A good book

I just finished The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon. I had not read any of Chabons's work when I bought this book together with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on a friend's recomendation. I kept running into people telling me that Kavalier and Clay was such a great book, the best thing that they'd read in years.

Well, K&C is sitting on the table next to the couch, half read and collecting dust, as it's been doing for the last 2 months. It's not that it's a bad book - I just haven't been able to get into it. I can objectively see its good qualities, but I found myself very quickly losing interest in all but the main characters. I can't remember this happening to me before, except when reading crap. And even then I generally finish the book so that I can digest it and shit it out, never to have to think about it again.

To be fair, the book that initially grabbed my attention from K&C was The Devil in the White City. I don't normally care for historical non-fiction, but I received it from a friend for Christmas so I had to check it out. And it turned out to be excellent. The same friend gave me American Gods, so I had to check this one out as well. It was interesting, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was Clive Barker re-writing the Immortality series by Piers Anthony.

Long story short, I decided that I would give Chabon another chance, and see if I couldn't re-spark my interest in K&C. So I picked up The Final Solution.

This is a very, very short book. But it's told excellently. Chabon seemed to sense exactly what he wanted to write, and left it at that - a rare gift for an author. I don't wish to give anything of the plot away, but I want to share just a couple of impressions.

We see every character in the story struggle, whether through age, alienation or madness. More importantly, we see every character. Even a mute boy is explored without resorting to internal monologue. The development isn't needlesly fleshed - we learn very little about anyone's background, for example. But it is subtely and exactly described.

The book seemed to me to be a study of characters and how they react within the circumstances, a story of characters, rather than a story with characters. Terrible things are expressed about the war and humanity, all without a single word being written about those things. These truths are worn exclusively on the faces of the people described so well by the author.