In his last large novel for adults, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (a review of mine can be found here), Michael Chabon wrote a thrilling and engaging tale about the golden age of comic books told through the experience of two fictional creative geniuses. Chabon wore his love of the comic book and superhero medium on his sleeve and it paid off in dividends—Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize. The novel was full of terrific characters, page-turning plot, real social commentary, and an education on how and why superheros do the things they do in comics.

Kavalier and Clay was also something of a manifesto from Chabon to the literary world. His previous novels and short stories fit well within the confines of what would be considered “serious fiction.” He gave attention to characters over plot, and the portrayals were deeply psychological, told with wit and a vocabulary so grand that he would make a dictionary look his words up in itself. In Kavalier & Clay, Chabon kept many of these serious elements, but also showed that plot was still just as an important component of good story-telling as strong themes or three-dimensional characters. A novel could still pierce deep into its characters’ psyches while the events of their lives caused readers to pay attention and want to turn to the next page as quickly as possible. In essence, Chabon took the concepts found in the less serious fiction he loved and placed them squarely in his story that addressed issues as serious as Holocaust survivor’s guilt. He took superheros and their creators and made them worthy of studious exploration. Chabon proved to be a genre-bender. He proved that the categories of serious writing and commercial writing were less important than good writing. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union Chabon continues to throw down the gauntlet.

For a comic book and genre-fiction fan like Chabon, it comes as no surprise that his latest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union again messes with our conventions. Every comic reader knows the concept of the alternate universe. Within comics there are general accepted lores for each superhero. The alternate universe concept messes with that lore to explore new themes or different dimensions of a character. For example, Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son re-imagines the Superman origin story with the precept that he landed on Earth twelve hours later than in the traditional story and was subsequently raised in the Soviet Union rather than Kansas.

For Chabon, his alternate universe takes place on a small island in the Alaskan panhandle. Grasping a bit of little-known history and asking “what if?” Chabon creates a wholly new world history in which Secretary of the Interior Harold Icke’s real but ultimately defeated suggestion to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to allow Jews fleeing the atrocities in Europe leading to World War II to inhabit Alaska succeeded. In the novel, the state of Israel was a miserable failure and collapsed in 1948. The largest enclave of Jews in the world now inhabit the Alexander Archipelago and Sitka is their capital. Yiddish is the official language and they are by and large an autonomous people. The problem is that their lease on the land is good for sixty years and the land will go back to the U. S., an event called Reversion, at the end of 2007. The book begins just before the Jews are once again homeless. Chabon has not just created an alternate history like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America in which an anti-semitic and Hitler-friendly Charles Lindbergh beats F. D. R. in the presidential election and is told through the medium of a coming-of-age family story. Chabon’s genre-bending isn’t done merely at his book’s premise. He has also decided to make his tale a hard-boiled detective story with a homicide investigator protagonist, Meyer Landsman, who we could imagine swapping secrets over coffee and cigarettes with men like Sam Spade.

The novel opens with a murder that occurs in the cheap weekly-rate hotel that Landsman has occupied since his divorce. Then the story grows as large as a Giant Sequoia from there. My suggestion is that if you want to read this novel, avoid nearly any mention of its plot points—even the book’s dust jacket. Chabon proves to have the mystery-writing chops. He draws the reader in and tempts them to make guesses only to prove them wrong, but gives the reader satisfying and plausible explanations. The world of Sitka and its inhabitants are fun to explore and by making the main character a down on his luck homicide detective, Chabon has given us someone with access to nearly anywhere. He’ll meet the local Filipino doughnut baker, the super sectarian Hasids who have their own enclave within the enclave, the aging chess club, the cantankerous and utterly devotionless boundary maven, and his half-Jewish, half-Tlingit cousin and partner Berko Shemmets.

Does it work? Is it good? An emphatic yes to both questions. The novel may not satisfy as thoroughly as Kavalier & Clay, but one cannot expect 500 foot home runs every time a batter steps up to the plate. The genre-bending certainly is awe-inspiring—over and over again, I found myself thinking I can’t believe Chabon pulls this off—but like any piece of creativity, its greatest strength can also be its greatest weakness. Sometimes the mix of sociological insight and rough-speaking characters on a hunt makes the reader feel one step behind, and Chabon does not give you time to catch up. Chabon plays with our understanding and expectations of conventions, but he’s also got a story to tell. By the time I came to grips with what he’s doing with my expectations of the genres, I needed to reread several pages just to get my bearings in the story. It was, however, well worth the time and effort to do so. And let me say, it isn’t all that taxing beyond my points here. Chabon’s prose is the tautest I’ve seen from him; he has admitted in interviews that the book contains some of the shortest sentences and paragraphs he’s published. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union isn’t just a creative exercise; it is a very good read. I imagine Chabon will receive some attention come awards time for this work.