wield his magic bat. It may seem hard to conceive of how baseball could save the world, but Chabon asks us to try, and it actually isn’t so hard once you get hooked on the book, even if you aren’t interested in baseball at all. I mean, why not a game of chance to decide the final outcome of the Story of everything that is? Why not a ragtag band facing off against wily, deceptive Coyote and his minions on Diamond Green? Chabon actually fairly successfully leads readers to imagine baseball as a kind of archetypal activity, a world-making and world-breaking cycle upon which everything in the universe depends. In the bottom of the ninth, readers find out if Ethan can muster the inner strength to deliver a final desperate stroke with the power of wonder, hope, and trust – the power to break down walls and make the world a better place in which to live.
Some critics of Summerland complain that it borrows or echoes elements from too many diverse sources – Norse mythology, Native American tradition, American tall tales and folklore (think Paul Bunyan et al.), Homeric quest, classic children’s literature by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. One favorable reviewer says Summerland is a “seamless merger of A Wrinkle In Time [by Madeline L’Engle] and ‘Field of Dreams’” – which is a somewhat accurate, but incomplete assessment of the book. If the book is a little derivative, it seems to me that it is with a knowing wink from Chabon, an unabashed delight in how so many versions of the story of the world can fit together. Though Chabon’s book is chock-full of references to and resonances with other, earlier literature and oral traditions, it works out a rhythm of its own, and it’s quite fun to see how Chabon makes all the pieces fall into place in his own world-system. I think the wild mash-up of origin stories and Armageddon scenarios works in Summerland. Read the book and see for yourself if you think so, too.
Chabon’s second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), was made into a movie starring Michael Douglas in 2000. Chabon’s best-known novel for adults, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. (I recommend this one, too!)
For the (younger) kiddos
Hey Willy, See the Pyramids (1988) by Maira Kalman is a quirky and endearing bedtime story with more than a touch of the surreal about it. Okay, at first glance, it may seem just plain weird. But despite its weirdness, or maybe because of it, there’s something really special about this book! When Alexander can’t sleep, he asks his sister, Lulu, to tell him stories. The book is made up of eleven of Lulu’s very short stories (a few sentences each, at most), interspersed with a couple of groggy exchanges between brother and sister (on pages as black as a bedroom without a nightlight). The stories are, of course, the kind a person makes up when she is tired and just trying to get a child to go to sleep; they have a vague, disconnected, stream-of-consciousness manner and tone, and they incorporate certain parts of the children’s waking life, like their relatives and neighbors. The distortions, disproportions, and spatial displacements in Kalman’s wacky paintings are not off-putting or hard to look at; they are surprising and fascinating. It’s natural for a listener’s eyes to wander all around one of Kalman’s illustrations and focus on various different little corners or details while hearing each related story, like in a dream. The pictures are downright funny, to match the bizarre stories. There is good, gentle humor in the absurd, which is one reason why, at our house, we have read and reread this extraordinary book.
