Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  Coyote does not want to take over the world, in YA cliché, end all life, or end the world. He wants to put an end to stories. (That the world will also end is incidental to Coyote.) Summerland builds toward the battle, through baseball, to preserve the possibility of storytelling, which will end when the pathways between worlds are destroyed. Indeed, the stories that populate Summerland itself mostly come about because the kids themselves travel through galls. After the first such adventure, Cutbelly explains,

  “That were yer first tangling-up with the greater grammer [Summerland’s system of magic]. . . . It won’t never keep ya out if yer so hot ta get in as all that. It’ll let ya in, you bet. But it won’t never let ya get far. Not without making sure that ya gotten yerself all tangled up in grammer.”

  “What happens then?”

  “Stories happen,” the ferisher said. “Misadventures. Exploits . . . Send a reubenish [human] army through—just try!—and they get tangled up in all kinds of sagas and folderol.” (199–200)

  Like many fairy tales, Summerland is aware of its own status as a story, and as a system for generating and telling stories. It hardly seems coincidental that Chabon uses the word “grammer” for magic spells, or even the implied pun on “spell” as intrinsic to magic and writing alike. Indeed, Ethan learns the secrets of baseball primarily from reading a book about it, so that he can use that knowledge to save books through baseball. Yet Coyote is an unconventional villain. In his review of Summerland, Adam Bresnick writes that “my budding 10-year-old literary critic . . . noted that Coyote is supposed to be the most evil figure in the cosmos, but finally there is nothing terrifying about him, as there is, say, about J. R. R. Tolkien’s reptilian nemesis Sauron.” In fact, Chabon does not portray Coyote as traditionally evil at all. He’s funny, charming, and persuasive—an alluring devil out of American folklore more than a silent Anglo-Saxon or Dante-esque Dark Lord. What’s more, Chabon clearly likes Coyote, and likes Tricksters, as he discusses extensively in his essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” in the book Maps and Legends. In it, Chabon cites Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World:

  Hyde’s masterpiece concerns the trickster of mythology—Hermes among the Greeks, the Northmen’s Loki, the Native Americans’ Coyote and Raven and Rabbit, the Africans’ Eshu and Legba and Anansi . . . , Krishna, the peach-stealing Monkey of the Chinese, and our own friend Satan. . . . Trickster is the stealer of fire, the maker of mischief, teller of lies, bringer of trouble, upset, and, above all, random change. And all around the world . . . Trickster is associated with borders, no man’s lands, with crossroads and intersections. (Maps and Legends 24)

  Like the influences of Summerland, the Trickster traverses America, Americana, American Indian, Judeo-Christian, Eastern, Pan-African, and Norse territory, even as the Trickster’s map is made up of borders and intersections, not the prescribed space itself. Chabon sees affinities between the writer and the Trickster: “Most of the most-interesting writers of the past seventy-five years or so have, like Trickster, found themselves drawn, inexorably, to the borderlands” (24), by which here Chabon means “the space between genres” (25), echoing Summerland’s description of galls. Summerland reiterates the names of “Trickster in a Suit of Lights” as well; introducing himself to Ethan’s father, Coyote allows that, in addition to Coyote, “Some people call me . . . the Changer. Monkey. Raven. Weasel. Snake. Loki, Herm, Legba, Glooscap, Eshu, Shaitan, Prometheus” (220). Yet here, Coyote does not represent “pleasure for readers through play, through the particular commingling of mockery and tribute, invocation and analysis, considered rejection and passionate embrace, which are the hallmarks of Trickster literature” (Maps and Legends 25). Instead, Coyote wants to bring about the end of stories. Uncle Mo says that Coyote is “tired of things the way they are” even though Mo implies, as Chabon suggests in his essay, that Coyote is in fact responsible for all stories in the first place. Coyote explains it this way to Ethan’s father:

  “Now, listen. For reasons that are hard to explain to reubens—believe me, I’ve tried—I would like to put an end to existence as we know it. But the way I’ve been going about it is so very slow and inefficient. Along about oh, three or four thousand years ago, I realized that I would never be able to undo everything, take everything back to zero, as long as magic and its by-product, story, were constantly flowing back and forth among the worlds through the pleached branches of the Tree. So I’ve been trying ever since to cut apart those interesting galls.” (Summerland 223–24)

  Here, Chabon presents a paradox of storytelling. Coyote, inventor of stories, embodies the spirit of play, randomness, indeterminacy, and borderlands. But at the same time, stories require the teller to impose a kind of order, a return to zero, by eliminating the spaces in between worlds where stories are made, or else the story will never end. To finish the story, Coyote must destroy it. And interestingly, Chabon sees this kind of symmetry between creation and destruction as part of the storyteller’s job as well. In the end, the kids and their team indeed beat Coyote in the last baseball game of the novel, but Coyote does not hold up his end of the bargain (“So I lied!” [470]), instead using the machine he has built to begin bringing about Ragged Rock. But Chabon introduces a deus ex machina, something that stops the end from happening and snatches up Coyote as he yells, “Get back in there! Go away, you big one-eyed bully! I’m not done! I’m not done!” (472). The “one-eyed bully” is likely Odin, king of the Norse Gods (in keeping with Coyote’s alias as Loki and with Ragnarök), who intervenes as a kind of cosmic umpire to make Coyote play fairly. But Coyote is done, and, soon enough after that final game, so are the other characters. Stories continue, but the victory does not stop this story, the book itself, from winding down in the final and shortest section, Home. The magical borders between worlds and their by-product, stories, will live on. But Chabon understands that in another sense, Coyote has won after all. With his seeming defeat, as dictated by the conventions of YA fantasy and baseball alike, the object is still to be safe at home and stay there. Stories must end, and wayward children must learn that there is no place like home. Chabon understands the constraints of literary conventions that he freely uses. In the end, Summerland is that most American thing, the bedtime story.

  Summerland, then, both adheres to and updates the conventions of YA fantasy: a group of diverse travelers, later to include a werefox, giant, and yeti, like the cast of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and many more; the orphaned main character (Harry Potter, Bod of Chabon contemporary Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, superheroes, as Chabon well knows, and too many more to name); the realization that the human world is just one of many. Chabon, however, makes these tropes distinctly American in a field of books that have become synonymous with British authors. He draws upon distinctly American lore throughout, including his team of giants, the Big Liars, their names a pun on their height and ontological status, and characters based on Paul Bunyan, Joe Magarac, John Henry, Pecos Bill, and others. But Chabon’s America is multicultural, so his legends, not just his people, are diverse as well. The novel appropriates the tale of La Llorona, of Mexican American origin, together with a strong undercurrent of American Indian legend, from the novel’s nemesis Coyote to the ferishers, who, unlike the Anglo-Saxon fairies popularized by Peter Pan, resemble “a bunch of tiny Indians out of some old film or museum diorama” (47) (or, I might add, canonical children’s literature such as The Indian in the Cupboard or Peter Pan itself). And they all play baseball. Humans—and in Summerland, they are Americans—are called reubens, rather than J. K. Rowling’s Muggles, a distinctly American shift in nomenclature. A reuben is an American sandwich that mixes incongruous, map-spanning ingredients (corned beef, swiss cheese, and Russian dressing). Reuben is a traditional Old Testament and Jewish name and one of the tribes of Israel, in keeping with Ethan’s heritage and the whole notion of multiple lands. But most importantly, a rube is carnival slang for an audience member who will believe
anything, an apt description of humans in general but particularly the reader, and also of Ethan himself. As the narrator explains in one of the novel’s authorial incursions,

  If 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. Since, however, every word of this account is true, the reader will not be surprised to learn that Ethan had no doubt whatsoever that in the company of a shadowtail he had leaped from one hidden branch of the Tree of Worlds to another—to the realm that in books was sometimes called Faerie—for the second time in his life. He knew perfectly well that he really had met a sort of fairy king there, and seen a ballpark made from a giant’s bones, and rescued an oracular clam with one lucky toss of a ball. Ethan could tell the difference between the nonsensical business of a dream and the wondrous logic of a true adventure. (61)

  While at times Summerland’s fantasy, baseball, and Jewish conceits make it seem as though its title should be Field of Dreams, Chabon is careful to differentiate between the symbolic wishes and fears represented by dreams, as opposed to the meticulously constructed nature of imaginary worlds and multilayered narratives. But again, crucially Chabon wants to mine the collective American imagination. Chabon says that “the ambition to write a fantasy novel using American myth and folklore, in the way that the works of Lewis and Tolkien, and Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander and Alan Garner use British and Celtic folklore, dates directly from the time when I was reading those writers—around the time I was 10 and 11” (Grant).

  Scholastic’s website calls Summerland’s genre a “Western,” that most American of genres. And while of course this is an oversight, it is a revealing one, since, in some sense, strangely enough, Summerland is a kind of Western, and not just because it includes Indians. Summerland begins on Clam Island, in Washington State—the very end of frontier and Manifest Destiny, so that there is no longer any America left to explore. The land has been fully charted. Like the imaginary worlds that influenced it—Narnia, Middle Earth, Neverland, and many more—Summerland begins with a map of Clam Island in the novel’s inside cover. However, unlike those novels, as Amy Bright notices, “Interestingly, Chabon does not map out the mythological space of the Summerlands, Winterlands, or the Gleaming, but limits himself to providing a physical representation of a realistic fictional geographical space. The mythological space must be mapped out by the reader’s imagination and is constructed through story rather than with a physical map” (94). What’s more, “Clam Island, seen on a map, looked like a boar that was running west” (Summerland 14), and Earth’s Summerland is the most western part. Neither America nor the boar can run any farther west. Yet the novel maintains and extends the dream of exploration and the frontier, which has moved from the physical to the metaphysical and magical.

  Chabon’s imaginary worlds, then, are extensions of America itself. On some level, though, Chabon does not want the reader to think that Summerland and the Tree of Worlds, also referred to as “the Lodgepole,” stand for some aspect of America, but rather, that, in a real way, they are America. As Cutbelly the werefox—shadowtail, Jungian sage, and Summerland’s Dumbledore—explains to Ethan, who, in trying to grasp the nature of the universe as a tree, asks if “‘Clam Island is like a leaf’”: “‘It isn’t like a leaf. It is a leaf. This is not some fancy metaphor, piglet. It’s real. It’s there. It’s holding us all up right now, you and me and Bulgaria and Pluto and everything else. Just because something is invisible and immaterial doesn’t mean it isn’t really there’” (40). A place can be imaginary as well as real. Reality is not at odds with the imagination. Rather, reality comes from conceptual mapping and story itself.

  Indeed, Chabon understands the relationships between place and story better than almost any other writer, beginning in the pun of his essay and collection title “Maps and Legends.” There, Chabon analyzes the town of Columbia, Maryland, where he grew up and which, like a fictional world, existed as a fully developed idea on paper before it came into physical being. When he and his family moved to Columbia in 1969, “it was home to no more than a few thousand people—‘pioneers,’ they called themselves. They were colonists of a dream, immigrants to a new land that as yet existed mostly on paper. More than four-fifths of Columbia’s projected houses, office buildings, parks, pools, bike paths, elementary schools, and shopping centers had yet to be built” (Maps and Legends 27). He describes how as a child he pored over that map “long before my family ever moved into the house that we eventually bought . . . at 519 Eliots Oak Road, in the Neighborhood of Longfellow, in the Village of Harper’s Choice. To me the remarkable thing about those names was not their oddity but the simple fact that most of them referred to locations that did not exist. They were like magic spells, each one calibrated to call into being one particular stretch of blacktop, sidewalk, and lawn, and no other” (31). Columbia, named after the man who did not quite discover America as much as made it exist on a map, came into being first through language. Its first residents were prototypical Americans—pioneers, colonists, and immigrants to this imaginary homeland that magically came to life from its inscriptions, like the Golem of Prague.

  Cutbelly to the contrary, however, the Tree of Worlds is also a metaphor, not for the world itself, but for the world of stories. Part of what makes Chabon’s work original and interesting is the same aspect that has frustrated book critics like Lipsyte and Murray and moderated his academic recognition—that the seemingly separate genres of writing all coexist, and that only some writers, like shadowtails, are able to find the points where the different leaves in the Tree of Worlds, the seemingly different, unreachable realms, intersect, the “galls,” as Uncle Mo explains in the earlier quotation, that Coyote wants to destroy. “Galls,” Cutbelly explains, “mark the spots were two worlds flow into each other. And they tend to be magical places. Sacred groves, haunted pools, and so forth. Your Summerland is just such a place” (52).

  And so is your Summerland, the novel. Cutbelly describes the Lodgepole in this way: “It’s holding us all up right now, you and me and Bulgaria and Pluto” (40). Writing about the restrictions he felt about genre in “Imaginary Homelands,” Chabon’s language mirrors Cutbelly’s; Chabon writes, “I learned that science fiction was not serious fiction, that a writer of mystery novels might be loved but not revered, that if I meant to get serious about the art of fiction I might set a novel in Pittsburgh but never on Pluto” (Maps and Legends 188). It is hardly surprising, then, that Chabon was drawn to the kinds of fantasy stories that influenced Summerland. YA is one of the only American genres where Chabon’s overlapping of fantasy and reality, fiction and truth, and genre—“pleaching”—is not only acceptable but, in the post-Potter world, nearly a requirement. In A Dangerous Fiction: Subverting Hegemonic Masculinity through the Novels of Michael Chabon and Tom Wolfe, Louise Colbran writes that Summerland “ultimately questions any sense of gender stability. It looks at a variety of behaviors that are represented as masculine . . . and, through this plurality, challenges the legitimacy of the hegemonic gender identity” (106). Substitute “genre” for “gender” and the analysis still holds up well. Young adult fantasy thrusts realistic, relatable characters into fantastic new worlds, but it also demands incursions of the real into the fantastic itself—the World War II subtext of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or Harry Potter’s central and counterintuitive notion of schools and governments for the thing that the average Muggle would least associate with them, magic.

  Chabon, then, in some ways has more in common with YA writers than with many of his contemporaries in literary fiction. It is no surprise that he is one of the few award-winning, “serious” novelists (perhaps with only Dave Eggers) to have cowritten Hollywood screenplays, including Spider-Man II and John Carter. Chabon’s ability to map the kinds of imaginary places found mostly in movies and YA becomes clear from his book titles alone: Summerland, together with Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Gentlemen of the Road, T
elegraph Avenue, A Model World, the essay collection Maps and Legends, and even his fabled, 1,500-page unfinished novel, Fountain City, are named after places rather than a main character, a title standby from the Aeneid to Clarissa to Mrs. Dalloway to Harry Potter. And even the novels not named after places are inextricable from their settings. At the same time, these novels are literary “galls,” joining of the two seemingly separate parts of the Tree of Worlds—in this case, literary worlds—where their stories and multiple genres intertwine in new kinds of magical, imaginary places.

  Unlike the worlds of Summerland, Chabon’s other imaginary places do not fit the traditional conception of fantasy. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, for example, explains that the writers were inspired by what it might be like to take “a guided tour of Paul Feval’s vampire city, Selene,” and, “excited by the idea, it did not take long for us to compile a list of other places we felt we would like to visit: Shangri-La, Oz, and Ruritania readily sprang to mind” (ix). Despite their book’s length—over 750 double-columned, small-print pages—nevertheless the authors discovered that “as the project developed, our list of entries kept growing, threatening to become endless” (x), resulting in the exclusion of imaginary places that were “in effect, disguises, or pseudonyms, for existing locales”; “Pooh’s turf or Watership Down” because “these exist. . . . The characters, the actions, were imaginary—not the places” (x); or imaginary worlds set in the future (xi). Summerland aside, Chabon’s novels certainly would not qualify for inclusion. Yet many of Chabon’s novels are set in imaginary places disguised as real ones, galls mapped by language from which stories emerge.