{"id":6949,"date":"2007-09-04T08:08:01","date_gmt":"2007-09-04T12:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6949"},"modified":"2015-05-11T11:36:20","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T15:36:20","slug":"the-books-the-final-solution-a-story-of-detection-michael-chabon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6949","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cThe Final Solution: A Story of Detection\u201d (Michael Chabon)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction<\/p>\n

\"FinalSolution.jpg\"The Final Solution: A Story of Detection<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – by Michael Chabon. This slim book was Chabon’s follow-up to the monster novel Kavalier & Clay<\/i> and is basically his homage to Sherlock Holmes, and the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As anyone who is a Chabon fan knows, he’s on a sort of mission to “rescue” genre fiction from the wilderness (whether or not it’s in a wilderness is debatable, as far as I’m concerned.) He has written numerous essays on the topic – and is quite vocal about it – he makes some good points, actually – but I find this particular “homage” tiresome, frankly. Kinda condescending. There is (naturally) some amazing writing in the book andI’d read it by Chabon if it were a grocery list. And his enthusiasm for “genre” fiction is very much akin to my own … and his frustration that people like Poe or Doyle or whoever are – relegated to the genre stacks, as opposed to being integrated with “real” literature – is something I think as well. And I am sure he had to rest after writing the behemoth Kavalier & Clay<\/i> (uhm, who’s being condescending now??) – and sort of take the heat off, relax, etc. etc. … so he wrote The Final Solution<\/i> – the story of a Holocaust survivor, a tiny boy, who doesn’t speak, whose only friend is an African parrot. A crime is committed. And an ancient man – once a famous detective (he’s un-named if I recall correctly – so I guess we are encouraged to imagine him as Sherlock Holmes) – anyway, a once famous detective is lured out of retirement … to try to solve the crime.<\/p>\n

The writing has that Chabon spark … but I have to admit. The book is 90 pages long – and I had to force myeslf to finish it. Why don’t I just read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – and go to the source – rather than read your fanboy ramblings?<\/p>\n

Now look. I’m a huge fangirl. I am THIS CLOSE to writing some Quantum Leap<\/i> fanfic just to LET OFF SOME STEAM … and also because most of the writing I’m doing now is off-line, and serious, and takes up a lot of my concentration … and it would be fun to just sit down and be a big fat freakin’ fangirl, imagining what would happen if Al and Sam did THIS or what if Sam leapt into THAT … etc.<\/p>\n

Fun!!<\/p>\n

(Would I want anyone else to read it though????) But that’s beside the point.<\/p>\n

So obviously, I got no problem with the fanboy aspect of it. But to me, it’s not good enough. The original is better. The original Sherlock Holmes books are better. Go read those.<\/p>\n

But great American novel? Great sweeping panorama of American life? Read Michael Chabon. I won’t hold his fanboy books against him – I have them all – and I read them all. Not saying I like them all – but I sure as shit read them all. He’s important. I know what it means to be a fan.<\/p>\n

I can’t wait to read Chabon’s latest – The Yiddish Policeman’s Union<\/i> … I get that writers have different ways of working and creating, and that writing a book takes time to recover from. All that focus and energy – and also pressure – if you’re already successful. It’s draining. Something like The Final Solution<\/i> must have been a lark for Chabon, and really fun to write – relaxing, easy … and hell, he knows there are folks out there like me who will buy it. (He even speaks to that in interviews. Basically it is his hope to broaden the appeal of Sherlock Holmes – but again, I find that condescending. Anyhoo, I’LL LET IT GO!)<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt – where the detective, referred to as “the old man” looks around for clues. \\<\/p>\n


\nExcerpt from The Final Solution: A Story of Detection<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – by Michael Chabon. <\/b><\/p>\n

With a series of huffings and grunts, laboring across twenty feet square of level ground as if they were the sheer icy face of Karakorum, the old man turned his beloved lens upon everything that occupied or surrounded the fatal spot, tucked between the lush green hedgerows of Hallows Lane, at which Shane’s half-headless body had been foound, early that morning, by his landlord, Mr. Panicker. Alas that the body had already been moved, and by clumsy men in heavy boots! All that remained was its faint imprint, a twisted cross in the dust. On the right tire of the dead man’s motorcar – awfully flash for a traveler in milking machines – he noted the centripetal pattern and moderate degree of darkening in the feathery spray of blood on the tire’s white wall. Though the police had made a search of the car, turning up an ordnance survey map of Sussex, a length of clear rubber milking hose, bits of valve and pipe, several glossy prospectuses for the Chedbourne & Jones Lactrola R-5, and a well-thumbed copy of Treadley’s Common Diseases of Milch Kine<\/i>, 1929 edition, the old man went over the whole thing again. All the while, though he was unaware of it, he kept up a steady muttering, nodding his head from time to time, carrying on one half of a conversation, and showing a certain impatience with his invisible interlocutor. This procedure required nearly forty minutes, but when he emerged from the car, feeling quite as if he ought to lie down, he was holding a live .45 caliber cartridge for that highly unlikely Webley, and an unsmoked Murat cigarette, an Egyptian brand whose choice by the victim, were it his, seemed to indicate still greater unsuspected depths of experience or romance. Finally he dug around in the mulchy earth that lay beneath the hedgerows, finding in the process a piece of shattered cranium, stuck with bits of skin and hair, that the policemen, to their evident discomfiture, had missed.<\/p>\n

He handled the grisly bit of evidence without hesitation or qualm. He had seen human beings in every state, phase, and attitude of death: a Cheapside drab tumbled, throat cut, headfirst down a stairway of the Thames Embankment, blood pooling in her mouth and eye sockets; a stolen child, green as a kelpie, stuffed into a storm drain; the papery pale husk of a pensioner, killed with arsenic over the course of a dozen years; a skeleton looted by kites and dogs and countless insects, bleached and creaking in a wood, tattered garments fluttering like flags; a pocketful of teeth and bone chips in a shovelful of pale incriminating ash. There was nothing remarkable, nothing at all, about the crooked X that death had scrawled in the dust of Hallows Lane.<\/p>\n