Summerland

Baseball has long inspired works of fantasy and magical realism, such as W. P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe (which inspired the 1989 film Field of Dreams). In Summerland, Michael Chabon combines the game of baseball with elements from mythologies across various cultures to create a world that elevates baseball from a simple game to a test of valor that is used to gain status and settle conflicts. The novel’s Tree of Worlds most prominently references the World Tree of Norse myth and represents the concept of life existing along the ever-expanding branches of a great tree. Within the four worlds of the novel, Chabon explores the light and dark courts of the fae worlds (the Summerlands and Winterlands), as well as Middling (the human realm based on Midgard from Norse myth), and the realm of the gods, which was locked away thousands of years before Summerland takes place in order to set the stage for the battle between chaos and order. Coyote is a prominent figure from Indigenous American myth, known as both a trickster and a figure who provided innovations to humans, always with a price. In the novel, he’s motivated by his belief that he knows best and that he could form creation better than the other gods, which makes him a symbol of humankind’s eternal struggle against the powers of nature. Because of this, Coyote is a universal figure who is represented across world cultures as figures like Prometheus (Greek) and Loki (Norse).

Chabon imposes these elements of world myth and a standard quest format onto an American mythology that he creates around the game of baseball in which the baseball diamond represents the different phases of the adventure, as the titles of the book’s four parts reflect. The protagonist, Ethan Feld, is the chosen one (a fantasy trope in which a character is the inevitable hero either by experience or design), and his journey is therefore both unique and universal. His specific quest to navigate the Summerlands through developing his baseball skills takes him on an adventure populated by creatures of American myth (such as the sasquatch). Ethan’s journey matches others undertaken by heroes across cultures, following the universal concept of the quest as philosopher Joseph Campbell discusses in his definitive work The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949). In addition, Summerland is a portal fantasy (a work in which the hero enters a separate world to undertake a quest across a fantastical landscape). By making baseball an established and powerful force in this fantastical world, Chabon sets up Ethan to overcome his dislike of the game as he’s forced to improve in order to save both his world and his father.