The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

I am still thinking about what I think about this book. I can say I wasn’t blown away.

I’ve only read one other book by Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I enjoyed that story more. It wasn’t perfect, either. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to know/understand about the nature of the golem, and I found the way that Sammy’s story ends was…I don’t know. Imperfect. It didn’t quite square with what I expected of Sammy’s character, but I felt that I never fully understood the character that he was given in the latter part of the book. The book was very close to Sammy at first, and then he receded, and although that later distance made sense for the plot’s resolution, I had the impression that Chabon abandoned Sammy to force that resolution. On the plus side, I loved Sammy throughout most of the book, and I do find Chabon’s writing to be really lovely. He is capable of a clarity that I don’t see a lot in contemporary literary fiction.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union may just have had too much going on. It's a hard-boiled detective narrative, but the detective was part of an actual police department. Genre-wise, that means that Chabon may have to juggle with conflicting conventions from two different kinds of detective stories: the hard-boiled detective and the police procedural. Admittedly, it is not impossible to plop your hard-boiled detective into a hierarchical department structure; it is precisely that combination of factors that has created so many of what a Vice Magazine article once referred to as ‘badge-and-gun’ scenes, where the rogue (righteous) cop is forced to hand over the tools of his trade to his superior officer. Since the era of Dirty Harry cop action movies, that particular rogue cop vs. tight-ass desk cop conflict seems much, much more common in TV and movies than in books, but that may be my biased perception. I read mostly pre-1970s detective fiction, so my idea of hard-boiled is the loner private detective, like Marlowe and Spade, rather than the rogue cop fighting his corrupt or just plain lame deparment. And, in fact, many of Chabon’s writing choices suggest that the reader should be thinking of those first-wave hard-boiled detectives. I’m not alone in making these associations with the earlier genres of hard-boiled detectives; in her review of this work for The Washington Post’s Book World, Elizabeth McCracken refers to the book’s “dimly lit 1940s vibe” and its “Chandlerian” prose.

The “mystery” plot itself, however, seems closer to international espionage thriller stuff than the usual hard-boiled mystery. In Chandler's Marlowe books, for example, the specific crimes of murder, or blackmail, or racketeering are bad enough, but they really matter because of the ways they are symptomatic of bigger social sicknesses. The mystery of Chabon's book is already on such a grand scale that it doesn't lend itself to that kind of metaphor. I perceive this plot to be a problem beyond the genre convention issues, though. As I read, I was aware that Chabon was providing answers to his mystery, but as soon as I finished the book, I completely forgot how he resolved it. I remember key, very dramatic events that took place toward the book’s conclusion, but I can’t really remember the last thing I learned about who the “culprit” was. That resolution was not a key to the story. So, sure, maybe Chabon was deliberately refusing to conform absolutely to convention, but given the loving detail that went into creating this hard-boiled character, his world, and his storyline, that sort of refusal seems pointless when contrasted with Chabon’s obvious love for the way the world of this genre works. If it’s undermining convention, it’s half-assed, and to no obvious purpose.

Finally, I really loved the premise of this book. I seem to have become a fan of these mildly tweaked alternate world / alternate history narratives, and I thought the setting, the Jewish-Alaskan settlement developed after the failure of Israel, was compelling. The coherence of Chabon’s Sitka was very impressive. I was disappointed that the fate of Sitka was such a key factor in the story, though, and would have preferred it as a fully realized setting, and nothing more. That’s my personal quirk in liking these alternate histories, though—I want them to be a done deal, and not something that plays out or can be resolved within the particular narrative that I am reading. Other readers would definitely disagree on this point.

I notice that the Amazon ratings for this book have a surprisingly wide spread for Amazon ratings. At the time I’m looking at the little reader-rating chart, there are 85 five-star, 55 four-star, 33 three-star, 19 two-star, and 30 one-star. Usually, when it comes to a potentially polarizing book, one rating is the clear leader e.g. Infinite Jest currently has 187 five-star ratings, and the other four categories combined add up to 147 ratings. I would imagine that as time goes by and the first flurry of folks reading the new Michael Chabon has passed, the people who are really interested in the premise and subject matter will end up increasing the five- and four-star ratings considerably. I was interested in the premise and enjoy the genre very much, but I would probably slap a three-star rating on this book, if pressed. I was impressed with various aspects of the book, but am still not convinced that Chabon really brought it all together, and don’t really believe that his intention was to bust up the conventions and leave the book loose and unresolved.