Book Review!

Yesterday I finished The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. Great book! In this book, Chabon aspired to combine the genres of noir police thriller, redemptive love story, and religio-political critique. He did admirably well on all three fronts. It is the story of Meyer Landsman, a faithless, self-destructive, but talented Jewish shammes (detective). He reminds me of the jilted Rick Blaine who goes on a bender when Ilsa Laszlo walks into his Casablanca gin joint. However, Meyer and his ex-wife are imagined in a parallel universe. It is 2008, but the Jews lost the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the flood of Jews heading for Palestine ended up settling for rainier pastures in the Alaskan panhandle, turning backwater Sitka into a metropolis of 3 million.

Since getting together, Alexis and I have read many of the same books as a way of keeping on the same page relationally. Let’s see: East of Eden, Gilead, Carter Beats the Devil, Pilgrim’s Regress, Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, The Mystery of Marriage, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and A Million Miles and a Thousand Years just to name them all. Although I recommend this for any married couple that can find books agreeable to both parties, I would have been interested in reading these books anyway. A couple of people have recently expressed surprise that I read fiction at all, I suppose because they had me pegged as a wanna-be-know-it-all who spends all his time trying to get the facts straight. Although I do have a healthy appreciation for a set of facts whittled to a fine point, I have always felt there is something more valuable, though less quantifiable, about good stories. The blunt edges of a story can’t always go straight to the heart of a matter, but can be useful for a wider variety of life-essential tasks than simply piercing falsehoods or skewering other people’s arguments. As with many things in this world, the things that most benefit us are not always the things for which we can track the benefits most easily. Neither the most important things in your life nor the most dangerous can easily be recorded as debits and credits in the ledger of your well-being.

Not only do I think this is a good book, but I would recommend it to anyone who has achieved a tenth grade reading level. It has something for everyone: action, intrigue, love, philosophy, religion, and it will help you brush up on your Yiddish. It struck me while reading it, that it could make a great movie. I just looked it up and apparently the Coen brothers think so too. The movie is in pre-production.

One thing the movie won’t be able to capture is how well Chabon crafts his metaphors. Although less-experienced writers (like myself) regularly construct sprawling, gaudy, and architecturally flawed metaphors for the sheer fun of it, Chabon attempts daring and complex turns of phrase without ever breaking the flow of the paragraph. He develops analogies that seem doomed to implosion only to shock you with how well the comparison seems to fit in once you swallow it. He is the Gaudi of the metaphor.

The great thing, though, is not just that his periphrastic pen doesn’t harm the action of the story, but that it actually enhances it. He keeps the action moving at exactly the right pace the entire novel. It’s as though he has set the cruise-control on the narrative so that no matter what he does with the steering wheel you are moving at just the right speed. In the introduction to my copy of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was described as having “perfect pitch” in a literary sense; perhaps not the most creative or brilliant writer ever, but he knew how to tell a story. Chabon does too.

I won’t give it away here, but Chabon’s plot is a great one, with much opportunity for poetic and philosophical pondering about the position of Jews in the world, the human need for redemption, and the politics of power. Chabon fills you in on just enough of these details to let you know that he has thought about them carefully, but he doesn’t weigh the story down too much with his musings. I get the impression, however, that if I sat down with some English majors we could find all kinds of intriguing parallels, analogies, and ideas tucked away in the book.

Since every good book review seems to have some kind of negative angle on the book, I will simply say that Chabon’s picture on the dust jacket bears an eerie resemblance to a misanthropic and rodent-like person I once knew. That remains my least favorite page.