The Chabon-created world of the Federal District of Sitka, Alaska, is home to four million Jews, the Jews who would in our real world populate Israel. Such is the strength of Chabon’s writing that his bizarre, politically ambiguous entity seems quite real.
The author makes up words or superimposes his own meaning on real Yiddish words. For instance, "latkes" are not just for eating, they are also the police who wear a pancake-like headgear. (Chabon helpfully includes a glossary at the end of the book.) As the title indicates, this is the land of Yiddish-speaking people; Hebrew is a strange and little-used language. There are different sects, some of which are thinly veiled criminal gangs. Jewish traditions are more like law than mere convention. The rebbe or rabbi is still the main man, familial relationships are complex and important, and pilpul is standard operating procedure.
Furthermore, the Federal District of Sitka is set to revert back to the control of America in just a few weeks. Millions of Jews are threatened once again with diaspora. In this fictional world, Israel died a-borning as a Jewish state.
Into this self-contained world comes a murder. A man who lives in the same apartment building as Meyer Landsman, a hard-bitten and stubborn police detective, has been shot. Meyer takes the murder personally because of this propinquity. With the help of his partner/cousin Berko Shemetz, a Tlinget Indian/Jewish bear of a man, Meyer finds that he is not investigating the simple murder of a heroin addict. What he finds relates to a much larger picture.
The victim was the estranged son of a powerful rebbe, head of a ruthless criminal "black-hat" sect. Throughout his work, Chabon presents the reader with odd mixtures of inviolable religious ethics and dishonest activity. It is in attempting to solve this murder that Meyer expands from his narrow investigation to the wider consideration of how this fits into the upcoming "Reversion."
This is not just a homicide investigation, however; it is also a journey into the life of Meyer Landsman. All the disappointing and triumphal moments of Meyer’s life prove crucial to the resolution of the story. For example, in the stark room of the victim is a chessboard. On the chessboard is a game nearing its end. Meyer’s father was a master chess player and so, in the way of fathers and sons, Meyer has repudiated chess. But the thought of what the chessboard represents obsesses him, and so Meyer works at it and discovers the clue the end game provides.
The complexity of the characters and the plot are enough to reward the reader, but it is Chabon’s humor and beautiful use of language that makes this book extraordinary. Here are some examples:
In describing a mismatched chess game: "'I resign,' says Velvel. He takes off his glasses, slips them into his pocket, and stands up. He forgot an appointment. He’s late for work. His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch."
Landsman in a nutshell: "He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery."
Chabon’s wry humor: "He’s parked in a cul-de-sac some developer laid out, paved, then saddled with the name of Tikvah Street, the Hebrew word denoting hope and connoting to the Yiddish ear on this grim afternoon at the end of time seventeen flavors of irony. The hoped-for houses were never built."
This book crosses many genres (noir, international intrigue, hard-boiled police procedural) and works many ideas together, but Chabon handles the juggling act well. It was hard not to race to the end but to do so would have been a disservice to the richness of the Sitka of Chabon’s imagining. My advice to you: linger.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
The Yiddish Policemen's Union (trade, $15.95), by Michael Chabon
Friday, May 2, 2008
2008 Edgar Awards
[Jordan is the daughter of our store manager Jean May, and more or less grew up at the store.]
Death Becomes Them at the 2008 Edgar Awards
by Jordan Foster -- Publishers Weekly, 5/1/2008 3:32:00 PM
The 62nd Annual Edgar Awards held in New York last night saluted several of the genre’s stalwarts as well as recognizing an emerging group of talented newcomers. Outgoing Mystery Writers of America president Nelson DeMille passed the torch to the incoming president, Edgar winner Harlan Coben, who opened the evening by praising the wisdom of another of multiple award-winner, Lawrence Block. The original motto of the MWA, said Coben, was “crime doesn’t pay…enough,” but added a tidbit he learned from Block early on his career: “nobody has to fail so that I can succeed.”John Hart took home the Edgar for Best Novel for his sophomore effort, Down River, the story of a man wrongly convicted of murder. Presenter Lee Child quipped that the envelope was difficult to open then hinted it might just be a plot device on his part. “I’m a suspense writer,” Child said, “what do you expect?” The Edgar for Best First Novel By An American Author went to Tana French for In the Woods, whose debut featured a detective in Dublin’s Murder Squad struggling with a childhood trauma. Other winners included Megan Abbott’s Queenpin for Best Paperback Original; Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy for Best Fact Crime; Susan Straight’s “The Golden Gopher,” part of Los Angeles Noir, for Best Short Story; Tedd Arnold’s Rat Life for Best Young Adult; Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton for Best Motion Picture Screenplay; and Matt Nix’s pilot episode of Burn Notice for Best Television Episode Teleplay.With Raven Awards going to the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book in Washington D.C. and Kate Mattes, owner of Kate’s Mystery Books in Boston, the evening also paid tribute to the newest MWA Grand Master, Bill Prozini. In a Star Wars-inspired film introduction, the titles of the prolific Prozini scrolled upwards in familiar yellow script. In his introduction for Pronzini, Lawrence Block amended Coben’s earlier quote by adding that while no one has to fail for him to succeed, “it’s so much more gratifying when they do.” Pronzini, known for his long-running Nameless Detective series, thanked his wife, former Grand Master Marcia Muller, and entertained the crowd with his favorite worst lines in crime fiction.
Still as Death ($6.99), by Sarah Stewart Taylor
Still as Death, the fourth in Taylor’s Sweeney St. George series, was a surprise. I had not read the other books, so I had expected something along the lines of “Friends,” and what I got was “Everwood.” There was more depth to the characters and more poignancy to the story.
Sweeney is an art historian specializing in art that memorializes death. She is launching a museum exhibit on this topic, including Victorian post-mortem photographs and Egyptian funerary containers, when a cleaning woman is found murdered. It appears she has been killed while thwarting the theft of a prized Egyptian canopic container. What Sweeney intuitively finds is a trail leading back to the death almost 30 years earlier of a young museum intern during a successful museum robbery.
While the lesson on funeral art is fascinating and Taylor presents the information without lecturing, the heart of the book lies in the relationships Sweeney has with her boyfriend, suave Londoner Ian Ball, and Boston police detective Tim Quinn. Each character is revealed in all of his or her strengths and vulnerabilities. Emotions are rarely neat and tidy, and Taylor accords the story the respect of not trying to make it so.
