Dream with Our Eyes Open

Near the beginning of The Summer Book, little Sophia wakes up during a cold night and looks out the window into the dark:

In our world, in 1938, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes suggested that Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe be settled in Alaska. The measure didn't pass — but in Chabon's book, it did. The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust in this AU was considerably fewer, but the modern state of Israel did not survive its war for independence. In the 70 years since, the Jews of Sitka have developed a Yiddish-speaking culture on the fringe of the frequently frozen wilderness of the north, but now their little world is coming to an end as the U.S. prepares to reclaim the District and cast out the vast majority of its residents. Unsurprisingly, many of the more religious residents of Sitka are once again speaking of the coming of the Messiah.

Against this End Times backdrop, police detective Meyer Landsman becomes obsessed with a murder all too close to home: a chess-playing junkie who was shot execution-style in Landsman's rundown apartment building. Who was this ruined man, and why was he killed? Is there a significance to the chess problem that was left set up in his room? And will Landsman, who has been told by his new supervisor — who is, just incidentally, his ex-wife Bina, for whom he's still carrying a king-sized torch — to consider the case closed because they have to have everything shipshape by the time the U.S. government takes over, ever solve the mystery?

I was reluctant to start this because it sounded too depressing, but I liked it a lot. The grimly funny prose, with its Yiddish sentence structure, just flowed off the page for me, and I found myself grinning or snickering several times each chapter. So it was a shock to look at Amazon's reader reviews — and find that significant numbers of people couldn't get into the book at all, found the language offensive or incomprehensible, and thought it too grim to finish. I guess I need to add YMMV. In my case, this is told in one of several accents with which I grew up (many of my New York cousins and their parents and our grandparents and great-aunts and uncles sounded more or less like this), as well as the style of humor to which I was accustomed. The idea of making terrible, cutting, and even vulgar jokes and humorous insults as the world is ending around you is an old tradition of our people, but clearly it doesn't work for everyone.