I started this year's novel category Hugo reading with Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (HarperCollins, 2007; no editor listed) for the simple reason that it was the only one I had to actually get from the library, all the others being conveniently available online to worldcon members. I'd never read any Chabon, though I knew the name from his Pulitzer Prize a few years ago. Yiddish Policemen's Union is billed as a wild combination of noir, thriller, alternate history and love story. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel over (among others) Nalo Hopkinson's lovely The New Moon's Arms. While I don't know the strength of the other novels on the Nebula ballot, I wouldn't have voted for it over the Hopkinson. I've rarely been so turned off by any book.
(Some very mild spoilers below)
It's not that it was badly written, exactly. Chabon is beautifully literate and the book is full of clever, sticky prose. But the story did not intrigue me or engage me or excite me. Instead I felt as if I were slogging through a particularly nasty swamp. I don't insist that books be full of bouncing good cheer; last year's Blindsight was quite depressing, but I burned through it eagerly at my typical speed (less than a day, mostly in one sitting at Readercon). Chabon's book took me four unhappy evenings to finish. Highly literate mud is still mud, and I was falling asleep over it for the first couple hundred pages while the murder-mystery plot gasped along between smothering infodumps.
I generally love alternate history, but this book was a waste of several really nifty ideas. The premise itself was intriguing: after the 1948 destruction of Israel, Jews were given refuge in Alaska for a 60-year period just coming to a close. The Jewish refugees founded a Yiddish-based society with a mix of Jewish observance ranging from secular to ultra-Orthodox. Native Alaskans still linger outside the Jewish territory; one character is mixed Jewish and native. A second diaspora threatens, with few options. The imminent destruction of the community provides the seeds of an international thriller plot which would have been an interesting novel in and of itself, but it comes up only at the very end of the novel and, along with the fate of the Jews about to be evicted from Alaska, is simply left hanging. That's annoying. Finally, after 400ish pages, it was getting interesting, but Chabon never bothered to resolve any of the larger issues which interested me more than the central murder mystery.
And, unfortunately, all of the clever worldbuilding results in massive infodumps, especially at the beginning, as if Chabon felt compelled to tell us about every last detail of his cleverness. Shtetl-on-the-tundra with some Jews more observant than others? Jews as exotic aliens? I'm unsure whether I'm too culturally unequipped to appreciate Chabon's accomplishment or so accustomed to Jewish traditions that it just didn't seem like much of one. I've had Jewish friends since childhood and spent quite a few weekends as a teenager observing Orthodox shabbos limits. I see black-hats walking down the street in my neighborhood and read about the antics of various sects in the Metro section of The New York Times. I'm not immersed in Yiddish literature, so perhaps I missed some grand riff on the canon there, but the whole thing just didn't feel terribly original or all that much more exotic than some New York neighborhoods. And the resulting (I refuse to say "necessary") infodumps slowed the plot to a crawl. The background could have been established in much broader brushstrokes to allow for faster plot development. And, sadly, all this shiny "Frozen Chosen" worldbuilding is mostly wasted in the context of the actual plot; the whole thing could have been set in Brooklyn with only a few minor tweaks. The speculative fiction aspects are almost irrelevant. The whole thing feels relentlessly mundane.
Some readers seem to have had a lot of trouble with the Yiddish (or faux-Yiddish) terms,
but it wasn't an issue for me. Words were either clear cognates
(shammes = shamus) or sufficiently obvious from context. I'm sure I
missed plenty of in-jokes, but I didn't find the book hard to follow with whatever bits of Yiddish I've picked up by just living in the New York area.
I suspect that other SF fans accustomed to SFnal alien vocabularies
will have equally little trouble.
The protagonist, an alcoholic police detective, divorced and living in a sleazy flophouse, was not particularly sympathetic or interesting. Neither were many of the other characters. I realized partway through that I just did not want to read about these people. Many of them repelled me; most of the rest irritated or bored me. The only two characters I found easily likable and interesting were already dead when the story began. A few minor characters, like the black-hat rebbetzin, sparked my curiosity, but they were peripheral to the main story. And once again, the alternate history aspect was irrelevant; there was nothing about these characters that required anything that would have been out of place in the real world and mainstream fiction.
The final problem, which I have never previously had with anything other than fairly vile pornography, was the sheer grossness of the characters. Chabon lingers obsessively over his descriptions. I'm sure some of the characters in the book were physically attractive, but Chabon's relentless prose makes them all feel repellent, in the same way that an extreme closeup on skin makes it look like a mess of pores and pits. This level of description does not feed my imagination; it fetters it, drags it down into the mud. Take this description of a rabbi in a sauna:
Now it emerged ponderous from the steam, a slab of wet limestone webbed with a black lichen of hair. Litvak felt like a fogbound airplane buffeted by updrafts into the surprise of a mountain. The belly pregnant with elephant triplets, the breasts full and pendulous, each tipped with a pink lentil of a nipple. The thighs, great hand-rolled marbled loaves of halvah. Lost in the shadows between them, a thick umbilicus of grayish-brown meat. (p. 341)
Yes, that image will certainly stick in my mind, sort of like gum sticks to a shoe. I may never eat a lentil again. I actually speculated briefly and inconclusively on whether this book was sufficiently laden with Elders-of-Zion-style stereotypes (physically disgusting Jews involved in an international financial conspiracy!) that it would be considered anti-Semitic if written by a Gentile.
Clearly I'm an outlier in my opinion of the book, but I'm startled and appalled that Chabon received both a Nebula and a Locus Award for this novel. It makes me wonder if the SF community (fan and pro) is suffering from some sort of collective insecurity complex that motivated them to vote for a book that is so relentlessly, unpleasantly mundane just because it's by a mainstream author who is (laudably) a vocal supporter of genre fiction.
I had planned to temporarily place the first nominee I read at the top of my ballot and move it down when/if other books exceeded it. Instead, my ballot currently looks like this:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5. The Yiddish Policemen's Union
I'll move it up if I read anything I dislike more, or possibly down (and out) if I decide I'd rather see no novel award at all than give it to this book.
Most of the world apparently disagrees with me, so if you want to see for yourself, here's a shopping link:
Actually, Sitka was established as a Jewish refuge not after the failure of Israel, but well before it; the inference can readily be drawn that Israel was not established because many of the Jews who in our timeline were there, were instead in Alaska.
Posted by: David Goldfarb | July 05, 2008 at 02:20 PM
the whole thing could have been set in Brooklyn with only a few minor tweaks. The speculative fiction aspects are almost irrelevant. The whole thing feels relentlessly mundane.
At the risk of uttering a judgment à l'emporte-pièce, isn't it the norm for mundane writers to use the props of SF as props? "Hey, this looks neat so let's just throw it into the setting." Who cares about the implications it could have upon the world. Me, I'll confess that I'd rather give my beer money (or my ice-cream money) to those who toil in our field and who know it. But that's just my opinion.
Posted by: Serge | July 05, 2008 at 03:56 PM
As for the description of the rabbi... Are non-Jewish characters portrayed in such subhuman terms? If not, that makes it even more disturbing.
Posted by: Serge | July 05, 2008 at 04:35 PM