Michael Chabon knows how to write. However eccentric his pulp anthologies for McSweeney’s; however slight his 2004 novella, “The Final Solution”; indeed, however fatally bizarre his new novel, “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” (HarperCollins, 432 pages, $39.95) sounds, every serious reader of American fiction should pay attention to Mr. Chabon.

His merit amounts to more than the high-diction punch he adds to noir formulae: “On a Friday night in season, you can buy or sell anything from moose meat to ketamine, and hear some of the most arrant lies ever put to language.” Rather, it is the integrity of his new novel, scene woven into scene, that makes reading Mr. Chabon a definite pleasure.

As the reader will gather from the description of a steak house quoted above, “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” takes place in a northern clime (Alaska), where local color has been completely saturated with gangland grime. Mr. Chabon has made Sitka, a small city in Alaska’s southern panhandle, into a Jewish homeland, an alternative refuge in a counterfactual history, according to which the 1948 Arab-Israeli war ended in defeat. In Mr. Chabon’s alternate universe, Sitka has evolved into a momentous blend of Jewish-American creativity and fatalism. It is Borough Park become a burnt-out Vancouver via Raymond Chandler; it is an Israel surrounded by resentful Indians.

This sort of motif salad is what Mr. Chabon thrives on. His knockout 2000 success, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” assimilated the golden age of comic books, golem arcana, Antarctic adventure, nostalgia for old New York, and other vogue subjects. Now, Mr. Chabon has something much more peculiar on his hands:

Landsman can smell fish offal from the canneries, grease from the fry pits at Pearl of Manila, the spew of taxis, an intoxicating bouquet of fresh hat from Grinspoon’s Felting two blocks away.

The best of Mr. Chabon’s style is captured in the instantaneous joking relish of “fresh hat.” But the inevitability of the hat joke, in an Orthodox community, becomes a little too evident with the Dickensian insistence of “Grinspoon,” and meanwhile “the spew of taxis,” a casual homage to the taken-forgranted language of pulp, reminds us that we are in a world Mr. Chabon has imagined, as much for his delectation as for ours.

The voice that obtains, in this eternally Yiddish city, is one of deadpan mysticism, of lively metaphor. Mr. Chabon’s hero, a recently divorced detective named Meyer Landsman living in a fleabag hotel, begins investigating the murder of a fellow tenant who, Landsman realizes, could have kept him good company, had they only been acquainted. But the stiff becomes, by novel’s end, a possible Messiah, a tzaddik ha-dor, and the routines of detective work acquire a redemptive, metaphysical quality. When Landsman attempts to board a moving four-by-four, “the power of the engine is translated into a sense of panic in his legs. It’s like a proof of the physics of his foolishness, the inescapable momentum of his bad luck.” Later, in a moment of intuition, “Discontentment gathers like ball lightning around the chessboard in the pocket of his coat.”

Landsman is a typical Chabon character, haunted by tragic family ties, buoyed by a capacity for friendship, and more real than Mr. Chabon’s synthetic backdrop. Yet it is that backdrop that takes center stage in this novel. The personal pathos of a book like “Kavalier and Clay,” in which the Nazis are a present fear, gets lost among this new novel’s history of curiosities, in which Marilyn Monroe becomes Marilyn Kennedy, American declares war on Cuba, and Orson Welles, not Francis Ford Coppola, directs a “Heart of Darkness” movie.

So, the backdrop makes the novel. In his Sitka, Mr. Chabon has created a never-ending tissue of convincing detail. If a book is thrown across a room in Jewish Sitka, what does it hit? “Probably the silver spice box on the glasstopped dining table.” And what would a detective in such a city drive? “Landsman is at the wheel of a 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport … in the ’71 model year, the Chevelle went from two pairs of headlight bulbs to a single pair.” These details are independent from the setting — it is not, say, a scrimshaw candelabrum that is knocked down in the Jewish Alaskan household. But they fit, and the reader moves on through this quick-reading novel, keeping to Mr. Chabon’s rhythm and its weft of zany integrity.

Once all the details are established, the novel becomes thinner. The detective revisits established scenes. His puzzle, unfortunately, leads to a world-historical conspiracy, and the ultimate villain is straight out of Tim Lahaye’s “Left Behind” series. Mr. Chabon folds the elongated island of Sitka onto the map of Palestine, and Landsman’s personal situation becomes a write-off commentary on that of the Wandering Jew.

We are currently seeing a trend of novels like “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” novels of manic geographical origami, novels of kaleidoscopic Venn diagrams, novels that speak in a creole of nerdish traditions. They are written by everyone from Gary Shteyngart to Nathan Englander. Mr. Chabon’s novel does not vindicate the trend. But it puts the other books in the shade.

blytal@nysun.com