Critique: Yiddish Policeman's Union
So I'd been wanting to read this book for years and finally got a chance to do so. It's a really wonderful book in a lot of ways. Chabon does a great job of building a world skewed from our own without ever making you feel like you're being infodumped on. The language is wonderfully idiosyncratic and by using the slang he does, it creates another layer of realism for the alternate present he's brought the reader into. I'd strongly reccomend this book for worldbuilding and language and how to use it.
The use of Sika as a location and the way Chabon builds the world is deftly handled, very beleivable and beautifully constructed. Atmosphere and local mesh pretty perfectly with the story and themes.
I love the idea of the post-ww2 Jewish exodus from Europe ending up in Alaska (something that had been an option at the time) and his familiarity with Jewish culture and religion means he's able to deftly use those tropes in a way that doesn't feel exoticized. One of the things I thought was really well done was showing how religion and religious traditions – filtered through human flaws – can be used for pretty terrible ends. He does it in a very beleivable manner. With the way things are now, that's an excellent point to remember.
I think there were a few writerly flaws: he has the same fascination I've seen before when people are re-imagining genre fiction – in this case noir and detective work. He emphasizes the grotesquerie of life; bad teeth and pimples, gross obesity and the infirmities of age, cowardice, despair, and cynism. I'm not quite sure how to describe it but I've seen it before in other stories that are playing with genre tropes – the impulse to dirty it up to make it more 'real' than the stylized versions of the genres have become. I found several of the minor characters more interesting than the protagonist, which might have been intentional. Our POV character, Meyer Landsman, wasn't terribly likeable – more for his almost total apathy than anything else (he's very emotionally flat to me) – but that also may have been intentional ala: grotesquerie.
There was also a problem with POV shifts in the book that suggested to me he wrote himself into a corner a couple of times – he needed to get us information that he couldn't from his main POV character so switched up on us, a little unexpected since it only happens twice in a fairly long novel and the information isn't plot critical (nor surprising).
As any good detective novel should, this book basically starts with a body. Our broken down POV character, Meyer Landsman, discovers it within five pagers of the opening. The rest of the book is about discovering who the dead man is and why he's dead. Unfortunately, as soon as we meet the boundary maven (a great character and the language used to talk about him is also great too) and he tells Landsman who the dead person really is, I knew that answer.
Short form: the dead guy was queer.
In fact this story wouldn't have happened if the dead guy hadn't been queer. So, despite not being at all about anyone's sexuality or a 'queer' book or anything of the sort, the entire novel hinges on a dead man's homosexuality. It's the reason he's dead. It's the reason he was found dead in a flophouse with a bullet in the back of his head. It's the reason he was living in a flophouse as a heroin addict despite being the only son of one of the wealthiest men in the city. It's the reason he ran away from home. The only other sexual minorities in the book were an informant and his trans wife who was dying of cancer and another woman – also dead – who was imagined to be lesbian though, evidently, she wasn't.
You know how I knew this? In the first quarter of the book? The thing that I guess the author thought was supposed to be a revelation?
I've seen it so many times that as soon as we're told that the dead man was special – could work miracles, was smart and loved and might even be the Messiah – I knew he was queer. Because the trope that men who are:
1: angelic or Christ like, or blessed, or special, or can heal and so on and
2: are also dead, are
3: also queer
This is so painfully common that I can see it within the first sentence out of a character's mouth. All those characteristics are 'spiritual' not 'earthy' and manly straight men are earthy (hairy, brutal, ugly, strong, stupid, scarred, brave) and gay men are spiritual (artistic, musical, geniuses, insane, magical, sensitive). Such characters are also, tragically, 'not meant for this world' and therefore almost always dead before the story starts, and if not that -- they are certianly dead before it ends.
This was the trope Chabon used for his victim. The beautiful fag is dead, due to the cold, cruel world.
We spend most of the rest of the book wrinkling out the details of the reason and who did it – ultimately the death is revealed a form of mercy killing beause the victim couldn't find a way to escape his life or survive in it. There's a lot more in the novel, the other big surprise not being terribly surprising to me either and involving American conservative politics. Also, in the course of the book, our depressed, alcoholic, recently divorced POV character comes to a reconciliation with his ex-wife.
So, the short form for the character arcs in the book are: straight couple comes to a reconciliation while investigating the dead queer.
I really don't believe Chabon is homophobic. I also haven't read Kavalier and Clay so that may affect things as well – I understand one of the protagonists is queer.
In many ways, the victim's sexuality is incidental to the story – there's a lot going on regarding politics and the limitations of life in the world Chabon built – and at the same time, the story couldn't have happened this way if the victim hadn't been queer. And core of the story is one I've seen so many times.
I am so sick of this sort of message and all the related ones. The one's that aren't overtly homophobic, that aren't maliciously thought up to prove that being queer is wrong. I'm tired of being a tragic figure, of hope denied, of being the tool for someone else's story, of being the example of just how dark and hard and cruel the world is.
Queers have been, historically, ferocious survivors – beatings and murders, laws and reparative therapy, riots and concentration camps. We're not rarefied victims too delicate to find a way in the world. If that were the case, we wouldn't be here and maybe, sadly, that's sort of the point of these tragic dead queers in so many stories, after all.
The use of Sika as a location and the way Chabon builds the world is deftly handled, very beleivable and beautifully constructed. Atmosphere and local mesh pretty perfectly with the story and themes.
I love the idea of the post-ww2 Jewish exodus from Europe ending up in Alaska (something that had been an option at the time) and his familiarity with Jewish culture and religion means he's able to deftly use those tropes in a way that doesn't feel exoticized. One of the things I thought was really well done was showing how religion and religious traditions – filtered through human flaws – can be used for pretty terrible ends. He does it in a very beleivable manner. With the way things are now, that's an excellent point to remember.
I think there were a few writerly flaws: he has the same fascination I've seen before when people are re-imagining genre fiction – in this case noir and detective work. He emphasizes the grotesquerie of life; bad teeth and pimples, gross obesity and the infirmities of age, cowardice, despair, and cynism. I'm not quite sure how to describe it but I've seen it before in other stories that are playing with genre tropes – the impulse to dirty it up to make it more 'real' than the stylized versions of the genres have become. I found several of the minor characters more interesting than the protagonist, which might have been intentional. Our POV character, Meyer Landsman, wasn't terribly likeable – more for his almost total apathy than anything else (he's very emotionally flat to me) – but that also may have been intentional ala: grotesquerie.
There was also a problem with POV shifts in the book that suggested to me he wrote himself into a corner a couple of times – he needed to get us information that he couldn't from his main POV character so switched up on us, a little unexpected since it only happens twice in a fairly long novel and the information isn't plot critical (nor surprising).
As any good detective novel should, this book basically starts with a body. Our broken down POV character, Meyer Landsman, discovers it within five pagers of the opening. The rest of the book is about discovering who the dead man is and why he's dead. Unfortunately, as soon as we meet the boundary maven (a great character and the language used to talk about him is also great too) and he tells Landsman who the dead person really is, I knew that answer.
Short form: the dead guy was queer.
In fact this story wouldn't have happened if the dead guy hadn't been queer. So, despite not being at all about anyone's sexuality or a 'queer' book or anything of the sort, the entire novel hinges on a dead man's homosexuality. It's the reason he's dead. It's the reason he was found dead in a flophouse with a bullet in the back of his head. It's the reason he was living in a flophouse as a heroin addict despite being the only son of one of the wealthiest men in the city. It's the reason he ran away from home. The only other sexual minorities in the book were an informant and his trans wife who was dying of cancer and another woman – also dead – who was imagined to be lesbian though, evidently, she wasn't.
You know how I knew this? In the first quarter of the book? The thing that I guess the author thought was supposed to be a revelation?
I've seen it so many times that as soon as we're told that the dead man was special – could work miracles, was smart and loved and might even be the Messiah – I knew he was queer. Because the trope that men who are:
1: angelic or Christ like, or blessed, or special, or can heal and so on and
2: are also dead, are
3: also queer
This is so painfully common that I can see it within the first sentence out of a character's mouth. All those characteristics are 'spiritual' not 'earthy' and manly straight men are earthy (hairy, brutal, ugly, strong, stupid, scarred, brave) and gay men are spiritual (artistic, musical, geniuses, insane, magical, sensitive). Such characters are also, tragically, 'not meant for this world' and therefore almost always dead before the story starts, and if not that -- they are certianly dead before it ends.
This was the trope Chabon used for his victim. The beautiful fag is dead, due to the cold, cruel world.
We spend most of the rest of the book wrinkling out the details of the reason and who did it – ultimately the death is revealed a form of mercy killing beause the victim couldn't find a way to escape his life or survive in it. There's a lot more in the novel, the other big surprise not being terribly surprising to me either and involving American conservative politics. Also, in the course of the book, our depressed, alcoholic, recently divorced POV character comes to a reconciliation with his ex-wife.
So, the short form for the character arcs in the book are: straight couple comes to a reconciliation while investigating the dead queer.
I really don't believe Chabon is homophobic. I also haven't read Kavalier and Clay so that may affect things as well – I understand one of the protagonists is queer.
In many ways, the victim's sexuality is incidental to the story – there's a lot going on regarding politics and the limitations of life in the world Chabon built – and at the same time, the story couldn't have happened this way if the victim hadn't been queer. And core of the story is one I've seen so many times.
I am so sick of this sort of message and all the related ones. The one's that aren't overtly homophobic, that aren't maliciously thought up to prove that being queer is wrong. I'm tired of being a tragic figure, of hope denied, of being the tool for someone else's story, of being the example of just how dark and hard and cruel the world is.
Queers have been, historically, ferocious survivors – beatings and murders, laws and reparative therapy, riots and concentration camps. We're not rarefied victims too delicate to find a way in the world. If that were the case, we wouldn't be here and maybe, sadly, that's sort of the point of these tragic dead queers in so many stories, after all.