“The Frozen Chosen”

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon


Wallace Stevens described metaphor as an object slightly turned. Michael Chabon places objects on the tip of his finger and twirls them like a plate-spinner, all dazzling speed and dexterity. He revels in the English language like no author since Nabokov. 2001’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay signaled his arrival as an author who had fulfilled his promise.

This year’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (HarperCollins, $26.95) explores potential unfulfilled. In an alternate reality, FDR creates a Jewish state in Alaska instead of Israel. However, the 60-year lease ends soon, and the void of Diaspora threatens. As the nation despairs, Detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a local hero. Chabon trades comics for detective novels, deckled edges and all.

Like New York in Clay, the “Jewlaskan” capital Sitka astounds in the sheer immensity of its imagination. Yet more than just re-creation, Union invents and populates a dynamic city. Sitka sports tensions, alliances, communities and power structures written in detailed splendor. The smoky afterhours nightclubs, back-alley chess clubs and seedy temple-hideouts rest atop hidden tunnels for clandestine escapes.

Chabon could happily broaden Sitka’s horizons forever, but when he globalizes Union’s plot, the work suffers. The author requests “foolish coyote faith,” asking us not to look down while running off a cliff, but the absurdity of the final act is amateurish compared to Union’s intermittent virtuosity. The greatness of the Bogart noirs is in their claustrophobia; everyone’s angles weave a labyrinth of confusion.

Union ends up a book by a marvelous talent that lacks cohesion. Chabon sacrifices his lyrical gift too frequently, yet his gentle sensitivity makes the book too soft for the pulps, leaving it in literary limbo. Still, Union is worth reading - if just to hear the language crackling on the page.

-Alan Snider

Cowboys and Contraband

Some reviewers have complained of the action movie-like pacing in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. With the forthcoming release of the Coen brothers’ film version, now marks an appropriate time to reexamine the novel. The brutality flies fast and fierce in the book, punctuated with moments of meditation and humor. After writing so many Westerns, McCarthy finally allows himself to enjoy channeling Sergio Leone, as he does briefly when the good, bad and ugly trio of Moss, Chigurh and Wells share the same stage.

It’s not all funny, though. Like Phillip Roth and Salman Rushdie before him, McCarthy examines the havoc the Vietnam war wrought on American consciousness. Readers familiar with McCarthy will recognize the setting: the bloodstained ground of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. However, this time McCarthy trades cowboys and Indians for 1980s hit men and drug dealers. But these aren’t traditional outlaws; the hordes of killers in the novel are government-trained. McCarthy’s US Military makes these men murderers, but he is less ready to blame Vietnam for the shift in American consciousness and morality. He questions if the war was merely a symptom of violence born from history and blood.

A novel examining Vietnam in contemporary America unquestionably concerns itself with the current conflict in Iraq. Sheriff Bell, after confessing his decision to desert his unit of wounded troops in WWII to save his life, describes his choice to retire from police work as a resolution to “cut and run.” McCarthy’s stage is a quarter-century behind, but the author engages the current war with this highly charged political language, finding himself disenchanted with violence masquerading as patriotism.