In a (futile) effort to be as cool as fellow Philistine Peter Holcombe, and also as a way to check the pulse of current literature as I labor away at my first attempt at a novel, I have decided to start reading more contemporary fiction. Quite a daunting task, given just how much literature is produced every year in the United States alone. Sorting the wheat from the chaff seems like a herculean task, even if you discount the large swaths of genre writing that feature a guy like this on their cover:
His soulful stare screams “Bad Boy”, but he’s really got a heart of gold underneath that gruff exterior.
That being the case, I decided to start with relatively known quantities and work my way outward to the more obscure. Michael Chabon’s name can reasonably be considered a household one, as much as any current American writer of “serious” fiction, so I thought I would check him out first. Full disclosure: I went to the library fully intending to check out The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the book for which Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize. But, thanks to the amazing lack of duplicates & copies, I ended up with his more recent book The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Still, even if the book was in this context my literary Rhonda, the premise intrigued me enough for me to Barbara Ann the book.
The blurb: Policemen’s Union is a hardboiled mystery a la Raymond Chandler, but set in the alternate reality Jewish homeland of Sitka, Alaska. Meyer Landsman, homicide detective, sets out to solve the murder of a fellow resident of his flophouse motel. Though aided by his cousin and partner Berko, Meyer faces some severe challenges. One, he just got a hardass new superior officer breathing down his neck. Two, she happens to be his ex-wife. Three, in a few months Sitka reverts back to U.S. control, and someone wants all cases closed by that point, solved or not.
Thus the noir game is afoot, as Meyer and Berko investigate any number of sleazy characters and faulty leads in their quest to provide justice for someone who by all accounts was a friendless junkie. But, as so often the case in crime novels, appearances are deceiving, and their investigation leads them into territory they never dreamed of. Competing groups of Jews, of just about every flavor, native Tlingit Indians, Russians, Filipinos, and Americans all play a role as the plot thickens more than a stew with too much roux dumped in. Along the way Chabon devotes ample time to tangential but important themes: chess, the place of Native Americans, and most of all Jewish identity.
Policemen’s Union‘s plot is satisfyingly pulpish, providing plenty of surprising twists and turns. I especially liked that, even when the overarching badness is revealed, there are still a few twists left. The conspiracy runs deep in the book, and by the end I was afraid that Chabon had lost focus on the individual characters, only to have him pull off a number of rapid twists that brought the book to a satisfying end. It is especially fun to see all the noir tropes transmogrified into a bizarre setting, a frozen paradise for the Jews. Typical characters: the shifty but inconsequential street rat, the secret informer, etc, receive new life from the very strangeness of their new context.
Ultimately the success of the novel rests on Meyer Landsman’s weary shoulders, and thankfully the hardbitten protagonist is up to the task. There is something entirely appropriate about the private dick in a crime novel belonging to that most world weary group of people, the Jews. And Landsman balances those two aspects of his character well while never teetering off into stereotype. His complicated history with many of the characters adds depth both to the plot and to his characterization. He stands as a worthy heir to Sam Spade.
Beyond the plot, though, what makes this book so interesting is its ruminations on national identity. The book’s central conceit, that European Jews were given part of Alaska as a safe haven during and immediately after World War II (which, I learned, was an actual plan by a US Congressman), helps Chabon explore the ties of a people to their land in a context at one remove from the debate raging today over the state of Israel. It is appropriate here to note that Chabon is ethnically Jewish, so of course this thought project has personal stakes for him. To his credit he does not come up with easy answers. It is clear that nobody in particular wants to deal with Abraham’s children and the massive logistical headache they present, yet the Sitka Jews are by no means given a free pass from Chabon. They are shown as exploitative, especially of the Tlingit tribe. Chabon brings this conflict to a head in the character of Berko, whose father was Jewish and whose mother was Tlingit. By Jewish tradition this does not make him Jewish, yet he adopts Jewish customs. In many ways he is a man adrift, caught between cultures, confused in a heartbreaking way.
That Chabon manages to raise such questions while still maintaining propulsive narrative drive and noir flavor does him credit as an author. He pulls off the balancing act with aplomb. He even manages to sprinkle dark humor throughout the narrative, as well as moments of real warmth. Chabon weaves a liberal number of metaphors through the book, and at times he stretches a bit: his metaphors do not always add to understanding or depth of flavor, and sometimes come off a bit showy. Other than that he is a capable prose stylist, even writing as he does in an unfamiliar genre. In this book he has provided a delicious cocktail of various literary ingredients. Best served on ice, of course.
Grade: B+
P.S. The Coen Bros. have been attached for several years to a film adaptation, but it seems to have drifted to the back of their very full burner. Let’s hope they get around to it, because they would be the perfect fit for the material, given their penchant both for films exploring Jewish identity (their great A Serious Man) and for crime films in very frigid settings (Fargo, anyone?).
