Fable attraction

LET'S begin with an uncomfortable question: What has Michael Chabon been up to for the last seven years? Certainly he's been writing; in 2002, he published "Summerland," a lengthy baseball fantasy for young readers, and two years later, his novella "The Final Solution" imagined Sherlock Holmes as an old man. He's also edited a couple of anthologies and created a series of comic books featuring the Escapist, the superhero he invented for his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001.

For a writer of Chabon's ambition, however, projects like these seem ancillary at best. His 1995 novel "Wonder Boys" -- by turns, the funniest and bleakest novel about the writing life ever set to paper -- is a deft examination of the rigors of expression, of the way art does not so much save as complicate your life. "Kavalier & Clay" eclipses the line between literature and genre fiction, integrating elements of myth, history, pop culture and Jewish identity in a nearly seamless weave. What's exciting about these books is their sense that fiction can do anything, that it can be provocative and graceful, challenging and flat-out, foot-stomping fun. It's as if Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth started a rock 'n' roll band; this is writing that makes you want to get up and dance.

Chabon's new novel, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," is, finally, a spiritual descendant of "Kavalier & Clay," a book that expands on the sensibility of the earlier novel and its roots in Jewish storytelling. It is very good -- let's just say that at the outset -- a larger-than-life folk tale set in an alternate universe version of the present where issues of exile and belonging, of identity, nationality, freedom and destiny are examined through a funhouse mirror that renders them opaque and recognizable all at once.

The setup is a series of speculations: What if, as Franklin Roosevelt once suggested, a safe zone had been established in Alaska under the protection of the United States for European Jews escaping Hitler? What if this "Federal District of Sitka" had grown and developed until its population was in the millions, a country within a country, as it were? What if Israel had collapsed in 1948, mere months after independence, leaving many Jews with nowhere else to turn?

And what if, 60 years later, Sitka was about to face a process called "reversion," in which its territories would be returned and its Jews cast back into the Diaspora, a Diaspora in which the desirability of their presence was not entirely assured?