Last night I finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. I loved it. Even though I listened to it on audio, I bought a used hard copy over the weekend so I can review some of the best passages. Chabon has that knack for detail—not just adding detail, but adding the perfect details that simultaneously describe the scene, set the tone, and make you think. Very, very rarely does he make a wrong step in this book.

I’m also about half-way through the author interview they added as additional tracks. The conversation starts with the novel’s genesis (Chabon finding a Yiddish phrase book for travelers) and then turns to the notion of genre fiction. Obviously, this is a detective story and Chabon talks lovingly about Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, but what truly surprised me was when the conversation turned to other genres. A few times, Chabon specifically invokes Tolkien when he’s discussing building this new world of Jews relocated to Alaska. He refers to building the back story as being Tolkienesque and describes this alternate Alaska as a “fantasy.”

This truly surprised me because it’s not fantasy at all: it’s quite clearly science fiction. The book has almost nothing in common with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings but is incredibly similar to Philip K. Dick’s, The Man in the High Castle. In Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Carl Freedman uses Dick’s alternate history of the Axis having won WWII as one of the exemplary cases of what science fiction does best; this section of the book continually ran through my mind as I listened to Chabon’s novel given the many similarities.

When talking about mixing so-called literary styles with genre, Chabon and Jonathan Lethem’s names always pop up. The genres pretty clearly include fantasy, comic book/superhero fiction, and the detective story, but I find it surprising that Chabon didn’t understand his own novel as inherently science fictional. I don’t think this would have gotten past Lethem, who started his career as a science fiction novelist. (BTW, on this topic I also wonder how much Lethem’s plot may have been influenced by Watchmen, but that’s just an aside).

Anyway, this book was strongly recommended to me by a professor who thought it should be on my preliminary exam, and boy was he right. Careful readers may remember Brian McHale’s thesis that the modernist text foregrounds the epistemological whereas the postmodern foregrounds the ontological; the classic example of the modernist text is the mystery or detective novel where the protagonists search for an elusive answer, whereas the postmodern text is science fictional, which is more interested in experiences than answers. What’s brilliant about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that it straddles this dividing line perfectly, perhaps knowingly—it’s an ontologically foregrounded detective story.

Anyway, it’s one of those books where I both mourned the coming of last page, yet could not put it down. Many rereads are on the cards, I would guess.

UPDATE: Of course, I no sooner write this when I listen to the rest of the interview and Chabon makes a specific point to bring the conversation back to science fiction. I think it’s actually the interviewer from Harper Audio who doesn’t understand the connection, but Chabon actually makes an eloquent case for this novel joining the ranks of other great alternate histories such as L. Sprague De Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall and, yes, The Man in the High Castle. Sorry to have doubted you Mike.

Current Mood: Quite Good |