the yiddish policemen's union, delayed

I was re-watching Wonder Boys the other night (after finally reading On Beauty last week--about which, more later--I was in the mood for more biting academic satire) and ended up wondering what has happened to Michael Chabon's new book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I've read a number of articles referring to the book (such as this one), describing it as a noirish detective story set in an alternate-history Alaska in which the short-lived 1940s proposal to create a home there for Jewish refugees has actually been implemented. Imagine an Alaskan panhandle populated by the descendents of the Ashkenazi of Eastern Europe, and you can see why this would be fruitful terrain for fiction--especially for a writer like Chabon. I only got around to reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay this past year, and was swept of my feet: one of the best American novels, and certainly one of the best feats of sheer storytelling, that I've enountered in years.

So anyway, I'd heard that the new book was due out this spring, but the usual pre-release buzz has been absent. I went and checked his website (beware: full of good essays and notes and odd little digressions that could derail you for hours) and found the sad news that the publication has been delayed--all the way until next winter. Alas. In the meantime, I recommend Chabon's novella The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, the tale of an encounter between an elderly Sherlock Holmes and a mute, traumatised boy from the Kindertransport, whose talking parrot (which recites mysterious sequences of numbers in German) suddenly disappears. It's too short to be entirely satisfying, but in its oblique, understated way manages to have a stronger impact than many books that approach the subject of the Holocaust more directly (something I also thought to be true of Kavalier & Clay).