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bennyandthejets420 's review for:
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
by Michael Chabon
Equal parts satisfying and frustrating. I don't remember the early Chabon feeling this split between layer cake paragraph description and pulp plotting. It takes every plot point in what is ostensibly a detective story twice as long to occur because we have to halt the action every few moments for a breathlessly inventive worldbuilding paragraph set within the imaginative setting Chabon has invented. There apparently was a real life plan to relocate Jewish people to Sitka, Alaska during World War 2 that almost went through and one of the joys of the book is seeing how Chabon filled out this speculative history timeline, with the contrast of the Jewish people in a frigid setting, the local customs which develop, and the tensions with the local indigenous population (the last point ended up being surprisingly relevant to this recent read through). But reading the book made me feel insane because it takes so long for anything to happen in what is supposed to be a tense, plotted, pulpy story about a mysterious murder.
I read somewhere the initial draft of this was 600 (!!) in first person that was then cut down to 400 or so pages in third person. If you ask me this could have maybe lost about a 100 more. The world building is excellent but it feels at odds with the story Chabon wants to tell. I felt like the book was never going to end and the plot developments (such as when the main character almost gets killed) didn't really matter for how slow the book was preceding. That's not to say there isn't any good stuff, and I liked the chess digressions Chabon built into the story, but my experience reading this was initial interest and excitement slowly burning down to an impatient frustration.
I think this style of writing Chabon developed with Cavalier and Clay (the layer cake description, bravura paragraphs, thick ekphrasis of fictional objects, and punchy, ping pong dialogue) works better in a story that has the space to unfurl across space and time. If you ask me, Chabon should have slimmed down even further with this attempt at a mystery, detective novel.
Also, having made it this far into Chabon's oeuvre I think I can boil down some of his constant themes: 1) the heterogeneity of Jewish identity, 2) capital D Daddy issues (usually of the cold, absent, or traumatic sort), 3) red headed women probably resembling Chabon's actual wife, 4) a flirtation and preoccupation with low art and genre: science fiction, mystery, comic books, etc, and 5) what it means to be gay or bisexual in a heterosexual world. I've got three more books to go, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, and Moonglow and I'm looking forward to the first, because Chabon seems to finally 100% commit to a genre, feeling cautious about the second, because it's Chabon attempting to write a modern day Middlemarch (uhhhhh?), and don't know what to expect with the third.
I read somewhere the initial draft of this was 600 (!!) in first person that was then cut down to 400 or so pages in third person. If you ask me this could have maybe lost about a 100 more. The world building is excellent but it feels at odds with the story Chabon wants to tell. I felt like the book was never going to end and the plot developments (such as when the main character almost gets killed) didn't really matter for how slow the book was preceding. That's not to say there isn't any good stuff, and I liked the chess digressions Chabon built into the story, but my experience reading this was initial interest and excitement slowly burning down to an impatient frustration.
I think this style of writing Chabon developed with Cavalier and Clay (the layer cake description, bravura paragraphs, thick ekphrasis of fictional objects, and punchy, ping pong dialogue) works better in a story that has the space to unfurl across space and time. If you ask me, Chabon should have slimmed down even further with this attempt at a mystery, detective novel.
Also, having made it this far into Chabon's oeuvre I think I can boil down some of his constant themes: 1) the heterogeneity of Jewish identity, 2) capital D Daddy issues (usually of the cold, absent, or traumatic sort), 3) red headed women probably resembling Chabon's actual wife, 4) a flirtation and preoccupation with low art and genre: science fiction, mystery, comic books, etc, and 5) what it means to be gay or bisexual in a heterosexual world. I've got three more books to go, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, and Moonglow and I'm looking forward to the first, because Chabon seems to finally 100% commit to a genre, feeling cautious about the second, because it's Chabon attempting to write a modern day Middlemarch (uhhhhh?), and don't know what to expect with the third.