From the first few pages of “The Yiddish Policemen's Union,” it was clear that Michael Chabon was an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist. He has the ability to do wonderful things with words, to conjure everything from the banalities of daily life to the most bizarre of melodrama.
Mr. Chabon’s latest novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” successfully creates a completely fictional world so persuasively detailed, as it gives the reader a gripping murder mystery and an appealing yet psychologically flawed detective hero. Though the ultimate secret behind the murder that kick-starts the story involves a religious-political scheme that tips over clumsily into surreal satire, the remainder of the book is so tediously constructed that the reader, absorbed in the plight of Mr. Chabon’s shambling hero, really doesn’t mind.
It’s fortunate that the novel’s prose is so untrammeled because murder-mystery plotting can be a deterrent to development of the universal theme and overall tone of the narrative. In just another temporary homeland and farther than ever from the one originally promised, the writer reimagines how Israeli diaspora would triumph in the US. But it soon becomes clear that Sitka’s very remoteness, its impossible distance from the redemption and fulfillment, suits the protagonist, Detective Landsman, the alcoholic homicide-cop hero.
More important, Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka — its history, culture, geography, its political and sectarian divisions — that no discernible difference can be thought of between the Alaskan town and the actual Israel. By the end of the book, we feel we know this chilly place in the same way we feel we have come to know Meyer Landsman: the cynical cornerstone of secularism against the tyranny of fundamentalism.
Mr. Chabon’s latest novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” successfully creates a completely fictional world so persuasively detailed, as it gives the reader a gripping murder mystery and an appealing yet psychologically flawed detective hero. Though the ultimate secret behind the murder that kick-starts the story involves a religious-political scheme that tips over clumsily into surreal satire, the remainder of the book is so tediously constructed that the reader, absorbed in the plight of Mr. Chabon’s shambling hero, really doesn’t mind.
It’s fortunate that the novel’s prose is so untrammeled because murder-mystery plotting can be a deterrent to development of the universal theme and overall tone of the narrative. In just another temporary homeland and farther than ever from the one originally promised, the writer reimagines how Israeli diaspora would triumph in the US. But it soon becomes clear that Sitka’s very remoteness, its impossible distance from the redemption and fulfillment, suits the protagonist, Detective Landsman, the alcoholic homicide-cop hero.
More important, Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka — its history, culture, geography, its political and sectarian divisions — that no discernible difference can be thought of between the Alaskan town and the actual Israel. By the end of the book, we feel we know this chilly place in the same way we feel we have come to know Meyer Landsman: the cynical cornerstone of secularism against the tyranny of fundamentalism.
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