Book Musing: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

 

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

by Michael Chabon

I came across an article a little over a week ago that suggested 10 books that anyone who loves science fiction ought to read as they had won both the Nebula and the Hugo awards. I immediately added them to my Goodreads list.

I honestly can’t remember where I saw it, but here is one such list - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/the-novels-that-won-both-the-hugo-and-nebula-awards-ranked/

Connie Willis and Joe Haldeman are both familiar names from their short stories in Nebula award collections, but I’d never read a Michael Chabon before.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union immediately appealed to me, perhaps because I spent so much time watching Seinfeld as a teen and perhaps because I have always had a fascination with Jewish culture as someone who was raised in upstate New York.

I’ve also enjoyed hard-boiled detective fiction since my late teens, which led me to take a course in Detective Fiction in college. This is right up there with them. Detective Landsman is both incorrigible and self-destructive, single-minded, and fumbling his way in the dark. It’s a characterization of fascinating contrasts.

This is an alternate history but not much of a “science” fiction otherwise. The setting is Sitka, Alaska, where a sixty year temporary haven for Jewish people was set up after World War II. It opens as the area is about to undergo “Reversion” when the government takes back the land. The residents have to either apply for permission to stay or find somewhere else to go.

Detective Meyer Landsman, the main character, is living in a long term stay hotel, drinking his life away. The manager comes and gets him when another tenant is found dead. Landsman quickly deduces that this was not an accidental death.

Landsman is a divorced police detective and the police department is about to be taken out of Jewish control as well. His ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish, is placed in charge of his department. He and his half Tlingit, half Jewish partner, Berko Shemets, are ordered to make a good faith attempt to clear up any outstanding cases, then a bad faith attempt, and finally to simply mark them as cold cases.

Landsman is not about to go gently into the good night though. The connections that get made along the way are great action-adventure writing, there’s a little schmaltz and plenty of heart, and the prose that caries you along is first rate.

The omniscient narrator is not all that common in a lot of what I read, but allows for a depth of description that you don’t find in much genre fiction. It gets into the perceptions and thoughts of a multitude of characters. The descriptions are lengthy and literary in their parallels, but also very often amusing, which is fairly common with noir detective fiction.

The prose is beautiful – so many times I was struck by the incongruity and yet correctness of the metaphors he used to describe things. Some might eschew it as too flowery but I loved it. I went and put several more of his books on my Goodreads list. It’s a book that takes a long time to get where it’s going but I loved every minute of the drive. (Yes, I also prefer to drive on secondary roads instead of highways.)

Are the characters sometimes a little too ridiculous? Yes, sure. The two main Tlingit characters we run into are both police officers with one being tall and extremely heavy set while the other is a mere four foot nothing. As the only characters we hear much of who are Tlingit, it’s a little too absurd.

I’ve seen a lot of positive reviews for this book, some lukewarm ones, and some downright negative, but that just recommends a book to me. When you get a good spread of opinions about a book, it generally means there’s going to be a lot to engage with, and this is no different. There’s a particular style here that people may or may not like. I loved it.

Chabon is one of those authors who both makes me feel small and insignificant as an author and also inspires me to want to write more and better. His first novel came out to some acclaim when he was twenty-four and it seems he has been writing hard and fast, but mostly steadily, ever since.  

It’s a first rate, rollicking, fascinating, gorgeously written book. I highly recommend.

Oh, and the reader who brings the audio to life is wonderful, allowing me to get the intonation in my head that I never would have gotten just by reading it.