A Texas Jewboy (Almost) Braves Chabon’s Alaskan Wild

As Meyer Landsman, Michael Chabon’s detective in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, observes early in this tome, “These are strange times to be a Jew.” Not one to flail the passive horse of Judaism forever, Chabon is merely intimating that down through history the times have never been quite as strange as the Jews. And one of the strangest of them all is, of course, Michael Chabon.

I’m 62 years old, but I read at the 64-year-old level. Nevertheless, I still took this assignment somewhat grudgingly. At 432 pages, the book looked to me to be the kind of thing only a mother, and I use the word loosely, could love. Maybe a spiritual invalid might have the time or inclination to read it, I thought. Was it a great existential work of art or simply a case of Northern Exposure meets The Emperor Has No Clothes?

When someone takes a simple idea and makes it complex, that is what we call an intellectual. Chabon assuredly is an intellectual, but is he an artist? Sherlock Holmes, whom Chabon professes to admire, once observed that the difference between the killer and the artist is that the artist knows when to stop.

Great artists in my reckoning have always been out-of-control forces who invariably intertwined their passionate lives with their pluperfect art. Examples are Van Gogh, Mozart, Charles Bukowski, Hank Williams, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Foster, Allen Ginsberg, etc., etc. The fact that most of them were seen as tragic figures is no accident; it is merely one of the elements of their greatness. Bob Dylan once wrote that even above life, he prized madness. Contrast this with Chabon’s professed primal pursuit of a “stable writing environment.” Tell that to Franz Kafka.

But I suppose I can overlook the fact that Chabon is a script doctor for soulless Spiderman sequels. And that he received a Pulitzer Prize from the same kind of crazy, tall Norwouija boards who gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter. Hell, my hat’s off to him just for being able to write with four kids in the house.

Okay, so I’m reading The Yiddish Policemen’s Union at gunpoint, and I’m starting to like it. Chabon, with the lush skills of an F. Scott Fitzgerald, describes the deserted lobby of the flophouse hotel—with its sad, old sofas and “ashtray charm”—where Landsman has been living since his marriage went to hell. There’s a “dead yid in 208,” murdered with what appears to be a party-of-one chess match in progress. So Chabon has his detective talk to the night manager about chess, Landsman admitting to having “no feel for the middle game.” “In my experience, Detective,” says the night manager, “it’s all middle game.” In spite of Chabon’s unspoken, possibly unwitting kinship with Gustave Flaubert, who claimed he lived to pour a few more buckets of shit upon mankind, this is great stuff.

If the slivovitz-swilling Landsman lives in strange times, they are playing out in an even stranger place—the fictional Yiddish frontier district of Sitka, a Jewish homeland carved from Alaska after World War II. (Chabon borrowed the idea from a long-forgotten but real wartime proposal of FDR’s.) The Palestine experiment failed early, in Chabon’s telling, so in place of sabras in the Jewish iconography, he offers “Polar Bears.” “By now,” he writes, “they were all staunch Alaskan Jews, which meant they were utopians, which meant they saw imperfection everywhere they looked.” Their temporary nation is nearing its 60-year expiration date, and a new Jewish expulsion looms when the story opens.

In true noir fashion, “rogue cop” Landsman finds himself drawn irresistibly into pursuing whoever killed his neighbor the chess whiz, who turns out to have been a junkie and the son of a separatist Hasid rebbe. Also in true noir fashion, the higher-ups want him off the case. Landsman’s investigation—in the company of his half-Tlingit, half-Jew partner—wraps him in the tassels of Orthodox gangsters, international conspiracies around the impending “Reversion” of Sitka and the allure of his sexy boss, who happens to be his ex-wife.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to poke fun or parody the field of detective fiction. Many highly successful mystery writers do it every day without even being aware of it. I respect Chabon for respecting the genre. Here, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the timeless, glorious game is afoot, the reader ten steps ahead of the detective, the author ten steps ahead of the reader. On a seminal level, the book works as a mystery novel. There’s a bit of John D. McDonald here, and a lingering hint of Dorothy Sayers. But, in many ways, the book is an homage to Raymond Chandler, who believed that plots were merely excuses for the characters to go places and say things.

Chabon clearly believes in the genre, as well he should. After all, mysteries afford us resolution; life itself rarely does. There’s an obscure quote of Chandler’s from one of his letters that I’m sure hasn’t escaped detection by Chabon’s micro-meticulous, mental hospital research. Chandler says, “The business of fiction is to recreate the illusion of life.” Chabon does this as well as anybody.

J.D. Salinger once obliged a character to say, “Cleverness is my wooden leg.” This may indeed be true of many writers and many Jews, but it’s especially true of Chabon, who wears his yellow star on his wooden leg. This is not a bad thing. It means Chabon is not an impotent, neurotic Seinfeld-type of Jew, but a crazy Jew with all the elements of greatness who’s never been afraid to take a crack at the big dream. His Landsman is a dreamer and a brawler and a union man toughing it out a continent—and a world—away from the skinny, self-loathing intellectuals who, when not writing, are busy seeing Woody Allen’s shrink.

Jackie Mason, whom I admire, reports that older Jewish ladies come up to him after almost every show. Like Reform harpies, they whisper in his ear, “Too Jewish. Too Jewish.” Mason never listens to them. I hope Chabon never listens, either.
The more I read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the more I believe I might finish it some day. Right now I’m reading at almost a remedial pace, savoring it like an unfinished symphony. I’m even starting to like Chabon. If I ever run into him, I’ll have to tell him to take the critical portions of this review with a pillar of salt. But then again, as Raymond Chandler himself once said, “If you like the book, never meet the author.”

Kinky Friedman’s forthcoming book, You Can Lead a Politician to Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think debuts in September from Simon and Schuster.