When I was an undergrad, the school-funded left/liberal/progressive tabloid ran a page two editorial offering cheerful, banal tips on relieving end-of-semester examination stress. The editor gave it the unfortunate title, "The Finals Solution." That the article was largely an endorsement of Austrian beverage Red Bull didn't help. Of course, the editor, a cookie-cutter ultraaggrieved liberal, was aghast at what he'd done. Only mutual Bush-hatred kept the team together.

Like the poor undergraduate's editorial, Michael Chabon's new The Final Solution sandwiches an epic tragedy between two whimsies, although in this case the author fully knew what he was doing. Chabon has made his reputation with the excellent (but uneven) Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which examined Holocaust-fleeing New York Jews who create a Superman-like comic book hero to enact their fantasies and dreams. He also inspired and guest-edited the McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, a well-intentioned retro experiment in genre fiction. In the foreword, he lamented the ascendance of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story," the grade-B Joyce knock-offs one quickly flips past in every single New Yorker, sighing at the probable timber count. The collection of intentionally genre tales wanted to be Bill Watterson and came off Warhol, but the intentions were good. And it clarified the thesis of Chabon's manifesto.

The Final Solution finds a voice for Chabon's genre-as-literature approach to writing books, and it works. Its style is joyfully breezy in a distinctly Victorian way. The main character is straight out of Doyle, while various inhabitants of the local vicarage/inn are wholly Dickens. Overlaid over this is the joy in seeing a book that IS new and modern, but picks from the best of what made this era of Victorian novels great and adds generously. The main character, an old, retired detective of advanced age who is never named, is clearly Sherlock Holmes, and the title reflects a double meaning in this sense. It's a play off "The Final Problem," the story in which Doyle attempted to kill off his character at a waterfall; it also suggests, as is obvious from Holmes' bouts of dementia, that this will be his last case.

But there's also an undercurrent of despair. The title also references the Holocaust, and the mystery concerns the pet parrot of a nine-year-old German Jew who is a refugee in England, a parrot which recites mysterious strings of numerals. And the descriptions of Sherlock Holmes encountering moments of mental frailty, even speaking during a case as if his friend Watson were by his side (and not, implicitly, long dead), are tinged with sadness.

I'm not giving out much plot detail because there is not much book to describe. With illustrations and a pretty stout typeface, this novella still struggles to fill one hundred thirty pages; at seventeen dollars, it's not the best deal going in hardcover. But it's undeniably Chabon's best work to date, a minor gem that suggests very big things to come. How big? Really big. Tom Hanks movie adaptation big. Superhero big.