In the sundry periodicals which I still read, I have of late run across various articles questioning whether Michael Chabon is a literary author, or merely a popular one. I don't care how that question gets answered, as long as he keeps writing paragraphs like this (p. 265):
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate universe in which Europe's Jews were resettled in Alaska, rather than Palestine, after World War II. The plotting is clever and the dialogue snappy, but as always in Chabon's work, its most compelling element is profound humanism. Its characters are real, recognizable people who operate from a complex and often conflicting set of principles and motives. Of course, my fondness for the novel is likely due, in large part, to recognizing myself in the wreckage of Meyer Landsman, should I suffer similar losses.
I have the "P.S." edition, which includes profiles of the author and an essay of his which led to writing this book. I take great encouragement that he wrote, and left unpublished, another novel on the same subject before he was able to write this one, and has another similarly discarded manuscript in his past. Even amongst the pros, a writer's work demands failures in order to create successes.
The wastebasket is a thing for children, blue and yellow with a cartoon dog cavorting in a field of daisies. Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children's garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspried, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horor of Goofy.That's why I read Michael Chabon.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate universe in which Europe's Jews were resettled in Alaska, rather than Palestine, after World War II. The plotting is clever and the dialogue snappy, but as always in Chabon's work, its most compelling element is profound humanism. Its characters are real, recognizable people who operate from a complex and often conflicting set of principles and motives. Of course, my fondness for the novel is likely due, in large part, to recognizing myself in the wreckage of Meyer Landsman, should I suffer similar losses.
I have the "P.S." edition, which includes profiles of the author and an essay of his which led to writing this book. I take great encouragement that he wrote, and left unpublished, another novel on the same subject before he was able to write this one, and has another similarly discarded manuscript in his past. Even amongst the pros, a writer's work demands failures in order to create successes.
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