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Michael Chabon snags Harry Potter magic on the baseball diamond

Sunday, December 29, 2002

By John Schulman

Pulitzer winner Michael Chabon's new novel is a departure for him in many ways.

It is meant for the 10- to 15-year-old age group, although any grown-up can read this without embarrassment.

It differs from his other coming-of-age narratives in the absence of screwed-up adults plastering together their lives through a mixture of sex, drugs and fantastic schemes.

	Summerland By Michael Chabon Hyperion ($22.95)

In all, it's is a perfect book to help the winter doldrums pass, as it is a fantasy revolving around the game of baseball.

Much of what we love in Chabon is still here. The rich, verdant prose that launched his reputation has not been dumbed-down for kids but is nevertheless kid-friendly.

A new troupe of fully realized characters with their troubled pasts and difficulties in relating to the real world finds either solace or ways of dealing with their problems.

Chabon's love of baseball and his admiration for some of its old-time players, a secondary theme that surfaces occasionally in previous works, forms the heart of the thematic lineup.

Ethan Feld lives on Clam Island off the coast of Washington State with his geeky inventor dad. He plays Little League ball unwillingly, being a last-pick sort, and the ballfield lies in Summerland, on the western tip of the island.

In defiance of the rains that plague the rest of Clam Island, the skies over Summerland are always blue.

It is a "ferisher," one of the Little Folk who populate the book, who explains Summerland's freakish weather. Ethan learns from them that the Universe is actually a tree, its enormous number of branches and leaves representing various places and times and with four main quadrants or worlds.

We on Earth happen to live in the Middling world. Some of the magical creatures can "scamper" from branch to branch, from world to world.

When two leaves from different branches touch, it creates a "gall," or magical space, where the mundane world takes on some of the features of the other land it touches. Such is the case with Summerland.

Besides the Little Folk, Ethan will encounter an odd assortment of talking clams, tribes of giants and mendacious cowboys, revivified Homestead Grays and other ballplayers, a morose female Sasquatch and the devilish Coyote, who represents evil.

Ethan has been chosen as the hero who can save the universe from destruction at the hands of Coyote.

Coyote's diabolical mission is not only to separate the leaves and thus eliminate the galls but also to poison the well that waters the tree. Coyote's plans are nearly complete -- rain has come to Summerland.

Two friends join Ethan on his adventures through the other worlds: Jennifer T. Rideout, also a member of the Little League team but worlds more talented, and Thor Wignutt, another teammate, awkwardly talented in his own ways.

The trio wage an epic battle, which hinges, of course, on a ballgame against the devil, with the fate of the universe decided in the bottom of the ninth.

Particularly well-handled are the poetics of baseball. It is the game that is played throughout the Four Worlds, the currency that determines power and place. Legendary players from the Grays play out second lives as shamans, saying things like, "A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day."

So it is an allegory that Chabon has served up, from a veritable melting pot of American sources. There is the trickster-coyote imported from Southwestern Indian creation myths, the mendacious cowboys who exaggerate everything and the wizened ballplayers reciting hard-won maxims.

That Chabon can spin a coherent allegory from such disparate material is testament to his powers as a writer.

There are other borrowings, but most of all there are parallels with Harry Potter -- Rowling made Rawlings. And who can blame Chabon for wanting a piece of that Potter mojo?

In both epics, a boy discovers hidden gifts within, including courage and loyalty, and must pit himself against the embodiment of evil, accompanied by two friends, a girl and a boy.

Baseball holds relatively more importance than Harry's game of Quidditch in the two, but the significance of Ethan's bat, made from a branch of the Tree itself, mirrors the wand Harry waves.

Ethan's bat has a recalcitrant knot, which, like Harry's scar, marks his history and his future. Indeed, "the pain of the Knot was searing," just as Harry's scar hurts when evil's around. Both stories even have airborne cars. Intentional or not, these similarities call attention to themselves.

If Rowling's books are the more powerful and memorable by virtue of better plotting and pacing, Chabon's is the more thoughtful and wide-ranging, as it probes the myths that inform that essence we can never quite identify: What it is to be an American.

After all, the granddaddy of American myths is that of assimilation. Can people of diverse backgrounds really become "naturalized" and share any cultural commonality at all?

Chabon makes a subtle case for "galls" as the redeeming factor. They are those rare places where connections are made, assimilation is accomplished, yet native identities are left intact.

Like other classics in this genre, Chabon's novel will give as good as it gets. He may be implying that the narrative and cadence of a ballgame can, like a good story, create ideal circumstances for a gall, transporting people to other worlds and bringing them back happier and wiser. Or he may simply be telling a ripping good yarn.

John Schulman is co-owner of Caliban Books, a used bookstore in Oakland.