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[bryant]

Summerland rules.

It absolutely, completely sings. I could sling around quotes all day, but suffice it to say that Chabon's prose is elegantly clear, without unnecessary flourish or artifice. He's got the knack of writing about the mythic without seeming pretentious or overwrought. People sound like people, even when they're saying important things. "A baseball game is nothing but a great contraption to get you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer afternoon." Yeah. I love the way he takes the sting out of the eloquence by deliberately dropping back into the vernacular with "get you to pay attention." A lesser writer would have said "to force you to pay attention," or used some other more grammatical construction.

On top of that, the structure of the book is beautiful. He's said he was trying to do Susan Cooper for America, and I think he's come pretty close. Baseball is the central metaphor, but it is not a book about baseball; I fell into the assumption that I was reading a book that would follow the usual sports tropes and was thus pleasantly flabbergasted at the climax.

I must also give Chabon credit for writing about the real American gods. Sorry, Neil. Gaiman's characters claim that "This is a bad land for Gods," but Chabon defuses such criticism and writes of The Tall Man with the Knife in His Boot and reminds us that yeah. We do have our own myths. It is not necessary to paper the walls of America with faded gods of other lands.

Even his Coyote is pretty solid. He occupies the most malevolent corner of the Trickster continuum, but that's OK. It's good to be reminded that Coyote isn't a benevolent god, just a god who mostly has good intentions.

I was probably fated to love this book from the moment Chabon casually mentioned a Hellboy T-shirt, catching the attention of my geek side, but everything else about Summerland was perfect too.

Comments

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

Wow. Great review. I may have to pick it up today. At the very least, one could look at American Gods as a nice Old World counterpoint to this book, in the vein that Americans don't have their own gods. Glad to hear it's not a rehashing of AG.

[bryant]

I will admit to being a Michael Chabon fanboy.

It's really interesting reading fiction which is so much /like/ something that would be written by an author from the SF&F subculture, yet which does not partake of the usual memes. At times I feel as though Chabon was raised in an invisible, parallel fandom.

Old World vs. New World is indeed an apt comparison.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Yes, excellent review. The book sounds great. I take it it didn't feel too much like reading a kid's book? That's really the only thing keeping me from running out and grabbing a copy.

We do have our own myths. It is not necessary to paper the walls of America with faded gods of other lands.

Very nicely put. I really wanted to love American Gods but was disappointed for just that reason. If the best "American God" you can come up with is an imported Odin, I think you're missing something important.

[bryant]

Hm. I'm never adverse to a good kid's book, but you might want to skim the first chapter before purchasing. It's a kid's book written without the notion that children have small vocabularies.

And yeah -- I didn't want to criticize Gaiman too harshly, because it wasn't the point of the review, but American Gods failed for me. It wasn't until I read Summerland that I realized why.