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"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."