here should be no mystery about the existence of Summerland. By now—at the end of 2002 in the West, after two centuries "chained," as Townes Van Zandt put it, "upon the face of time"—an experience rendered with neurasthenic exactitude in the literatures of the fantastic—it should no longer be a problem for critics when a fast-track centerfold writer like Michael Chabon, whose previous novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2002), won the Pulitzer Prize, publishes a full fantasy tale without recusing himself from the Trial of Letters.
Summerland is in the end as serious as Kavalier; it is meant to tell the truth as fully. Though its sentences may be shorter, and the convulvulus of its storyline may have been more strictly trained than Kavalier's, Summerland conveys the same bright-eyed, neurasthenic exactitude about rendering that world that Chabon began to master 20 years ago, when his career began to climb. And indeed there has been no fuss, as such, from Establishmentland—though reviews of Summerland in the more tight-sphinctered book review sections of the American quality press have been slightly iffish.
Some ifs are perhaps fair enough; but the biggest of the doubts that might be expressed—a sense that Chabon tends to lose momentum in the middle passages of his vaster projects, Kavalier for example twining for hundreds of interior pages through 1939-1941 like a dozen snakes sucking a dozen tails—relate to problems symptomatic of all his work. Sometimes becoming immersed in the soft middle of one of his tales is like bathing in a once-hot bath. His books tend to a kind of globalizing miniaturism, a sinuous intensity of involvement in detailwork cognate with, but significantly lacking in the plethoras of panicked bricolage characteristic of, "hysterical realism"—a term the critic James Wood has recently used to describe the overblown enumerative list-heavy Big Novels of young American male writers of Chabon's generation. Other ifs, though, certainly any doubts about the actual substance of the tale, are less fair.
Any cavils about the way Summerland actually works, for instance, seem misplaced. It is a tale fully in control of its medium, which is what, in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, I characterized, rhetorically and prescriptively, as "full fantasy": that is, a tale which transacts a passage of the world (which may not necessarily be our world) from seeming normalcy into some lessened and amnesiacal state; caught in that state, the tale's protagonists experience some sort of metamorphosis or self-awareness which transforms not only them but the world around them, returns that world and those who dwell within it to reality. This reality is not, however, the reality of our own fallen existence here in 2002, in the hysteria of plethora; it is a world, an arcadia, that we—all of us, writers and readers and actors on the stage—feel we had lost forever, but have now earned. In Summerland, the emblem and Reality of this long passage into loss and return is the game of baseball.
Pitching the perfect game
We are on an island in Puget Sound, along the Pacific Rim. Young Ethan Feld is a lousy baseball player, already responsible for several losses of his home team, whose matches take place near the western tip of the island, in an enclave or polder called Summerland, a place where, weirdly, it has not rained for more than a century. The baseball diamond at the heart of Summerland (we learn much, much later) can be understood as being isomorphic with the diamond in Hoboken, N.J., where baseball was reportedly invented about 1840; it is also isomorphic with the baseball diamond at the omphalos of the Four Worlds (see below) where the Well waters Yggrdrasil.
Baseball—because of its obedience to the dramatic unities, its Et in Arcadia hover, a hushed timelessness intrinsicate with the deep nostalgia known as desiderium, which may be defined as the longing for a world which should have existed but never did—baseball is the story of the universe. For the true story of the universe in Summerland is the story of retaining that which we, in 2002, lose daily in plethora: What we lose is the story. As in almost any full fantasy, the story of Summerland is all about the regaining of story.
But that universe is under threat. Rain falls on Summerland. Mysterious tiny gnarled men call upon Ethan Feld to leave our world and cross from one branch to another of Yggrdrasil—there are four great branches, the interweaving of whose leaves constitutes the Four Worlds of the universe, including our own, which is the Middling, and Summerland, which is Faerie—in order to gain access to the Well and the primal baseball diamond before the enemy of the universe, who is Coyote, or Trickster, or Hermes, or Loki, can finish his task of desiccating the great story, which is baseball, or, more profoundly, the warp and woof of the leaves of life. To beat Coyote at his game, Ethan Feld must defeat him in the game, that is, baseball.
The effrontery of the idea is, perhaps, central to the pleasure we take. There have been lots of baseball fantasies in recent decades—W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982) and its siblings, Michael Bishop's Brittle Innings (1994), Karen Joy Fowler's The Sweetheart Season (1996), the stories assembled in Rick Wilber's Where Garagiola Waits (1999), to name a few—but none with the chutzpah to claim that a baseball diamond in Hoboken is an iteration of the Well of the Worlds, or that the outcome of one seminal game will announce (or fend off) Ragnarok.
If Chabon gets away with this, and I rather think he does, it is not because he floods us with baseball itself, in its fractal abysms of minutiae; for he does not do so. He wins us over, I think, through an essential virtue in his relationship to story, which is the ability to convey an absolute sense of security in the story being told. He seems to have something like perfect pitch for what a story is, sentence by sentence, then by then.
Kavalier, for all its wanderings in the interior of the tale, has this perfect pitch; the succession of echoes and assonances and prickly coincidences, which gradually conflate the lives of its two heroes with the cartoon characters they created out of bad memories and dreams and adumbrations, is perfectly pitched. Summerland, too, rings like a bell entirely in tune. When Ethan swings his bat for the last time—a bat splintered from Yggrdrasil—blasting a home run that shatters the pane between the worlds that has imprisoned Odin from his thinning creation, then we know we are in the hands of a master of the game.
Summerland is a story we all win.
