I love pie, and I loved this description of a pie shop, which emerges as an eerie, mysterious clue in Chapter 6 of Michael Chabon’s strange and clever new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union:

The place is nothing more than a window that opens onto a kitchen equipped with five gleaming ovens. Next to the window hangs a whiteboard, and every day the proprietors–a couple of hostile Klondikes and their mysterious daughter–write out a list of the day’s wares: blackberry, apple, rhubarb, peach, banana cream. The pie is good, even famous in a modest way. Anybody who has passed through the Yakovy airfield knows it, and there are rumors of people who will fly in from Juneau or Fairbanks or farther away to eat it.

One of the things I really dig about this book is the reinvention of an actual place–Sitka, Alaska–with its attending history. The Sitka you know, or know of, is there in the iciness of the landscape and other details, but Chabon’s Sitka is the reimagined homeland of the Jews, an Israel in North America, given over as reparation in the aftermath of World War II. The novel opens on the eve of Reversion, when the Federal District of Sitka will return to Alaskan control , a premise that is explosive with possibility.

Naturally, this made me think of Hong Kong and China, circa 1997. I was employed by a Chinese trading company in New York City in the days leading up to Chinese takeover, and I spent a lot of time helping my boss furnish a mansion in Elizabeth, New Jersey, for company executives who were concerned about what would become of Hong Kong and its citizens once China took control. During that time, I also lived briefly in Hong Kong, where the sense of anxiety and the uncertainty about Hong Kong’s economic and cultural future was palpable. In the decade since, Hong Kong has continued to prosper, but the real test perhaps will be in the next decade, and the next. At any rate, getting back to Chabon, I’m only 6 chapters into the book but will post again when I’ve finished–my initial reaction is that this is going to be a very good ride.