An unpromising land

The enjoyment you take in this novel will depend on what sort of animal you think the novel is. If you think novels are moral journeys, examinations of the troubles of the world, you will enjoy it as an ingenious example of the ‘alternate world’ fantasy. If you think they are principally aesthetic objects made out of language, you will enjoy it mostly as a dazzling game with styles and genres. Either way, there’s no denying the high hilarity and wit, in the largest sense, of this exceptional book.

Michael Chabon’s conceit is that the state of Israel was briefly founded, but was destroyed almost immediately, chased into the sea in 1948. The Jews of the world found a homeland instead in Alaska. Just as you start to think that that isn’t much of an alternate-world fantasy — it just seems to repeat history in a worse climate — Chabon adds a masochistic twist.