Brilliant American writer gives us a great new story
<$z10.5>WHEN did great writers quit telling great stories?That was Michael Chabon’s complaint in his introduction to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, which he edited in 2003. He said he was bored with the “quotidian, plot-less, moment-of-truth revelatory story” that dominated American fiction. Let’s have detective stories, he said, horror stories, adventure stories, romance stories — in short, let’s have stories with plots.
Chabon takes up his own challenge in his latest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, his first major work since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2001r The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
The new book hangs on a collection of plot points so unlikely that it could have been written on a dare, a drunken bar bet of a story. There’s no way anyone could pull off a hard-boiled detective story, set in Alaska, populated by Jews and Tlingit Indians, pivoting on a game of chess and a Vicks inhaler. Who would even think to try?
But it works because Chabon is one of America’s most generous literary writers, a virtuoso performer who keeps one eye on pleasing his audience.
Like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America a few yearso, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union <$>is an alternate history. An actual congressional proposal in 1940 suggested creating a Jewish homeland in Alaska — not Israel — and Chabon spins this historical fragment out into the present day.
Jewish refugees and their descendants have been living in the Federal District of Sitka for 60 years, but the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, leaving an uncertain future for the Jewish settlers.
Into that bizarre setting, Chabon drops a noir crime thriller. His detective, Meyer Landsman, is a divorced alcoholic living in a seedy hotel room. His victim, a gay heroin addict who shoots up by tying off his arm with the leather strap from his tefillin (two black boxes holding biblical verses), may or may not be the Messiah.
The entire premise stretches credibility, but Chabon carries it off because he writes like a dream and he colours in the Sitka District with vivid detail: the Jewish kids who ironically wear pyjamas decorated with igloos, snowflakes and polar bears; the Filipino-style Chinese doughnuts called shtekeleh; jokes about Alaskan Jews being the “Frozen Chosen”.
And Chabon’s brilliant turns of phrase seem particularly suited to the conventions of the hard-boiled detective story. A clock on the hospital wall “got antsy, kept snapping off pieces of the night with its minute hand”. A chubby kid has “a second and hints of a third chin without clear benefit of a first”.
Speculative fiction like this usually takes aim at a contemporary target, and Chabon’s villain is religious extremism. His detective is sick of “guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God”. But the deep allegory tucked away in The Yiddish Policemen’sion <$>seems less interesting than the obvious surface delights we take in Chabon’s storytelling.
It seems almost ungenerous to criticise a writer because he doesn’t reach the same depths that Roth sounds out in each new novel — especially stingy considering how hard Chabon works to entertain us. With this book, a brilliant American writer has given us a great new story, and maybe that’s more than enough.
