Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has just been published, and while it's not his best, it is his most interesting.
A caveat: I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and in its perfect realization it is surely the best thing Chabon has ever written. But I never fully got the recent writerly fascination with comic-book heroes, graphic novels, manga, anime - you get my point.
It's not that I have a snobbish disdain for comics, or for visual culture. Far from it. It's just that the escapist pleasure of books resides partly in the room they leave for the reader to imagine what the characters and the action look like. That room for fantasy is what attracts me to books without pictures. So while I enjoyed the heck out of Kavalier & Clay, I enjoyed it despite its subject matter (which makes Chabon's accomplishment all the more remarkable).
But The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a noir murder mystery, takes up a subject that intrigues me greatly and gets far too little attention: What if the language of the new Jewish country had been Yiddish, not Hebrew? (Because, clearly, it should have been Yiddish.) Chabon imagines a world in which the Jews lost the 1948 war, were expelled from Palestine, and trudged off to Alaska, where the United States had granted a parcel to be the Jewish homeland. It's a funny but also haunting book, which I describe at greater length in my full review.
In addition to the book's interest in the possibility of a Yiddish homeland, Chabon also becomes one of the few major novelists in recent years, Jewish or otherwise, to give us a major character - Berko Shemets - who is religiously observant. Most new American books that deal with religious figures are treacly, saccharine schlock. But there are exceptions: Mark Salzman's nun in Lying Awake, for example, or the works of Allegra Goodman and Tova Mirvis. John Updike's last novel, too. The grandmaster is Steve
Stern, who is still alive, producing magnificent work, and unjustly neglected.
Chabon's new novel, in addition to being a terrific read, raises a host of interesting, provocative questions: about Yiddishkeit, about religion, about what our fiction is for. Best of all, it points us toward some other writers who have been writing in a similar vein yet without the awards or popular success that Chabon has enjoyed.