The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (P.S.) | Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (P.S.) | Michael Chabon | Chabon's best to date

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The Yiddish Police...

	The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (P.S.) Michael Chabon Harper Perennial, 2008 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 288 reviews view larger image
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For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder?right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

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Deliciously Multi-Layered

Prior to U.S. involvement in World War II President Roosevelt proposed establishing a temporary Jewish settlement on the Alaskan panhandle. In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Michael Chabon takes that premise and creates an alternate reality in which the impending "Reversion" (the frozen Chosen are about to be displaced from their temporary homeland) is but a few weeks away. Initially this is mere backdrop for the story of Meyer Landsman, a Sitka police detective suffering a bad case of bottle abuse the result of a never-born child and subsequent divorce, the possibility that his sister was murdered, and a father who committed suicide.

Landsman awakes in his fleabag hotel room one morning to learn that one of the other tenants has been murdered. Landsman learns the corpse is a chess prodigy and heroin addict, but also the wayward son of a powerful head of a Jewish sect and, possibly, the key to the future of the "Alyeskan" Jews. Against the orders of his boss, who also happens to be his ex-wife, Landsman's investigation, with help from his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and half-cousin, takes him into the underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis.

Chabon pays homage to Hammett and Chandler but manages to bring something new to the genre, and although some readers may find the narrative pushes the limits of their endurance - characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket;" "In the street the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat;" he writes of his protagonist, "Something wistful tugs at his memory, a whiff of some brand of aftershave that nobody wears anymore, the jangling chorus of a song that was moderately popular one August twenty-five summers ago." - others will be entranced.

If the plot of Policemen's Union is a trifle complex and its denouement - composed of elements of international terrorists complicated by a religious conspiracy and a group of end-of-the-world zealots - a little over the top, Chabon's treatment of this alternate history, its discount houses, seedy bars and pie shops, is razor sharp. The settings, the characters, the narrative all drive the plot. In Landsman Chabon has created a Jewish Phillip Marlowe (replete with porkpie hat); but where Marlowe is rather one-dimensional, Landsman is the everyman antihero, as prone to fits of self-pity and the urge to return to his room, and his bottle of slivovitz and his World's Fair souvenir glass, as he is committed to solving the mystery of this murder and tying it to the untimely death of his sister, all the while ruing his divorce while lacking the courage to make amends. The reader is compelled to follow Landsman across the pages to see what happens next, who he will meet next, whether it's the pie man's daughter or the diminutive Tlingit police inspector named Willie Dick (honest!).

Chabon also deftly explores the relationship between fathers and sons as well as what it means to be displaced - a people without a homeland, or as Landsman himself says, "My homeland is in my hat."

Highly recommended.

J. Conrad Guest for The Smoking Poet

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Chabon's best to date

Chabon creates an absorbing counterfactual world with a hard-boiled detective story inside it. Informative and hilarious, big chunks of the book are as good as any fiction I've read. Chabon is a terrific writer. The ending does not do the rest of the book justice, but I flew through this book and really enjoyed it. It's along the lines of "Gun with Occasional Music" by the brilliant Jonathan Lethem and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World by Haruki Murikami. Highly recommended.

Bittersweet like woodsmoke

This is a book I am not allowed to read in bed, as my husband is opposed to books that make me cackle while he's trying to sleep.

" According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with the crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman only has two moods: working and dead. ...He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like theres a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets."

Our hero, detective Landsman, has spend the night in his partner's bed. Which was invaded by small children. It was not restful. Upon rising, he speaks to his hostess

" You have a serious toenail problem among your youth," Landsman says. "Also something, I think it might be a sea otter, died and is rotting in the little one's diaper."

Chabon is never going to convince me that he has NOT shared a bed with a four-year old at some point.

Also:

" Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.

I finished it up yesterday. At then end, all the plot lines slammed together is a frothy stew of of beautiful coincidence. This book caters to my known preferences for character-based writing with a coherent plot. Nothing that happened was out of character, and the writing was lyrical and expressive.

I think the theme of this book is redemption. There is a running chess motif. Landsman's heart is described as making a "knight move in his chest", which is really evocative. I thought the last third of the book was a little slow, but I ripped through it at a pretty good pace, so it's not like it was so sludge-slow.

One of the interesting things I noticed was that I was unclear on when exactly the story was set. There were more and more clues, but it started like it could have been an alternate history Maltese Falcon, and as the story goes on, it becomes more and more firmly seated in time.

Read this if: you like alternate ethnography and history, if you have a burning need for more Yiddish flavor in your life, if you are a fan of chess, character-based writing, or weird lyricism.
Avoid if: you hate ambiguous endings, "artistic" writing, noir, or hats

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Really, really good

I almost gave up on this book. I'm not Jewish and I found the generous serving of Yiddish words to be very discouraging and a barrier to appreciating the book fully. At page 150 I was ready to put it down, but because the book received so much praise (I think the Economist called it one of the best books of 2007), I forced myself to continue and am so glad I did. I finally got into the groove of the novel and found myself awestruck by the way the author's words could capture such true-to-life feelings and conversations. The author's writing style and the way he can write a conversation between characters makes other authors' representations of characters and words seem contrived. WARNING - Plot spoiler: He even got me to accept the eventual reuniting of Detective Landsman and his ex-wife as a perfectly natural thing (even though at the beginning of the book, the only thing I hoped for was that the author would not pander to the audience's natural desire for happy endings). All I can say to those who are turned off by the book is to keep at it, you'll be rewarded. You may even speak Yiddish by the end of it.

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