Review
'This is a master storyteller at work, a stylish noir-esque murder mystery interwoven with pathos, wit, and the grasp of descriptive metaphor that make one swallow hard to keep from shouting with joy. Michael Chabon illuminates and invites discussion while his meticulous plotting and scintillating characters create an alternate world that compels belief…confirms Chabon's status as one of the truly great living American writers.' Waterstones Books Quarterly
‘His almost ecstatically smart and sassy new novel…Chabon is a spectacular writer…Chabon is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words…Chabon's ornate prose makes (Raymond) Chandler's fruity observations of the world look quite plain…He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it.’ Guardian
‘Michael Chabon’s brilliant new novel starts with a bang…It hums with humour. It buzzes with gags…Superb images also team in this long novel: the accumulated reading experience is one of admiration, close to awe, at the vigour of Chabon’s imagination…a hilarious, antic whirl of a novel.’ Sunday Times
‘Chabon is masterly at evoking reality through smells and rises to the challenge of differentiating his “black hat” (Orthodox) characters with precise descriptions of beards.’ Observer
‘His talent is undisputable. Chabon’s novels are warm, witty, a little whimsical, always beautifully written. He is that rare and precious beast: a literary writer with crossover appeal and a proper engagement with the demotic…Funny, touching and compelling, the novel transcends the limitations of all its genres – which is pretty much Chabon’s MO…a stunning achievement…If the film’s half as fun as the book, we’d have a hit on our hands. Hell, there’s even a car chase.’ GQ
‘It makes film noir look like film blanc by comparison.’ Arena
‘A first rate noir novel always works on the premise that everyone has secrets; that we all apply veneers in our dealings with others, and that guilt is an omnipresent force in human interaction. “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” certainly plays by these rules…Chabon has brilliant fun with his Jewish-Alaska construct and its cultural disconnections. Besides being a fantastic crash-course in Yiddishisms, the novel never sins against its own splendidly absurd conceit by becoming overtly showy or pleased with its considerable brilliance.’ The Times
‘Where Raymond Chandler collided with Hoard Jacobson in this hilarious tale of Alaska's 'frozen chosen’.’ Observer Books of the Year
'It's Raymond Chandler meets Speilberg's "Munich", via Haruki Murakami.' Time Out
‘Mr. Chabon’s latest novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”, builds upon the achievement of “Kavalier & Clay”…authoritatively and minutely imagined…Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka – its history, culture, geography, its incestuous and Byzantine political and sectarian divisions – that the reader comes to take its existence for granted.’ The Scotsman
'Chabon is obsessed with finding ways of uniting the highest ambitions of modernism with popular fiction, especially science fiction, to produce a literature which engages the reader on the most serious level, while creating a medium capable of addressing the urgent issues of our times…Chabon's plot grows increasingly terrifying and complex, yet is resolved with the technical mastery we have come to expect from this astonishingly disciplined and inventive writer.' Telegraph
'Chabon displays great skill in knitting together the disparate elements of his invented milieu…' Independent
‘You are in for a treat, not just for the electric charge of Mr. Chabon's writing but for a story more finely plotted than any published this year…a gripping whodunnit that tips its cap to Raymond Chandler and 1940s film noir…no one but Mr. Chabon could have written it.’ The Economist
From the Publisher
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Like Haruki Murakami in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End
of the World (1991), Chabon plays with the conventions of the Chandlerian
private-eye novel, but that's only one ingredient in an epic-scale
alternate-history saga of Jewish life since World War II. The premise draws
on an obscure historical fact: FDR once proposed that Alaska, not Israel,
become the homeland for Jews after the war. In Chabon's telling, that's
exactly what happened, except, inevitably, it hasn't gone as planned: the
U.S. government now has enacted a policy that will evict all Jews without
proper papers from Sitka, the center of Jewish Alaska. In the midst of this
nightmare, browbeaten police detective Meyer Landsman investigates the
murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who happens to be the disgraced
son of Sitka's most powerful rabbi. No one wants this case solved, from
Landsman's boss (his ex-wife, Bina) to the FBI, but our Yiddish Marlowe
keeps digging, uncovering apocalypse in the making. Chabon manipulates his
bulging plot masterfully, but what makes the novel soar is its humor and
humanity. Even without grasping all the Yiddish wordplay that seasons the
delectable prose, readers will fall headlong into the alternate universe of
Chabon's Sitka, where black humor is a kind of antifreeze necessary to
support life. And when Meyer, in the end, must "weigh the fates of the
Jews, of the Arabs, of the whole unblessed and homeless planet" against a
promise made to a grieving mother, it's clear that this parallel world
smells a lot like home. Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ran
the book-award table in 2000, and this one just may be its equal. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
