Fiction:'Vos macht a yid?" is Yiddish for "How you doin"?, or "Whassup?", or "How are things?". For Michael Chabon, novelist, screenwriter, and Pulitzer-Prizewinning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), things are going okay. No, really, they are. Oy, as my grandmother would say. Things could be worse.
Like Philip Roth's recent The Plot Against America (2004), Chabon's novel is a big Jewish American "What If?" Roth asked, what if the famous Nazi-sympathising aviator Charles Lindbergh had become American president? Chabon asks, what if the European Jews fleeing the Nazis had settled not in Israel, but rather in Sitka, a small fishing town in Alaska?
You like? If you like the what if, you're going to like the book. In fact, even if you don't like the what if - if you think, say, so what? - you're probably going to like the book. Michael Chabon is an audacious, thrilling, high-speed writer: vos iz ahfen kop, iz ahfen tsang (what's on his mind is on his tongue).
In the novel, Sitka has become the Promised Land, a Jewlaska, where the first language is Yiddish, the first settlers are known not as Pioneers, but as Polar Bears, and the Jewish people are known colloquially as the Frozen Chosen. Chabon takes a leap, a hop, skip and a jump - Jews, homeland, Alaska - and he's into a vast new counter-factual world.
The book is ostensibly a murder mystery. No. That's not right. To describe the book as even ostensibly a murder mystery is hardly to do it justice: the book is a homage to the whole murder mystery genre.
The novel's hero is Meyer Landsman, a classic washed-up, burnt-out alcoholic policeman. In his time Landsman "has been called hard-boiled and foolhardy, a momzer, a crazy son of a bitch. He has faced down shtarkers and psychopaths, has been shot at, beaten, frozen, burned". Now he's working on his last case - the murder of a one-time chess prodigy and heroin addict. Time is running out for Landsman as he tries to solve the crime, since Sitka, after a 60-year lease to the dispossessed Jews, is about to revert back to Alaskan control.
Landsman lives in the deliciously seedy Hotel Zamenhof. His ex-wife, Bina, is his boss, and his partner, Berko Shemets, is half-Tlingit, half-Jewish, stands two metres tall and weighs 110kg. Obviously, inevitably, personal and familial complications ensue, and characters major and minor proliferate - children, babies, old people, the good, the bad, evil rebbes and "black hats" (Orthodox Jews), half-decent goys. The book is absolutely teeming.
And the words! Vos hakst du mir in kop (what are you talking my head off for)? Chabon puts two and two together and makes seven, and 10, and 613. Uniformed cops are called "latkes"; a gun, wittily, is a "sholem"; a drip-filter coffee-maker "hawks and spits like a decrepit Jewish policeman after ten flights of steps". And watch him scene-painting: "Night is an orange smear over Sitka, a compound of fog and the light of sodium-vapor streetlamps. It has the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat". A minor character has a brow so furrowed it "looks like one of those domed beehives you see representing Industry in medieval woodcuts".
So there's a lot of noir hyperbole and wit there, but there's also a heart: the dark heart of crime fiction, and one that's been there all along in Chabon's work, right from his early short stories. "Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realise that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss."
There's always the abyss there, and Chabon continues to push fiction round and about and as far it can go towards it, and then topples it right in. He doesn't just have chutzpah, he's a chutzpanik.
Ian Sansom teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast. He is the author of the Mobile Library series of novels (Harper Collins)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union By Michael Chabon 4th Estate, 414pp. £17.99