In notes on other writers on which I am not becoming an expert, I read and really, really liked Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union this summer. I already liked Chabon, thanks to Kavalier and Clay. But given my impressive ability to forget everything specific about books that I don’t discuss, it was good to read something new of his, to have something to tie to these vague good feelings. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is different, of course. It fits nicely within the detective novel genre while replacing often cringe-worthy potboiler language with his delightful writing, full of precise words and sometimes crazily expansive metaphors.
When I was younger–perhaps middle school and/or high school–I read a number of page-turner novels, from John Grisham to Michael Crichton. That seems to have made suspense-writing pleasantly familiar, nostalgia-inducing. I find the smart but self-destructive and often wounded detective a comfortable protagonist, even as Chabon affords this particular protagonist (Meyer Landsman) amusingly bizarre foibles. This type calls to mind my very different father, perhaps as another embodiment of middle-aged masculinity. More likely because the novels I read, at first surreptitiously, were his.
As I consider how this book makes me think of my father, I am reminded that one of my favorite passages is a family metaphor:
Landsman gives Berko a look that is meant to remind him not of his age and station in life but of the manifest uncoolness of bickering with one’s relatives. It’s an old and well-worn facial expression dating from the time of Berko’s first strife-filled years with the Landsmans. It never takes longer than a few minutes , whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts. (Chabon 308-09)
This passage reminded of how when I walk around campus, I can often tell immediately when students (who I don’t know) are on the phone with their parents. There is a tone of sheer exasperation, like that I imagine Berko using in the lines preceding this passage. And it is supremely uncool. Not the less so because it reminds me of a tone I’ve heard myself use. But more than that, what I love is the sprawl of the metaphor. Chabon deliberately halting a sentence and beginning the next with “And,” calling attention to the mutliplicity of the family’s significance and roles, of their crazedness, of the difficulty of capturing this dynamic. In the sprawl Chabon calls up that frustration with the family, even more their potential deadliness to one another, but also their potential to create drunken revels, and, finally, life. It steers around trite, to a place both humorous and true.
Finally, it is also the family Landsman creates that endears this novel to me. His ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish, is probably one of the strongest female characters in a detective novel I have read. Yes, she is strong and capable and returns to town as her ex-husband’s boss at the police department. But Chabon makes her strength most interesting in the way that Landsman is able simultaneously to admire and to forget it. He is so confident that he knows just where their marriage went wrong, what he did, and what failed as a result. And we, as readers who follow him closely throghout the novel, come to assume that he is right. But she provides the reminder of other perspectives, that their mistakes were more complex because shared. She challenges our ability to pin down one simple, seemingly inevitable narrative of why things go wrong. And we believe her challenge to that narrative because we remember again that she is so strong he could not have controlled their marriage and their losses alone.
So strangely, the dark, often lonely detective story is pleasurable to me because it is, here, about family. I like it for other reasons, too. In particular, for the suspense and for Chabon’s management of interweaving plot threads and contrivances. But it is unsurpising that this story–about a detective who pursues a murder case because the victim reminds him of himself and his family–finds its power in its ability to characterize family and to invite my identification with and sympathy for these families.
