Short Review of The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is an unapologetic nerd, which is one of the things that makes his work so likeable to me. He wins a Pulitzer Prize for a piece of historical fiction about two friends during the golden age of comics, and follows that audacious victory by writing a piece of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction that's barely long enough to be called a novel. So he publishes it as "A Story of Detection."

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. Chabon's gift for long, eloquently crafted sentences and his prediliction for shifting perspectives get in the way of an otherwise great little yarn.

I never expect sparse prose from Chabon, nor do I think a short story can't sustain stylistic flair, but as a subjective reader, I feel the story slipping away from me.

There are reasons for the rules that govern genre fiction. Generally, if you write a detective story, it is best to use first person or, at the very least, to limit the perspective to one main character. This creates a sense of immediacy, a feeling of immersion, and a focus that you need for that edge-of-the-seat effect and that sense of epiphany at the solution.

Chabon's changes in perspective bother me. Each one happens quickly, without warning, and they do not remain in play long enough to engage me. I feel that the climax loses its gravity because of one such change. Just as I adjust to the inside of the head of an unconventional character, the section ends, the tension releases, and the story is over before I have a chance to care.

There's also a reason I typically see short sentences in detective stories. Detectives are fact-oriented. The emotional and artistic movements of a detective story usually flow from an interest in the facts. While this is another rule that can be well-broken, The Final Solution suffers for it, at least in the heart of this reader. Long sentences seem wasteful, excessive, and distracting. The facts and bits of information that are so central to the solution of a story get fluffed, obscured, and blunted by long sentences.

That Chabon is the master of the sentence, and a powerful storyteller, remains clear to me. I just feel that The Final Solution broke rules to its own detriment, where Chabon's other work seems to benefit from the same gestures. So I won't say The Final Solution wasn't a good book. All I can say is that, as a reader and fan, it didn't work for me.