RaymondChandler? meets ChaimPotok? meets HarryTurtledove? meets JosephWambaugh? meets NealStephenson meets DanBrown meets JerryJenkins?.
I'd had this novel on my mental list for some time, considering all the awards it had won (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sidewise). On the other hand, knowing it would be alternate history, I was in no great hurry. When a friend handed me this novel after I finished fixing her bollixed Windows machine at 3 a.m., my time to read it had come. I must say my reaction is mixed.
For the first several chapters, I was too annoyed by baffling similes and metaphors. For example, here's the beginning of the last paragraph on page 2: "According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy." I don't know about you, but I can't readily jump from an alcoholic's medicinal brandy to tuning an old radio. And here's the ending of the paragraph: "When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of this brain like pages from a blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down." Castanets don't help me picture (or hear) a rocket, and the phrase "blowing out" coming shortly after the image of a rocket makes me think of explosions, not wafting breezes. Finally, blotter sheets don't blow in the wind; paperwork on top of a blotter gets caught in a breeze, but the blotter sheets themselves don't go flying, either because they're attached or they're too heavy. Hence, I can't picture what he's writing here.
[ From the Merriam Webster online dictionary entry for blotter: "a book in which entries (as of transactions or occurrences) are made temporarily pending their transfer to permanent record books <police blotter>"
So a police blotter would be a constantly growing book and be reasonably implemented in a loose leaf binder.
-- Bill Rutiser ]
So, right away I was turned off, couldn't tell what Chabon was trying to do, and couldn't tell whether I would care about the character(s). "Well," I thought to myself, "the similes aren't as awkward as JosephWambaugh?'s. But Wambaugh's are so bad they're funny, and Chabon's aren't bad enough to make me laugh." I proceeded to just skim past them without letting them bother me. Yet I still wasn't really getting into the novel, still was tempted to give up. That is, until page 103, where a guy named Berko hauls out a hilariously intimidating monster of a hammer, like Crocodile Dundee hauling out his giant knife or Hiro Protagonist hauling out his giant sword. Okay! I started getting a pleasant charge out of the novel, as long as I let the awkward similes go in one eye and out the other.
About halfway through the novel, when I mentioned Chabon's annoying similes to my beau, it occurred to me that Chabon might be deliberately making fun of some detective and true-crime authors by throwing deliberately bad similes at the reader. I was then able to chuckle at them. Here's a beaut from page 207: "'No problem,' Shprintzl Rudashevsky says in American, in a voice like an onion rolling in a bucket." That's about as ridiculous as "He looked like a game of stickball," from Wambaugh's EchoesInTheDarkenss?. Meanwhile, Landsman's ex-wife's hairdos got sillier and sillier, like Stephenson's Quicksilver nobleman's fashions getting ever more outlandish.
So, there I was finally enjoying the novel as pulpy detective romp set in an alternate-history quasi-Potok present. That is, until I encountered the secret farm with a red heifer. Oy! The fake addiction-recovery camp a few chapters earlier had already tipped the novel into thriller territory, but the red heifer said (mooed) "DanBrown and JerryJenkins?." Now we're talking international religious thriller, complete with messianic end times.
Earlier dialogs pretty much consisted of the various characters dryly putting one another down, saying the opposite of what they mean, sounding cynical—as well they should in noir detective fiction. But, besides the plot elements, I could tell the final third or so of the novel was thriller dreck because Chabon's protagonists started talking like DanBrown's. (See the DigitalFortress page.) I wondered whether it's impossible to write a best-selling thriller without lapsing into DanBrown dialog. And I also wondered whether Chabon was deliberately making fun of Brown-ish thrillers by deliberately imitating the bad dialogs.
The trouble with Yiddish Policemen's Union is it's too many things. It's noir detective fiction. It's bad true-crime writing. It's a Potok coming-of-age story gone wrong. It's alternative history. It's Northern Exposure or Dances with Bears or something. It's a Stephenson romp. It's a secret-society thriller. It's an end-of-days religious thing. But it's not all of these simultaneously. The book goes veering through genres and moods and writing styles, and I can't tell what in this mishmash is deliberate or inadvertent, serious or tongue-in-cheek. Plus the ending is weak, like that of a Stephenson novel.
It honestly makes me start to wonder about the current value of a Hugo or Nebula. (So does my noticing a couple days ago that a HarryPotter novel won the Hugo a few years back.) Well, I've been wondering about the state of ScienceFiction for a few years now, and just how to classify this novel is debatable. But I do want a Hugo and Nebula winner to make me say, "Wow. That's very cool. That's even groundbreaking." The Yiddish Policemen's Union, however, makes me despair—despite the very cool hammer.
Later: This novel would work well as a movie. In fact, near the middle of my reading, I couldn't help trying to imagine various actors in roles. However, the director and screenwriter will need to figure out how to give it a consistent mood and humor level. They especially need to rework the DanBrown dialogs. The Coen brothers should take a stab at it. (Behold, I see from Wikipedia that they will.) -- Eliz
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