Chabon Legs It Out in Summerland

Both Michael Chabon's Summerland and Adam Gopnik's The King in the Window are fantasies written by established authors for adults and published by Miramax Books. Both are about boys who must rescue their fathers from being hollowed out by their work--psychologically in Gopnik's book, both psychologically and literally in Chabon's.

I found The King in the Window to be needlessly long and complicated, hobbled by an internal lack of logic, and too enamored with its own ideas. And for quite a while I worried that Summerland would sink into the same morass.

The book is 500 pages long, and the first hundred pages are a slow wind-up. Four different characters summon Ethan and his father to the fantasy world, where each is, in different ways, the Chosen One. (Later we learn that there was yet another messenger years before, a pixie with ideas of ballooning.)

Some logical glitches arise from a surfeit of Neat Ideas. For example, we watch the miniature ferishers communicate with their oracular clam using a scroll covered with mysterious letters. Yet when protagonist Ethan picks up a ferisher guidebook to playing catcher, it's written in English.

Giants have kept the smaller creatures of the fantasy world in fear for ages. But on page 427, a character named Cutbelly reveals that he can "scamper" into another dimension and return through a most terrible giant, killing her. Why did none of the many characters who can "scamper" do this to giants before?

And, as I wrote before, I don't understand the resolution of the book's cosmic conflict or how that fits with its stated themes.

Nevertheless, despite its stumbles right out of the box, Summerland gains traction and becomes a solid literary adventure, its heart and imagination lightening its weight. I thought the story took hold when Chabon turned from using wimpy, self-doubting Ethan as his only point-of-view character and started to follow his teammate Jennifer T. Rideout as well. She has fresher worries; more important, she tackles her problems, which Ethan must first learn how to do before he can really be a hero.

The narrative voice also comes into its own, turning more intrusive and even self-referential after sixty pages. It tells us, "This this were a work of fiction, the author would now be obliged to have Ethan waste a few moments wondering if he had dreamed the events of the past few hours."

Finally, I like Chabon's style. Page 6 mentions "a Rodrigo Buendía baseball card." That surname is, of course, an allusion to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Chabon eventually brings Buendía himself into the story, an aging, sore-kneed power hitter who needs the same magic as Ethan and Jennifer T. That could be a cheap literary/baseball stunt, but it works.