One often hears, though usually several years after the fact, that an author's work was “reviewed respectfully.” Such a loaded phrase, and yet it perfectly sums up the spirit of some notices—including this one of Michael Chabon's new short-story collection.

Chabon is, in the technical sense, a terrific writer, able to come up with smart epigrammatic turns like these: “If you can still see how you once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible.” And sharp glances of self-recognition: “He worried that his pants were too tight across the seat, that his gait was hitched and dorky, that his hands swung chimpishly at his sides.”

Yet his new book, A Model World and Other Stories, suggests that he has not yet become a very interesting writer—although now and then he comes close. I suspect that is because Chabon is still caught up in the life and obsessions of the recent college graduate, or postgraduate (even when the terrain is something else), and his world will seem almost terrifyingly narrow to many readers. It will also at times seem familiar to anyone who read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, his 1988 debut novel about a post-collegiate search for various things, including sexual identity.

At the same time, what is best in this new book is its very narrowly focused second half; that might have become something interesting indeed.

As it is, the final connected five stories are a wise chronicle of the life, from age 10 to 16, of one Nathan Shapiro, a child of divorce and modern times. The informal quintet, joined together by the title “A Lost World,” is made up of wonderfully observed situations, some wrenching moments and a fierce instinct to get it all down—“to preserve all the discord for which, in his wildly preserving imagination, he was and would always be responsible.”

Chabon describes the re-arrangements of an American family almost as if the dynamics are wholly new. When the Shapiros take a vacation in North Carolina, the initial cracks in their life are drawn with great skill. The father's “left hand was always flying up to smack his sad and outraged forehead, so hard that Nathan often thought he could hear his father's wedding ring crack against his skull.” Nathan sees his mother, “in her bathrobe, a wild, sleepless smile on her face.” Two years later, when his father moves out, Nathan is moved to sadness by a glimpse of a “liquor box, full of hats, on the floor of his parents' bedroom, and the sight of a black Russian hat made of fur that was swirled like a brain.” And at age 14, he discovers that he is powerfully attracted to one of “those half-dozen funny, sad women” who have become his mother's friends.

After a time, a curious thing happens: The prose in these stories becomes steadily artless, lighter-than-air, almost childlike—as if to stay wholly in tune with protagonist Nathan. The comparison will seem far-fetched, but the tone at times reminds me of Arnold Lobel, who wrote those sweet, knowing “Frog and Toad” books for young kids. It's a pushy thing for a reviewer to give advice, but Chabon ought to think about going back to the novella-length “A Lost World” someday, and finishing the book it could be.

As for the six stories that make up the beginning of A Model World, they are … slight. Chabon seems bemused by such things as ugly ties (they appear separately in two stories), taken by skinny women (also appearing in two stories) and amused by drunken sprees. Sometimes the fun is infectious, sometimes not; sometimes the indirectly observed poignant moment is affecting, sometimes not. The best of the six by far is the title story—a cheerful, sometimes witty look at an academic careerist who plagiarized his thesis whole.

None of this is in any way bad. It is, rather, the unmemorable, proficient work of a writer who may, next time, suddenly find just the right subject. When that happens, it will be Chabon's good fortune—and ours.