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.

Book Review: Max Hamm Fairy Tale Detective by Frank Cammuso

 

Max Hamm Fairy Tale Detective

by Frank Cammuso

This month my book club chose graphic novels for our theme. The first one I picked up was a tongue in cheek noir detective fairy tale re-write.

It reminded me a bit of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, “Oh, you’re a smart guy, are ya?”

It was mostly funny, though there were a couple jokes that fell a bit flat for me.

The seamy underside of Hollywood is reprised in the The Big Sheep as Storybook Land to good effect.

Max Hamm runs a detective agency with Humpty Dumpty called Hamm and Eggs Detective Agency. Well, you can guess what happens to Humpty, though perhaps not exactly how or why.

Little Bo Peep makes an appearance right off, with a sob story about coming to the big city and falling on hard times.

“It was after midnight when the cops called me to come down to King Cole’s Supper Club. My not so hard-boiled partner had an accident.”

It seems Bo Peep has drawn them into quite a sordid little story, but eventually Max gets the upper ham, I mean hand.

Events become even more sordid in The Long Ever After. “Rose Red did the bump and grind at the Puss-n-Boots.”

This is definitely not a comic book for little kids, but the parade of familiar characters in noir setting continues. Snow White is a very prominent character, an old friend, perhaps even an old flame, Max Hamm. Apparently Snow White married badly.

The artwork is monochromatic with gray washes used to good effect. The pictures alternate between full page and a traditional comic panel layout on the page, making it easy to follow the progression of events and speakers.

Yeah, it’s pretty, well, hammy, but fun.

A Tightly Raveled Mind by Diane Lawson

A Tightly Raveled Mind

By Diane Lawson

Nora Goodman is a psychiatrist doing traditional daily psychoanalysis with a small number of patients in San Antonio, Texas. She and her husband, Richard, had moved to his old hometown from Chicago, at his insistence. He is a high profile psychiatrist who consults for the police and on television shows.

They are separated but have two children, Camille and Alex, typical adolescents having a hard time coping with their father having moved out of the family home. Richard is trying to get Nora back into their marriage, holding out ridiculous carrots like membership in the country club, which Nora cares nothing about.

Professor Howard Westerman is Nora’s first patient of the day. He “accidentally” blows himself up in a home lab workshop. A loose gas fitting? Sabotage? Suicide?

Allyson Forsyth is the second patient of the day, a wealthy oil heiress, but she has a great deal of trouble with her marriage. She has “a distracted aloofness that people read as a refusal to be bothered with life’s ordinary concerns. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I understood that her depression made her move as if underwater.” She has just been to see her divorce lawyer then goes and steps off a high building and kills herself.

Nora hires a private detective, Mike Ruiz, to investigate because she is afraid her patients are being killed. The interactions with Mike develop in an off-kilter fashion to something between a relationship and a noir sexual entanglement that wasn't sexy, just disturbing.

John Heyderman is her third patient of the day, a former military sniper. “He’d been discharged from the military in body only, his internal world stuck in a perpetual cycle of horrific flashback, demonic guilt and deadening denial.” Is he the threat or in danger himself?

There is a lot of talk in the book about the terms of therapy, like countertransference. “About repression. About the power of the Unconscious to put our head up our butt and keep it there.”

The story is told in first person, past tense with A LOT of foreshadowing. “I failed to anticipate each and every one of those fatal events, not to mention the violence I would prove capable of myself.”

Halfway between an old-fashioned noir mystery like the Raymond Chandler books I used to read and a Girl on the Train thriller. The narrator seems like she should be above reproach, but she casts aspersions on her own fallibility early on, saying that she didn’t “see” this or that and that the analyst is usually as in need of therapy as the patient.

Then she goes very far astray, acting at one point as if she is in a fugue state though it could be stress and sleep deprivation.

It was an intriguing book but a bit coarse, much like a Raymond Chandler, but it wasn’t a smooth ride. It was okay, I finished it, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it to anyone I know.