BOOKS

By John Skow

A MODEL WORLD AND OTHER STORIES

by Michael Chabon

Morrow; 207 pages; $18.95

There was an appealing, puppy-dog quality to Michael Chabon's very youthful first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; and in this likable second book of fiction, the strongest impression is still of a healthy new talent clowning around and delighting itself. The stories for the most part are unserious to the point of being silly. In the title piece a grad student cheerfully and successfully plagiarizes an old doctoral dissertation about climatology in Antarctica. That has little to do with a strange dinner party that is suffused with adulterous currents leading nowhere, and that at any rate seems to have no bearing on the narrator's decision to abandon particle physics and become a playwright.

The story is a random walk -- no cause, no effect and no harm done -- with the author's mischievous grin taking the curse off a detectable undertone of "Ain't I cute!" Getting non sequiturs to tail up like circus elephants doesn't always work, even if the paragraphs are amusing. In a sketch called Blumenthal on the Air, an American disk jockey for some reason is based in Paris and unaccountably burdened with a surly Iranian wife. He broods murkily without enlightenment, and so does the reader.

A sheaf of related stories called The Lost World (boyhood is what has been lost) gives a nicely measured picture of a kindly, weighty father and a narrator-son who has not yet achieved gravitas. But the entirely adult stunner of an otherwise boyish book is a superb story called Smoke, about a failing baseball pitcher who attends the funeral of a teammate. We don't learn why the teammate died, or why the pitcher has lost his stuff, his smoke. All that matters is the single word with which the pitcher answers two terrible questions. The first is asked by the teammate's small son, who looks at the casket and says, "Is my daddy in there?" The second is the query of a friendly sportswriter who asks whether the pitcher realizes he may never recapture his skill. "Yes" is the bitter double answer. Smoke, indeed, from a fireballing phenom.