Chabon is a master. His descriptions give you a sense of setting and characters so well that I feel I would recognize the book’s primary cast if I met them on the street. He makes you care deeply about them even when you disagree with their actions and life choices.
The first Chabon I read was Summerland. I’m a baseball fan and Summerland uses baseball – think sandlot, not MLB – as a backdrop for much broader themes. Among everything else I took away from that book, I wholeheartedly believe that Chabon loves the game that “was invented to make us appreciate the pace of a summer’s day.”
He also wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. That’s a different story. I struggled with it, starting, and stopping it three times before I was all in. It’s a great novel. My problem, I think, is that I had read far too many novels set in and around WWII to digest another at the time. Years have passed and I dove back in. It’s an outstanding book and won the Pulitzer.
TYPU is an alternate history that’s based on some interesting facts that Chabon picked up along the way. One of those was an actual proposal to create a Jewish homeland in Alaska (proposed by Harold Ickes, FDR’s Secretary of the Interior). Chabon chooses Sitka – a beautiful city in the panhandle, very Seattle-like in geography and climate but with more rain and snow. He also had us fight a war in Cuba. Something very possible, had JFK not backed down in the Bay of Pigs affair.
It’s also a murder mystery. Chabon teases us with clues just like the classics of the genre.
On the Feral Scale, it’s a 10 for the story, and won a Hugo Award. I learned a lot reading the book and now keep it within easy reach of my writing desk to study how he builds scenes and describes characters. Even though it’s technically sci-fi because of the alternate history, we don’t get many aspects of that other than, “hey, it’s Earth, but with different choices.”
Check it out here.
Here’s a gratuitous pic of my copy of Kavalier and Clay atop Fire.
