REVIEW - The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (2007)

It’s not often that a Pulitzer Prize winner stumbles into the sudetenland claimed by genre territory but the past twelve months have seen two come our way.  Firstly, Cormac McCarthy’s stunning The Road and now Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  Despite the methodological similarities between these two examples of mainstream authors playing around with genre tropes, the two books also reveal a profoundly different attitude towards genre.  Indeed, where McCarthy took what he needed from genre without even a nod of recognition, Chabon positively revels in the amount his book owes both to the Noir detective novels of US  pre- and post-War period and to more contemporary fare such as the alternative history works of people such as Philip Roth.  However, compared to the elegant simplicity of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale, Chabon’s book proves to be a little bit too smart for its own good as McCarthy takes his eye off the demands of his aped genre just enough to take the book over the line that demarcates the intelligent re-invention from the knowing pastiche.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union focuses on Meyer Landsman.  A divorcee who drinks too much and still loves his wife, Landsman, as is traditional for anti-heroes in the Chandlerian mould, hides his loneliness, desperation and existential angst under a veneer of cynicism and dark humour.  First on the scene when a young chess playing junkie gets murdered down the hall from where he lives, Landsman and his half-Indian partner Berko start investigating what turns out to be the murder of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, a gifted Jew born into every generation on the off chance that the time comes for the Jewish Messiah to be called.  The only problem is that the chess playing junkie messiah is also the son of a pillar of one particularly nasty corner of the Orthodox Jewish community.  A man-mountain and “black hat” in all possible senses, this man not only has plans for the future of Jewry, he also has good reason for not wanting nosey policemen like Landsman rooting around in his affairs.

The book features three star turns : the setting, the language and the central character Meyer Landsman.

The book’s setting is perhaps its most written about characteristic.  Taking place in an alternate present, the book takes place in a Jewish city in Alaska that was granted to the global Jewish community after the collapse of Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.  Decades later and international Jewry finds itself about to be cast again to the winds of fortune as their enclave is about to return to American control; as we are frequently reminded, “these are strange times to be a Jew”.  As many disembarking Jews were disappointed to discover, Sitka (the name of the district and city) is not a world of snow fields and polar bears but rather of Alaskan swamps, mists, mosquitos and fogs.  Chabon populates this city with slightly olde worlde family owned businesses and boarding houses quite different to the retail franchises and apartment complexes that fill the rest of modern America but strangely similar both in climate and atmosphere to the pre- and post-War California of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.  So far, so recognisable but where the world of the Yiddish Policeman’s Union comes into its own is when Chabon is taking elements of Jewish society and projecting the niches they might fill in a modern world where they were left unbothered by ethnic diversity and unsullied by 50 years of occupation in Palestine.

One of Chabon’s finest creations in this optic is the boundary maven who maintains the eruv, a network of threads between posts that allow Jews to leave the house on the Sabbath without technically leaving the house because the threads count as extended parts of the door frame.  The idea of a man whose job it is to allow people to bend the rules of their religion is a fantastic idea improved only by the fact that they are entirely real.  Indeed, a trip to north London will reveal lots of poles with leads running between them, maintaining an eruv for the denizens of London’s Jewish areas.  Chabon portrays the maven as one part black market spiv and one part pillar of the community and he fits into the Noir setting seamlessly.

Chabon’s other great creation is Rabbi Schpillman.  A brutal patriarch of a religious order nearly extinguished by the holocaust, Schpillman not only serves as the book’s chief villain, he also does a fantastic job of condensing everything that appears weird and Other about Orthodox Jews to a secularised cynical Jew such as Landsman.  Again we see Chabon’s perfect mingling of Noir tropes with Jewish archetypes as the religious order is not so much a bunch of religious fanatics as they are a collection of uniformed gangsters... utterly loyal to their own largely unclear spiritual beliefs and utterly ruthless.  Indeed, these characters are also the subject of Chabon’s greatest intellectual and linguistic pun.

Throughout the book, Landsman and his companions refer to members of Sitka’s Orthodox communities as “black hats”.  This is simply a stroke of genius as it manages to contain in two words not only secular Jewry’s mockery of Orthodox eccentricities but also the alienation of the two visions of what it is to be a Jew and the distrust and alienation as, of course... only bad guys wear black hats.  While this particular pun is particularly delicious, the entire book is peppered with thematic jokes.  From the short punchy phraseology to the absurd similes (Voices like “an onion rolling in a bucket”) and the endless progression of Jewish names and Yiddish slang.  Indeed, nowhere is the meshing of Jewish and Noir archetypes better expressed than in the person of Meyer Landsman.

As his name suggests, Landsman is a product of his home.  His increasing anxiety and disastrous dealings in Talmudic prophecy mirror the same frequently tense relationship most modern Jews have with their religious heritage.  Landsman is, in many ways, an everyman, despite the suggestion that his honest and virtuous nature may make him some kind of spiritual figure in his own right.  In reading the descriptions of Landsman I was struck by the words of modern Noir writer James Elroy who once rounded on the roots of his chosen genre and pointed out that his characters were scum-bags where as those of Marlowe et al. were good guys who were merely sensitive and bludgeoned by the world into a weary cynicism.  Indeed, this insightful characterisation also fuels the various links between Noir and the Japanese concept of the masterless  Samurai the Ronin.  Though the Ronin’s outer appearance may be gruff and cynical, beneath the tarnished armour and unkempt beard lies a truly honourable man.  This is definitely true of Landsman.  In fact, it is difficult to not see the book as being almost entirely about Landsman’s journey through his myriad of psychological problems to an eventual happiness.  As Landsman points out, he’s crazy when he’s not working.

Despite possessing a simple if thrilling plot with plenty of action, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is not really a thriller or a detective story.  As a thriller it suffers from questionable pace as each new character greets us with a paragraph of wittily purple descriptive prose and any descriptive passages come bogged down with jargon and Jewish names.  The book’s plot is also ridiculously, absurdly over the top... not so much a whodunit or a detective story, the plot takes in vast international conspiracies more on a par with The Da Vinci Code than the more human scale of the likes of The Maltese Falcon.

Indeed, the book functions primarily as a mood piece.  Like many exercises in ontological genre manipulation such as Keith Roberts’ Pavane (a tale set in an alternative universe where Elizabethan Britain fell to Catholicism) or John M. Ford’s equally alternative fantasy renaissance novel The Dragon Waiting, the Yiddish Policeman’s Union works best when it is standing still and Chabon is free to carefully craft his high-concept universe without needing to overly complicate things by featuring hugely involving plot-lines.  However, despite being a mood piece, the book stays clear of the clomping foot of nerdism by virtue of Chabon’s decision to channel so much of his attention into the metaphorical mental state of his main protagonist.  Despite Chabon’s anchorage in the traditional Noir detective genre, Chabon does not follow the genre in making his book be all about the plot.  Instead, Chabon stresses the idea of the detective as a cutter of Gordian knots, a vision that is present in the genre but is perhaps more obviously seen in works such as Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels in which the French detective has to pick through the ruins of failed relationships to find the person who is “to blame”.  While this conception of the role of the detective is one that is accepted, it is clearly the vision not of a genre fan but of a literary critic and therein lies this book’s main problem.

Archly clever and technically superb to the point of smugness, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a book that never feels entirely comfortable or natural to read.  Rather than writing a Noir detective story set in a fictional Alaskan city, Chabon has clearly come at this story from the perspective of someone attempting to ape and make jokes about a literary genre (one American G-man is referred to as “Agent Spade”).  The endless descriptive passages smack of a man enjoying his act of mimicry and the energy sapping jargon that litters every page reveals this book’s roots in Chabon’s 1997 review of a Yiddish phrase book originally published in 1958 and featuring instructions in how to ask about a Social Security card in Yiddish.  In many ways, postmodernism is about being smarter than the people who buy into any given narrative and that slight smugness infects this book and explains why the book’s actual plot is so ludicrously epic and overblown.  Chabon’s approach to this book was so disconnected and cerebral that he never felt the need to write a proper detective story, preferring instead to expertly mimic all the linguistic trappings of that genre.  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a cleverly written book by a technically gifted author, it’s just not a particularly likeable book.

Comments

[franQ]

Hearing all this talk of the new Chabon release makes me a little sad…

A year ago, I would have been thrilled and no doubt attended his book signing. He’s been my favorite author since I first read his debut novel THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH back in the early 90s.

But I can no longer support the work of an author who has no regard for the story and characters that put him on the literary map.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a film version of MOP coming out later this year… Written and directed by the guy who brought us DODGEBALL, in which he’s CHANGED 85% of Chabon’s original story.

And the sad part is… Michael Chabon himself APPROVED of the script! WHY would he do this? I can only think of one possible answer: $$

If you are a Chabon fan, esp MOP, I suggest you do NOT see this movie. You will be sadly disappointed at the COMPLETE removal of the gay character, Arthur Lecomte, and the fabrication of a romantic love triangle between Art Bechstein, Jane Bellwether, and a bi-sexual Cleveland Arning. And really, what is MOP without the presence of Phlox Lombardi? Alas, she’s barely in it.

For a copy of the script email: bechstein[at]yahoo[dot]com