Kids Are Us!

By Richard Lacayo/Berkeley

"Burdleburbleslurpleslurpleburbleburdleslurp," said the clam, more or less.

It is a well-established fact that one of the main reasons for writing children's literature is that it offers so many chances for dialogue like that. (Just try to work that sentence into a romance novel.) Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize last year for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, is a novelist who can fashion an elegant grownup story as if it were a piece of soft aluminum. But the opportunity to plunge into the burdleburple of sheer fantasy is one reason he wrote Summerland (Hyperion/Miramax; 500 pages), the kind of book that features a motherly Sasquatch, some intrepid kids, numerous giants and "werefoxes," and several cliff-hanger baseball games on which the fate of the whole world just happens to hinge, plus a giant, prognosticating clam.

Another famous reason to write children's literature is that it gets you back in touch with your inner child. For Chabon, 39, that may not be much of an incentive, since in person he comes across like a man who already exchanges regular e-mails with his inner child and plays paintball tag with him all the time. But lately there's a big new reason for writing stories aimed at "young readers," the publishing-industry term for kids who are done with picture books but not quite ready for Tolstoy and Candace Bushnell. It's Harry Potter. Harry's success with the reading world--more than 100 million copies sold around the globe--is something that the writing world could not ignore.

Chabon (pronounced Shay-bon) is the best known of a field of established authors who are all at once producing books for the Potterhead age group and up. This fall brings titles by the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende; Carl Hiassen, the deadpan satirist of modern Florida; and Clive Barker, the ghoul--or whatever you would call the man behind the Hellraiser films. There's serious money here. Even before Barker's book appears in stores, Disney has reportedly paid $8 million for the film, merchandising and theme-park rights to his characters. Theme-park rights? This never happened to Faulkner.

Chabon runs his fingers through his unkempt hair and looks up at the ceiling. He's one of those radiant-child adults, the kind you can imagine as the dreamy fourth-grader he must once have been. We're in his big Arts and Crafts-style house in Berkeley, Calif., with his wife Ayelet Waldman, a former public defender turned crime novelist, and their three children, Sophie, 7; Zeke, 5; and Ida-Rose, 16 months. Chabon and his wife live in a noisy, kid-centered world. Waldman's books are about a former public defender turned stay-at-home mom who cracks cases while the baby naps. As Chabon answers questions, the dog barks. Waldman picks a piece of fluff off her husband's face. Sophie's school calls with the news that Sophie just threw up. This would help explain why, in order to write, Chabon stashes himself away every morning in a small cottage behind the house, with his Bakelite radio, his framed original comic-strip panels and his Roberto Clemente baseball card.

"I wasn't thinking about Harry Potter for a second when I wrote Summerland," Chabon insists. But he admits that "it helped pave the way. It made the idea of a children's book so much more thinkable for writers." Even when you put aside the money, what writer would not want to have J.K. Rowling's impact on the world? Because of Rowling's Harry Potter series, millions of children have decided, at least for a while, that the most important thing in their lives is not a Powerpuff Girls movie, a pro-wrestling action figure or Britney. It's a book. "Our daughter Sophie got so obsessed with Harry Potter," Chabon recalls. "I said to myself, 'I want something that I write to mean that much to her.' Your kids are always saying to you, 'Daddy, when are you gonna write a book that I can read?' You always have a sense that you're letting them down by writing these stories about people with pot habits who cheat on their wives."

Given that Summerland's publisher, Miramax Books, is an affiliate of Miramax studios, guess who will produce the inevitable Summerland film? Miramax Books had already embarked on its blatant Harry Potter knock-off, the Artemis Fowl series, when Chabon came by with his idea for something subtler, a story about a struggle to fend off the end of everything, hinging upon baseball games played in a magical parallel world. The hero is that classic figure of children's literature, the semiabandoned child. Ethan Feld is 11. His mother has died of cancer. His loving but grieving father is absorbed now in perfecting his prize invention, a family dirigible. Father and son have recently moved to Clam Island, a cloud-covered stretch of land in the Puget Sound where Ethan is the worst player on a hapless Little League team.

Ethan hates baseball. It's a game in which errors are actually counted, and Ethan is the kind of player who lets easy pop flies drift over his mitt. All the same, Ethan is recruited to head a team being formed by the ferishers, a race of fairy folk who are struggling to prevent Coyote, Chabon's semiappealing Satan figure, from poisoning the waters that nourish the Tree of the World, which holds up the four worlds, which can be magically traversed by scampering around the Tree, which...Let's just say that when it comes to elaborate plotting, Proust has nothing on Chabon.

Summerland adapts Norse mythology, Native American folklore, American fables and Homeric myth, in addition to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, to teach the enduring children's book lessons about finding strength within yourself. Like Sammy Clay, the self-doubting hero of Kavalier & Clay, Ethan goes through much of the book convinced that he is not up to the task assigned to him. Chabon himself has talked about feeling like a fraud sometimes, even as the reviews and prizes poured in. But the beauty of writing as an occupation is that personal anxiety just gives you one more way into your characters. "I have more confidence now in my abilities as a writer," he says. "I think I'm a pretty good father. But there are still plenty of areas where I feel I'm not coming up to the mark. And those have enabled me to hold on to that sense of inadequacy that has served me so well throughout my life."

Some people would call it a charmed life anyway. Chabon has been a published novelist almost from the moment he completed the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine. The manuscript he produced for his master's degree was passed along by his thesis adviser to an agent. Eventually it became The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the 1988 book that got him noticed immediately as a young writer on the rise. "I've been very lucky all my life," he says. "You can't help but feel that you don't deserve it. You're an impostor, impersonating a successful person."

Chabon's rise stalled for a while as he spent nearly five years on an ever enlarging but never completed novel. In time he put the ballooning manuscript aside and started a new novel about a pot-smoking college professor with his own long-unfinished novel. Wonder Boys was a wry 1995 book that became a witty movie last year with Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr. But it was Kavalier & Clay that made the superabundance of Chabon's gifts superapparent. The story of two boys who invent a Nazi-bashing comic-book hero during World War II, it is an irresistible tale of a lost New York City that is also a superb coming-of-age story. Chabon has just completed the screenplay for a forthcoming film version to be produced by Scott Rudin, who also produced Wonder Boys.

For any of the many writers going to kids' books these days, the Harry pot of gold may be reason enough to go. But children's literature, with its freedom from the constraints of reality, was a natural place for Chabon to turn. Tom Wolfe may think that the 19th century social novel is the only true model for fiction these days, but Chabon has other ideas. For one thing, he wants literary fiction to enjoy the liberties of fantasy genres like science fiction or horror. His next novel will be about a detective in an alternative present day in which the Jewish state is not the Israel we know but a Yiddish-speaking homeland carved out of Alaska.

"I am not going to become a fantasy writer or a writer of science fiction," he says. "But I'm going to ignore the conventions of literary fiction as much as I can. And whatever kind of fiction comes out of that, I'm just going to hope I can bring readers along with me." They can start the trip at Summerland.