Late, late, late adolescence is Michael Chabon's favorite territory, miles after coming-of-age city but just before the dunes of yuppie angst. They are the neither years, when friends mistakenly become lovers, and lovers quickly become embarrassments. Amid the drunken dinner parties and underheated apartments, confused desires run amok. In his first story collection, A Model World, which follows his acclaimed first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), Chabon takes on the terrible 20s with a fine eye and an eloquent tongue. Not to mention a little cheek. It's not a particularly original subject, really; the entire Brat Pack ouevre has depended on fecklessness and hormonal anarchy for its fuel. But Chabon's prose is so delicately layered, his sentences so clever, the subject is given the finer perspective it deserves. Among his quickly disappointing deadpan peers, he stands out as a lively, intelligent writer with a future.

In most of the stories in the first section of A Model World, you can see Chabon winking, remaining one step removed from his troubled young heroes. In the title story, a postgraduate student named Levine decides to plagiarize his entire dissertation from an obscure book. After he'd typed the book word for word, Levine's “eyes were strained, his back and his neck hurt, but there was a sweet taste in his mouth, for he had regained his faith in the stoic nobility of scientific endeavor, and his regard for the austere beauty of its method.” Levine's professor may not catch him, but Chabon certainly doesn't let him off easy. Nor does academia fare well, as a well-lubricated party at Levine's professor's house turns into a feast of “cuckoldry, charlatanism, and academic corruption.”

In “Millionaires,” two friends fall for the same woman, with disastrous results. “At one time Harry and I shared everything,” the story begins. “It is an error common to fast friendship.” In “Ocean Avenue,” an alienated couple is locked into an antagonistic attraction: “They had been warned, begged, and even ordered to stay away from each other by everyone, from their shrinks to their parents to the bench of Orange County itself; yet here they were, in plain view, smiling and smiling.”

You never really succumb to the first section of stories in A Model World; they are tales about turmoil written from a safe distance. Chabon is generally wiser than his characters, refusing to take them as seriously as they take themselves. But if the stories are not emotionally engaging, they are always articulate and never less than insightful. They are wonderfully wry.

As if sensing that an entire book of lightly mocking stories might grow tiring, Chabon has wisely weighted the later part of A Model World with a series of more sincere, interlocking stories. The cool he keeps in the bulk of the book is abandoned for five stories about Nathan Shapiro, a melancholy boy who must cope with his parents' divorce and his own feelings of guilt. Again, it's familiar ground—a young boy, divorce, first crush, second crush—but treated with a refreshing honesty and simplicity. Called “The Lost World,” it's a wistful sequence that proves Chabon is not hiding behind his own cleverness.