What if Israel had collapsed shortly after inception in 1948, and European Jews had relocated to a reservation of sorts in Alaska? And what if, 60 years later, the U.S. was about to say, "Hey, sorry, we want our land back. You don't have to go home, but you've gotta get the hell out so we can let our own natives play house for a while"? You'd have the right mix of events for Michael Chabon's
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history novel about just those things.
Kind of a Jewish noir, the story pivots around Meyer Landsman, a rumpled, agnostic detective investigating the murder of a junkie in Landsman's skeezy residential hotel in the Sitka District of Alaska. The dead junkie, of course, turns out to be significantly more important than you might expect from his iffy surroundings. And Meyer makes a series of bad decisions that plunge him into a shadowy underworld of Hasidic godfathers, possible messiahs, and red heifers. (Good thing I had that
crash course from AJ Jacobs earlier this year.) On top of that, he's got kind of a 21st century Bogart thing going on: problems with his ex-wife becoming his new boss; increasingly unpleasant side effects from his alcoholism; and a sort of loose cannon partner, who's having trouble reconciling his half-Inuit, half-Jewish heritage. I believe that's known as the trifecta in the detective fiction world.
Part of the reason the book is so good is that Chabon really commits to the alternative timeline of the Sitka District, while making everything plausible. Like a throwaway reference to "American first lady Marilyn Monroe Kennedy in her pink pillbox hat, with mesmeric spirals for eyes." Chabon doesn't
have to go there, but he does, and it deepens the "here but not here" element.
The rest of the goodness comes from the complex relationships between the characters. Meyer and his ex-wife are wary of one another, but there's still a lingering core of affection (and sex) that bonds them, even though the loss of a baby was just too much for their marriage. The dead guy, a refugee from a pious crime family, worked miracles for various members of the community before losing himself to heroin. The layers are intricate and expressed at a good, tension-maintaining pace.
And as with
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the language is just so spot-on--lyrical without being too brainy or overwhelming. Chabon incorporates the Yiddish phrases, syntax, and sensibility so well that you'd think there really
was a hybridized Yiddish community in Alaska. Unfortunately, Chabon never mentions whether Governor Palin makes the historical cut in this version. Let's assume she doesn't.
Some of my favorite parts:
"Bina reaches into the breast pocket of her suit jacket and takes out a pair of half-glasses that Landsman has never seen before. She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other."
"When, after careful consideration, she can't fit Berko into her taxonomy of lowlifes, Mrs. Kalushiner spits into her cup. By one kind of reckoning, she owes Landsman seventeen favors; by another, she ought to give him a punch in the belly. She steps aside and lets them pass."
"Each was the other's first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first person to turn to when something--even the marriage itself--went wrong. For half their lives, they entangled their histories, bodies, phobias, theories, recipes, libraries, record collections. They mounted spectacular arguments, nose-to-nose, hands flying, spittle flying, throwing things, kicking things, breaking things, rolling around on the ground grabbing fistfuls of each other's hair. The next day he would bear the red moons of Bina's nails in his cheeks and on the meat of his chest, and she wore his purple fingerprints like an armlet. For something like seven years of their lives together, they f*cked almost every day. Angry, loving, sick, well, cold, hot, half asleep....Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away."
On tour for American Wife, Sittenfeld gave a reading at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble the other night. Sheryl and I (also known as the "We Could Have Written That" book club) made the trip up to see her, fueled by our mutual, post-adolescent love of Prep. Sittenfeld was remarkably...normal. A little nasal due to a cold, she was quirky and sincere at the same time. Very funny in her one-liners about her life as a writer, and very candid in her admiration for Mrs. Bush. (Sittenfeld is not a Republican, and not so thrilled with the Bush presidency.) 
