Not to pigeonhole myself, but it would seem that I have alighted upon another noir with a twist this month. This book gained a fair amount of press upon publication, partly because it was so unusual, and partly because of the fact that Michael Chabon has become in recent years one of the most recognizable and talented modern-American writers.
This book is exceedingly difficult to place into a distinct literary category, something that the author himself has made note of. The overarching narrative is essentially noir, with an ageing and self-loathing detective plying his trade in the seedy setting that these sorts of stories invariably find themselves in. However, that is where any comparison with Chandler (incidentally one of Chabon’s favorite writers) ends.
One of the reasons the book is so difficult to define, is that it is a work of an alternate present. This is not an entirely new idea, Phillip K Dick (among other writers) did it with “The Man in the High Castle”, conjuring a setting in which the Axis, not the Allies, had won World War II. In this book, Chabon extrapolates upon a plan posited by FDR during the war that suggested putting all the migrant Jews from Europe into a province in the Alaskan panhandle. It is thusly that the Sitka district is born.
Sitka is a veritable mish-mosh of European Jewish culture. It is meticulously crafted, with a high attention to detail, and painstakingly fleshed out. Chabon establishes this setting so effortlessly through anecdotes and character driven exposition, that half of the joy of the book is the world which it inhabits. It is through this lens that Chabon not only examines Jewish identity, but he drapes it, and the traditional ennui of a homicide detective, around a metaphoric subplot of chess. To throw one more ingredient into the mix, the book is written in combination of modern Yiddish and “American” as the book designates it.
Now, if you think this novel sounds somewhat layered, it is. However, that is what I enjoyed about it so much. The layers and levels of meaning you can draw from Chabon’s prose are positively lush, and I often found myself re-reading a page so that I could grasp its full meaning. Chabon extends the cultural and moral questions that the book posits far beyond that of a European Jew, into greater examinations of man’s search for meaning and the human experience. If you are interested in Judaism, Yiddish, detective fiction, chess, European culture, or are just in the mood for a fantastic read, you would do well to check this one out.
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