Early on in one of Michael Chabon's stories, young Nathan Shapiro finds himself in the middle of what will be his family's last vacation to Nags Head, N.C. Staying at a rustic hotel called the Sandpiper, his parents about to separate, he is filled with a strange, inexplicable feeling brought on by the sight of an old bottle-dispensing Coke machine.

“The sight of the faded machine and of the whole Sandpiper,” Mr. Chabon writes, “filled Nathan with a happy sadness, or, really, a sad happiness; he was not too young, at ten, to have developed a sense of nostalgia.”

Nostalgia is a favorite word in A Model World. The sadness of things lost, or perhaps never attained, haunts these fine stories like the faraway notes of a '60s love song. The irony is, of course, that Mr. Chabon also is not too young, at 27, to have developed a sense of nostalgia. In 1988, he burst onto the literary scene with the jaunty The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which earned for its author a contract worth ＄155,000, the highest price ever for a literary debut.

This, his second work—a collection of stories, several of which originally were published in the New Yorker—had critics wondering if he would live up to earlier raves. Perhaps, they reasoned, like so many other young writers, he would fail to meet their expectations.

But Mr. Chabon does not disappoint.

His new book is divided into two parts. In the first, he takes on a variety of subjects—academe and yuppies-in-love chief among them. He does so with aplomb.

“Millionaires,” the best of this first lot, chronicles what sad things happen when love gets in the way of friendship. Longtime buddies Vince, a disc jockey, and toy-maker Harry end up vying for the attentions of a woeful cocktail waitress named Kim Trilby.

Or rather, they end up trading off. Vince takes over when Harry calls it quits, like an “equally qualified temporary sent by some Kelly Services of love”—to disastrous results.

“Harry was my best friend,” Vince relates, “but millionaires have squandered their fortunes, and men have lost their minds, and friends have tracked each other down for less than the sight of a lovely woman in nothing but a sweater.”

By the time Kim finally tires of the two, they are no longer roommates who share everything from a cold apartment to a record collection and eggs slathered in Vietnamese hot sauce. Rather, their relations now “draw their greatest animation from beer and reminiscence.”

As stylish as these stories may be, the second section, “The Lost World,” takes on tougher stuff. Meet the Shapiro family—psychiatrist father, wife, sons Nathan and Ricky. Their marriage is dissolving slowly, and Nathan can only stand and watch “the inevitable outward expansion, as of an empire or a galaxy, of what once had been his family.”

In “The Little Knife” the Shapiros take their annual vacation in Nags Head. A pivotal lunchtime scene—which beautifully encapsulates the failing marriage—precipitates the decision to cut short the beach trip.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Shapiro admires a sharp little knife, perfect for slicing celery.

“‘Why don't you just take it?’” Mr. Shapiro asks. Toast begins burning in the toaster and he runs to unplug it.

“‘Give it to me,’” he says.

“‘I'm not going to let you—make me—dishonest anymore!’” Mrs. Shapiro says, ignoring the smoke.

“‘I only wanted it to extract the piece of toast,’” he says. “‘God damn it.’”

The next story, “More Than Human” chronicles Dr. Shapiro's moving-out day, for which Nathan and his little brother have been sent to the local mall.

Nathan at first wants to witness the event, but the sight of his father's black Russian hat, “which Nathan remembered his father wearing on some black-and-white winter day before Ricky was ever born, had filled him with such longing and anger that he was glad to spend the afternoon eating pizza and wishing for toys in the Huxley Mall, whose air was sweet with candles and soap, and bitter with the chlorine from the fountains.”

After his father is gone, Nathan discovers—in the trash can—a list Dr. Shapiro apparently drew up in an effort to make himself a better person, better father and “a true Renaissance man.” The list ends with No. 9—an admonishment never to throw it away.

While Nathan sits clutching the piece of crumpled paper, his father calls, and Nathan runs to reassure him that, yes, he had been a good dad.

“Thanks,” his father says, but “abstractedly, a little too fast, as though it were only a reply, as though his mind were on other more difficult, more wondrous things.”

Although the two sections may seem disparate, the author's already distinctive style holds them together. He is not afraid to use a big word, like “quotidian” and “susurrant.” There are those who might argue, perhaps, that Mr. Chabon's extensive vocabulary and polite narrative may seem a little mannered.

He seems to have adopted, as did his old friend Art Bechstein, the narrator of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, an “overgrammatical, precious manner.” But because these stories are so often filled with fanciful, colorful things—a troop of admirals, a box of gold doubloons, a jack-o'-lantern shaped like a Japanese house—this style, more often than not, comes off as playful.

As short-story collections go, A Model World is no prototype; it's the real thing. And how wonderful—because Mr. Chabon grew up in Columbia, Md.—that we can claim this bright young writer as our own.