Summerland by Michael Chabon

I do not belong to a book club for two reasons. One is that I don’t want to be told what to read at any given time, and the other is that I’ve never been invited to join one. It’s a sad fact, but I could count on one hand the number of bibliophiles among my friends in the Bay Area. I did once try to start my own book club with my friends outside the Bay Area, an ambitious undertaking that lasted, surprisingly, over a year. Who would have thought that an enterprise named The Long Distance Book Club would survive that long?

My plan was simple yet ridiculously difficult to accomplish: each member of the club would choose a book, and on the first of the month, mail it to the next person in the mailing chain. Every month, you mailed the book in your possession on, whether or not you had finished it. Then, you would journal your thoughts about each book on a website I had set up, Amazon-style. Thus, after a full mailing rotation, every book had a number of “reviews” and the book returned to its original owner. What a stupid idea.

The first book I chose was an ARC I had recently gotten for Michael Chabon’s YA novel, Summerland. Back in 2002, successful authors writing children’s books were still a bit of a novelty, and the release of Summerland was big news in the literary world. It even got some critical acclaim, but I attribute that entirely to Chabon’s prowess at adult literature, not the mess that was Summerland.

The Long Distance Book Club website is still there, after all this time, so I can quote myself from my review of the book:

“Chabon seems to think that there is a hole in the American mythological and legendary tradition that he could fill. It ended up, however, being a rambling epic full of lukewarm characters and obvious ploys to inject his own version of Americana into the short-term memory of our culture.”

Other members were more charitable. My friend who is now a professor of history at Princeton wrote:

“I appreciate that attempt to unify a whole bunch of different mythologies (Native American, Judeo-Christian, Scandinavian, Greek) into one semi-coherent universe, which sort of starts from the premise that if you relax some of your beliefs about nature and reality, a lot of things come together. And that is the part of this book that earned the three stars -- I actually liked the way he put together this world.”

On the whole, however, Summerland was not well-received in this club, despite the high marks it enjoys from critics and online reviewers. Our collective dissent reminds me of why my friends are my friends: we share a common framework for our ideas and opinions. Plus, they must really love me to have participated in my crazy scheme as wholeheartedly as they did for as long as they did.

Summerland by Michael Chabon

tags: children's books book reviews book clubs Michael Chabon