Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union ***

 I love the idea of this book: a murder mystery taking place in an alternate reality where Jewish refugees from World War II were settled in Sitka Alaska rather than Israel. Detective action, social commentary, atmospheric location.

Alas, Chabon fails to blend the various components of this ambitious brew. The plot mostly fits together narratively, but Chabon isn't able to settle on a tone. A scene of hard-boiled slangy dialogue bumps up next to a broadly comic set piece followed by exposition about Jewish culture. Is our hero Meyer Landsman a flawed defender of moral justice (à la Marlowe) or a seriocomic bumbler (à la Clouseau)? How respectful are we intended to be toward the religious customs of the various Jewish sects?

I felt that Chabon wasn't vivid enough in describing life in his alternate world, either social life in the city or the natural environment. The Sitka District is about to revert to United States control (à la Hong Kong), but the stakes never feel high. I also felt that the scale of the nefarious plot underlying all of the action was a bit too world-historical to match the rest of the story.

Wallace Stegner, Marking the Sparrow's Fall ****

Wallace Stegner's great strength as a writer is his ability to describe landscapes, cultures, and history in terms that are vividly particular but also clearly related to a general thesis. He writes primarily about the American West, defined as everything west of the 100th meridian of longitude, which runs through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. This definition is not arbitrary but rather represents "the isohyetal line of twenty inches, beyond which the annual rainfall is less than the twenty inches normally necessary for unirrigated crops." In the course of these essays, Stegner shows how this one fact explains the distinctive flavor of the West, not just its topography but also its history, its politics, and its values.

The other key element that Stegner identifies is land. In "The Twilight of Self-Reliance," he provides a capsule history of the United States based on the premise that American values formed largely in response to the availability of free land in the New World, at a time when all land in Europe was claimed and held tightly. Much of our modern malaise began around the beginning of the 19th century when we exhausted the available land and our values no longer matched our society.

Put these two factors together –– low rainfall and the perceived value of working the land –– and you can see how the modern West was formed. Protecting watersheds becomes critical, lots of land can seem worthless for agriculture or indeed any productive use, resources are exploited in a boom then abandoned. Over 80% of Nevada is federal land.

I've read three other Stegner books, each of which I recommend strongly. Wolf Willow is a memoir of his childhood on a homestead in Saskatchewan. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a biography of John Wesley Powell. Angle of Repose is a novel about a woman in the mining camps of Leadville Colorado. (I believe I read another of his novels, The Spectator Bird, but it has flown from my memory.)

Marking the Sparrow's Fall ends with a novella about cattlemen on the Saskatchewan prairie during the brutal winter of 1906. It is an immersive adventure story.

Alice Munro, Family Furnishings ****

Family Furnishings is a companion collection to Munro's Selected Stories. Selected Stories covers the years 1968 to 1994; Family Furnishings covers 1995 to her retirement in 2014.

The first stories in this collection find Munro at (what I consider) her peak, including a few stories from the book that first hooked me, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. I really enjoyed the stories from the books that preceded and followed that one. 

The stories in the second half of the book show Munro experimenting with different approaches. For example, "The View from Castle Rock" is an historical drama about a family emigrating from Scotland to Canada, and turns out to be the first of several stories/sketches drawing from her family's history. The most recent stories feature more dramatic and lurid events –– murders, sexual assaults –– compared to the more mundane and internal action of her earlier work. Some of them, such as "Dimensions," effectively demonstrate her talents; others, such as "Amundsen," suffer in comparison to other writers' work in a similar mode.