A review by gothhotel
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

4.0

As a detective novel, middling. The atmosphere is great but the pacing is off and the plot rambles around the block and up and down a few hills before settling down somewhere out of left field. Still, it's got chutzpah, if I may borrow the term. Chabon writes like a control freak - you must know the exact inflection with which this minor character pronounces a name. - but with such imagination and wit that it is impossible not to enjoy. The big picture is rich and the little picture is jam-packed with weird little quips that make you laugh and say, "where the hell did that come from?" A character was "as sober as a carp in a bathtub." A place "had all the allure of a dehumidifier". In the slower first half, I had to make myself pick up the book, but I was always glad I did. The ending also hit like a ton of bricks, in light of recent events. ("That's the kind of shit we have to look forward to now. Burning cars and homicidal dancing.”)

If you put aside the whole "detective story" angle and look at the book as something else - a black-humored look at the tangle of fathers and sons, displacement and diaspora - it's really very good, probably even great. And in a monkey-brain aside, I imagined Landsman as Harry du Bois from Disco Elysium, but I'm pretty sure the writers of Disco Elysium were imagining Landsman when they wrote Harry du Bois, so I stand by it.