Michael Chabon is a rarity among American writers, a wunderkind who not only survived instant and early success but who has thrived and grown, becoming more accomplished and successful with each book. His bestselling first novel, the giddy Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published when he was 24, was aptly described as “a nearly perfect example of the promising first novel,” and his first volume of short stories, A Model World, provided further evidence of the elegance of his prose while demonstrating even more emotional depth and technical control than the novel. Wonder Boys, his second novel and first fully realized work, was a gleefully inventive and hugely entertaining story of writers behaving badly; it managed to be madcap and moving all at once.

Now, with Werewolves in Their Youth, his splendid new volume of short stories, it's possible to speak of a Chabon oeuvre, to recognize a style and certain subject matters as Chabonesque. With wit and compassion, Chabon writes especially well in these stories about pre-teen boys (the title story), the uneasy relationship of parent and child (“Green's Book”), failing relationships (“House Hunting” and “That Was Me”), and middle-aged professionals dragging after them like Marley's Ghost the unintended consequences of hasty decisions (“Mrs. Box”). When the stories are put alongside his treatment of these themes in his earlier books. Chabon seems to be writing, after Balzac, his own, good-humored American Comedie Humaine, a series of works about the often simultaneous folly and heartbreak of the American middle class. He's Updike without the condescension, Cheever without the self-pity, a young American Nabokov who writes with a rueful joie de vivre from within his own culture instead of writing bemusedly about it from the outside.

Much of his success lies in the fact that Chabon does not write fashionable fiction. Written under the trinity of Chekhov, Joyce and Carver, many contemporary stories read as if “narrative” were a dirty word, coasting on attitude, voice and, too often, a jerry-built epiphany. For all his evident knowledge of, and love for, pop culture, Chabon is no postmodernist; he writes old-fashioned stories with beginnings, middles and ends, each as expertly carpentered and fun to partake of as a Cole Porter song. In the wryly heartbreaking “Son of the Wolfman,” Cara and Richard, a struggling L.A. couple who work on the lower echelons of show business, fail in their attempts to have a child, only to have Cara become pregnant by a notorious rapist. Cara decides to have the child, Richard abandons her, and from this point on the reader can clearly see where Chabon is going with the story. But this predictability works as a splendid mimetic effect, as the reader, as wary as Richard of finding any good in the situation, comes to accept a sort of miracle.

Chabon's gift, in fact, is to find not only grace but humor in otherwise unpleasant circumstances. In “Green's Book,” a young divorced dad, Green, and his weekending young daughter attend a birthday party where Green runs into Ruby, a young woman whom he babysat when he was 13 and she was 4. Now a family therapist and the author of a book on fatherhood, Green is haunted by a brief moment with Ruby years ago, when, out of mostly innocent adolescent confusion, he nearly committed an act of borderline abuse. Needless to say, this is a red-hot topic, but Chabon writes charmingly of the lifelong confusion of a good man—putatively an expert in human relations—over his own unruly emotions.

One of Chabon's other gifts is his ability to depict writers and the writing life without seeming precious or self-indulgent. The final story in the book, “In the Black Mill,” is presented as the work of August van Zorn, a minor character in Wonder Boys, a lonely small-time academic who wrote pulp horror stories in the '40s and '50s. You don't need to have read the novel to appreciate the story, but knowing that van Zorn wrote for the pulps to pay for his wife's care in a mental asylum adds a layer of poignancy to what is otherwise a scary, funny and affectionate pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft, complete with faux literary prose, a gloomy first-person narrator, and unnameable creatures from beyond.

There is a good deal of loss, failure and despair in Chabon—see the stories “That Was Me” and “Spikes,” set among the defeated permanent residents of a resort island in the Pacific Northwest—but he never wallows in pain or romanticizes it. He is, dare I say it, a fundamentally hopeful writer, capable of compassion without sentiment, skilled at depicting stupidities and even crimes without diminishing the human worth of the perpetrators. An unearned despair and adolescent nihilism are too often taken as the hallmarks of literary writing; to be called hopeful, clever and charming is in some quarters the kiss of death to a serious writer's reputation. But Chabon more than redeems these underrated virtues with a mature understanding of life's disappointments, never selling those disappointments short but always celebrating the profoundly humane comedy they bring out in all of us.