Hugo Discussion - Best Novel

As has been announced everywhere, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union has won the Hugo for best novel.

I reviewed it back in July 2007.

The voting breakdown can be downloaded from Here (thanks to Larry for the tip).


I think that this was always going to happen.  Some people suggested that Brasyl or Halting State might prevent Chabon from taking the Hugo but I think that it was pretty clear from Chabon's Locus win that the SF audience are not in any way turned off by his 'mainstream' credentials.

Unlike many critics, I was not overly impressed by The Yiddish Policemen's Union.  While I liked the setting, the characterisation and some of the themes (even if the 'struggling for identity' chestnut is quite elderly) I thought that the plotting was lousy.  I think that if you're going to ape hardboiled tropes then you should follow through with hardboiled story telling and The Yiddish Policemen's Union is not a gritty tale of sordid double-dealing and murder.  It is a vast, sprawling political conspiracy centred around the figure of a Jewish Messiah.  I think conspiracies are dull to read as in effect, all you have to do is stay one step ahead of your readers and then end the book by disclosing what is really going on.  I think that type of story is easier to write and out of genre and, as a result, less interesting to me. 

In fact, Chabon's rather uneven relationship with genre story-telling also crippled my enjoyment of his Sword and Sorcery pastiche Gentlemen of the Road.  As with The Yiddish Policeman's Union, I thought that the book (in fact a series of linked short stories published in the New Yorker) failed to completely embrace genre narratives in favour of what is ultimately a pastiche as opposed to an actual genre work.  Since then, my views on Chabon-as-a-genre-author have mellowed as he has joined the SFWA and clearly thinks of himself in those terms but I do continue to think that Chabon's genre work is flawed in that he has trouble with plot.

But then my favourite, Brasyl, finished fifth.  So what do I know?

Comments

[Max Cairnduff]

I have to admit I thought you were a bit harsh on Gentlemen of the Road, I thought it more successful than you did (despite oddly enough agreeing with every one of your criticisms). I thought a love of the genre shone through it, and I also thought he avoided pastiche simply by virtue of the fact he was trying not to ape the S&S genre but to write in it (successfully or not).

I haven't read this yet, and am quite looking forward to it, but it's size is itself worrying. You say it is poorly plotted, and plot is important to detective fiction which typically is lean and prizes brevity in prose style in a way that is not perhaps natural to Chabon. Actually, that takes me back to your Gentlemen review, S&S too prizes brevity but Chabon is not a naturally concise writer in the pulp or hardboiled manner.

[Jonathan M]

Yeah, I remember you getting on better with GotR than I did.

I don't think he was trying to write a Pastiche. As I say here, my view of Chabon has mellowed and I no longer think that he's trying to plumb genre for ideas. I think that both GotR and YPU were written as firm examples of the genres they were written in.

My problem with both books is that I don't think he's quite managed to write within the genre yet. Gentlemen of the Road felt over-written by the standards of the genre. In a way it was too well written as it used some sophisticated techniques, proper characterisation and some lovely prose but without the basic story being particularly sound.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by contrast, was philosophically utterly opposed to the hardboiled stuff it was aping. If Hardboiled fiction is partly about the suggestion that life is usually a lot simpler than we might think (i.e. it is subject to certain primal forces such as sex and violence) then YPU takes the opposite stance by suggesting that even a simple murder can not only involve vast temporal conspiracies but also huge mystical forces that are at work in our lives too.

In both cases, I feel that he's one step away from getting it right but he's just a little too clever to get it just right and as a result his fiction has a certain (clearly unintended) postmodern, deconstructed feel to it.

I find this really frustrating as I think Chabon is one of the good guys and there are moments in YPU and GotR that are utterly fantastic (in fact, I'd recommend you check out YPU as I think it might be right up your street if you don't have a problem with the whole deconstruction thing) but for some reason I feel that his approach to plot is never quite right.

[Max Cairnduff]

Plot is difficult for those from a literary fiction background, many litfit enthusiasts see plot as essentially a negative, their interest is in the use of language and internal character growth. It's not a good training background for genre writing as a rule.

Also, the emphasis in litfit on use of language can be problematic when moving to genres where concision of prose is a virtue.

So yes, he's probably not quite there yet (the probably is just because I haven't read YPU yet and so can't fully commit) but I think if not it's because his background and training haven't well prepared him for what he is now trying to do.

Interesting point on the philosophy of hardboiled, in some ways I agree, though I would note hardboiled plots can be bafflingly complex in execution albeit with motives which are as you note essentially simple.

[Jonathan M]

You said what I didn't want to say :-) There are stories of him going to writers' workshops and being laughed at for trying to put together genre stories and I suspect that, like a left-handed child in the old days, he has learned to write a certain way and so must now un-learn his "bad habits" in order to write in his natural voice.

It's a minor flaw and, as the Hugo suggested, many people obviously aren't as bothered by the flaw as I am but I do think it's a chink in his armour. I think if he can find that geek voice inside him then there will be no stopping him. He will probably craft the next generation of genre writers in his image. But he's not quite there yet.