Short Book Review: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
A dumpling of a hard-boiled crime novel wrapped inside a shell of speculative fiction, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is unarguably Chabon’s best work since he won the Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay back in 2001. The nascent State of Israel collapsed in 1948 and the Jews were instead given safe haven and some degree of autonomy in the panhandle of Alaska, where they await the appearance of the Messiah and the return to the Holy Land—meanwhile, the shadow of the Sitka District’s imminent reversion to full US control and a return to diaspora looms. Our hero, Detective Meyer Landsman, is cut from the cloth of noir protagonists from time immemorial: alcoholic, divorced, a loose cannon who always has a snappy comeback. The murder of a junkie drags Landsman into apocalyptic religious/political intrigue whose impact reaches far beyond Sitka. Chabon is a master of prose and he’s done an admirable job of melding the hard-boiled crime tone with Yiddish slang and making it all seem of a piece, although I wonder what someone with less familiarity with Jewish culture and history would get out of it (and I know I missed plenty); in that, it reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, which I originally read in an edition without a glossary, wondering all along how anybody who didn’t know Russian could understand it.
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But the real question is, did Chabon manage to work in some guy-on-guy action? After Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys, I was under the impression that was kind of his schtick.
Also: I was not super impressed with Kavalier and Clay. Would you say this is about as good or better?
By Jason on 10.20.07 1:58 pm
Interesting that you bring up the homosexual angle. I was reading Chabon’s Wikipedia entry before this, and it said that he “was mistakenly featured in a Newsweek article on up-and-coming gay writers.” But, yes, there is at least one gay character in the book, though it’s more incidental than anything else; most of the sex takes place “offscreen.”
My recollections of Kavalier and Clay are dulled by the seven years since I’ve read it. I’ll say this: this book is far less epic in scope than K&C, which I think makes it feel tighter. The main action, with the exception of a few flashbacks that fill in details, takes place in about a week. And for me, much of the attraction of the book comes from its hard-boiled roots; I spent much of the earlier part of this year on a Raymond Chandler kick, and Chabon does a good job of channeling him for large parts of the story. I don’t know what, if anything, turned you off about K&C, so I can’t say for certain that Union is the better book, but I had a hard time putting it down.
By Dan on 10.20.07 2:47 pm
I think the narrower scope you’re describing is what made me feel like Wonder Boys was just better written than Kavalier and Clay. (Or maybe I was just unimpressed that the rest of the country was discovering that comics were neato through prose fiction.) I think I walked away from those books feeling like Chabon probably had a knack for genre fiction, and does a decent job with emotional realism (or whatever you call it), but I wasn’t really impressed by his attempt to overlay them.
By Jason on 10.20.07 9:22 pm
[...] may seem like I’m on a Michael Chabon kick, reading this so soon after The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but I knew nothing of this book until I saw it mentioned in Chabon’s Wikipedia entry. [...]
By doombot » Short Book Review: Gentlemen of the Road on 11.08.07 12:46 pm
[...] to Variety, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen Union (which I read a few months back) is being made into a movie by none other than the Coen brothers (whose latest movie, No Country [...]
By doombot » Shit. Yes. on 02.12.08 11:16 am
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