Why I Stopped Reading: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
People have been raving about this book, a lot. It also won the Nebula Award for 2007. I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which was really good so I picked up Yiddish. After all, it won a major genre award so it must be good, right?
Well, not quite. It’s not that it’s poorly written or anything. Chabon does a really good job of setting up his alternate Alaska filled with exiled Jews. Everything feels believable and realistic, especially the history underlying the story. So what happened to cause me to quit?
It was around page 100 that I realized the story was moving, well dragging, along very slowly. A murder had occurred and the authorities had only just then started questioning people. And with so little invested in that mystery, it didn’t hook me at all. In the meantime, we get a lot of character backstory. Which would be ok if I felt the characters were interesting. Even with all of the build up for their stories, I really didn’t find one that made me want to read more about them. Part of this is probably because I am not a Jew, so a lot of the words and problems that are brought out really don’t resonate with me. I kept having to try and puzzle out just what Chabon was talking about, especially with the Yiddish.
So after 100 pages I realized I was bored with the book. I didn’t want to keep going, puzzling my way through the story for another 350+ pages. Maybe it gets better, I don’t know. But after 100 pages, I’m willing to move on to something more immediately interesting. Which I did.
Which leads me to question why did this book win the Nebula? Was it because the Nebula voters saw a science fictionish novel from a big time literary author and think ‘Ah ha! Respectability for SF, at last! He wins!” The only other award nominee I read was Ragamuffin, which I enjoyed a lot more than Chabon’s book. Maybe I’m just a philistine.
Related posts:
- Review – The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, Michael Chabon
- REVIEW: Silverheart by Michael Moorcock and Storm Constantine
- 1975 Do-Over Reading Project – JP’s Take
- TOC: The Best of Michael Swanwick
- Reading Snobbery, Part 2
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I enjoyed the novel very much. It has a nice blend of murder mystery, alternate time line science fiction, stranger(s) in a strange land scenario, romance(s), anthropology and humor.
And an excellent study of human behavior — some dependent on religion; some dependent on culture; some dependent on familial ties; and some dependent on love, honor and loyalty.
Reading this novel to me wasn’t any different than reading any other scifi novel where the author has transported you to another (alien) culture. There were elements that were familiar — the locale, prior history, current history that was skewed — but definitely an imaginary created culture.
Morjana
If it is so boring, as you say, it could be a big PC moment. “Hey, a book about Jewish exiles in Alaska, brownie points all around”. Maybe not, but you know it’s possible.
I think you’re doing the book – and the author – a disservice by suggesting it won the Nebula due to political correctness. Not to mention doing the award a disservice. I enjoyed the novel a great deal – see here – although I thought Chabon botched the ending a little.
I often feel like a philistine when I can’t get through anything that’s even remotely considered “literary”. I get bored to tears and just don’t want to continue. For example, I got through Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake pretty easily and enjoyed it enough to try The Blind Assassin. About a hundred and fifty pages into it I’m both bored and depressed waiting for either something remotely surprising to be revealed or for something good to happen to someone. If this novel is a metaphor for Canada or the U.S. or the 20th Century or something then it is completely over my head.
I admit it – I am a philistine. I should have paid attention in college literature classes rather than sat there with a hangover or just plain drunk.
Why jump immediately to the cynical and accusatory position of, “It must have won because it’s by a guy who won a Pulitzer”? Usually, it seems to me, credentials from the mainstream lit’ry world are an impediment to a writer when it comes to the genre community. So the book bored you. Okay. That’s an individual response, and one that might even change were you to read the book at another time. Or it might not, and that’s fine, too. But to then take your, “Not for me,” and move it to, “The rest of you must be lying about enjoying it” seems to be a bit of a leap; then you suggest the opposite leap: “There must be something wrong with me.” Neither is a good way to proceed. You could discover far more interesting insights if you began from opposite assumptions: 1. People who enjoyed this book legitimately enjoyed it; 2. Your boredom with the book is a legitimate feeling.
When I first read Chandler’s The Big Sleep, I kept waiting for the action stuff to start. I mean, Marlowe is a giant in crime literature. Where’s the gun fights and stuff? That’s what happens in movies, right?
Turns out, Chandler didn’t write that kind of book. For Chandler, the crime is almost secondary. It’s the characters that matter. Ditto for Chabon and TYPU. Granted, if you didn’t like the characters, then the book–a characters study–will be boring.
My suggestion: try the audiobook from you library. That’s how I experienced TYPU. The reader (forgot his name) was wonderful. He sounded Jewish and made all the other characters come alive. Besides, with audiobooks, you can weed the garden, jog, or do something else even if the book is boring.
Admittedly, I’m only about 150 pages further along in it than you, but I’m enjoying the heck out of it so far. It’s a great “what if?” alternate history, a terrific character study, and a fun murder mystery. And I don’t think you need to be Jewish or PC, any more than you need to be a native Alaskan or police detective, to enjoy it. I’m certainly none of those things.
To each his own.
I read the whole thing, and then wondered why I had bothered. I bothered because it had been nominated for a Hugo, so I tried to read all the novels that had been nominated. The only one of the 5 that I absolutely could NOT finish was Brasyl.
Like you, I much preferred Ragamuffin.
My reaction to this post: “Oh good, I’m not the only one!”
I want to enjoy this book. I like Michael Chabon a great deal; he did a fantastic job speaking at my college last semester. He was funny and witty and perfectly literary with a touch of rebellion. But I am having the hardest time getting into TYPU. It’s just not grabbing me the way I want new fiction to behave. I’m probably less than 100 pages in, but I am struggling too.
I just finished it over the weekend (read because of Nebula fame). I have mixed feelings about it.
At some points I was bored and felt like the story wasnt going anywhere. At some points I wondered why do I care about these characters. Chabon definitely likes to develop his character backstories, although they seem to be stereotypical characters at the beginning probably because he was always trying to write an homage to the murder mystery/crime/noir genre. It wasn’t until you realize how Landsman drives his wife away or who the murder victim was that I truly admired Chabon’s character development. Towards the middle or second half of the novel the real characters emerge from behind the cardboard noir cutout copies.
Chabon also has a way with prose that is almost magical. There were lines about the most mundane things that made me stop and reread the line for its beautiful simplicity or an unorthodox simile that made absolute sense. I remember one line about watching the minute hand of a clock snap off pieces of the night (I can’t do it justice) but there were pieces of prose that just lept of the page and into my mind.
I wouldn’t describe Chabon as an easy read (especially in the beginning) but I don’t think he intends to be. He writes in a literary way where you have to think about the words and how they are structured and derive secondary (and sometimes tertiary meaning behind them).
I don’t admonish you for stopping. I read a pulpy Star Wars novel in the middle of reading the TYPU to lighten the load. It was definitely a good read and a great book but it did take a lot of effort to get through. I really have no problem with it winning the Nebula especially in light of Joe Haldeman’s Cameoflague victory. (Talk about bad books…). Chabon’s book is definitely a mixture of characters and ideas. It might not feature the best characters and it might not feature the most innovative ideas but it is one of the best I have ever read in terms of combining the two.
Are you always bored if a book is about a culture other than your own? If the answer is no, then we can safely assume that the reason you didn’t like the book wasn’t because you aren’t a Jew.
It always startles me when presumably intelligent people say something like that. I can’t imagine that you aren’t curious about other cultures, that you only want to read things written from one kind of perspective. Right? Right?
That said, of course you’re allowed to be bored with the pacing, unhappy with the prose, uninterested in general…
Personally, I don’t mind occasionally having to pick up meanings from context or even having to look things up. Some people feel that intrudes on the narrative; I suppose I can understand that, but I don’t think a writer should use a vocabulary designed solely for comfort.
Also, do you seriously expect to like everything that wins the big awards? Why?
Well, I have just a few things to say:
I felt the exact same way trying to read Kavelier and Clay, but I only made it through 50 pages of that. Fifty pages and I couldn’t bear the thought of 600 more. I used to find it impossible to give up on a book, but I’m getting better. You’ve got to. And, Matt, you seem a bit touchy. Don’t tell me that prestigious awards such as the Pulitzer don’t often praise the drab works which only scratch the surface of big issues. It’s like the New Yorker for chrissake; people want their high falutin ideas wrapped in dry, wry prose, because the works of a Vonnegut are too crude.
That’s a generalization, of course, and I’m not saying no one could have liked this book or any other just because I didn’t. I am saying, however, to be wary of fancy awards and Oprah Book Club bestsellers. Which brings me to my next point:
I am now reading “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy and, while I like it, I’m getting the distinct feeling that this has all been done about a million times before and that the only reason the Pulitzer people awarded it is because everyone likes a post-apocalyptic tale, but it wasn’t until McCarthy that they had a “respectable” literary figure write one.
One more point on Chabon. I thought, perhaps, one reason I couldn’t get into K&C was because I’m not Jewish and have no particular interest in Jewish culture. But I should be able to like it even though I’m not Jewish, just as I’m now enjoying “What is the What,” even though I’m not Sudanese. A friend of mine pre-empted my thought and said “I enjoyed K&C a lot but, then, I’m Jewish.” So why can no on else seem to admit Chabon has alienated some of his potential readership? It might not even be a bad thing, but admit the possibility.
Ah yes, Joe Haldeman. I read The Forever War not long ago and am amazed that it one BOTH the Nebula and Hugo awards.
Wow. I thought YPU was one of the richest stories I’ve ever read, and I’m pretty hard to please.
It is not fair to assume that the Nebula voters gave the award to TYPU to win mainstream credibility. I really enjoyed TYPU and suspect I will vote for it for the Hugo (it’s #1 on my list but I haven’t yet finished all the nominees), but I often do not like SF novels by mainstream writers. I disliked The Road by Cormac McCarthy and detested Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, f’rinstance. So just chalk it up to different folks’ tastes.
Hey, this could be bigger than my negative vibes review!
The book interests me not at all. Doesn’t sound like particularly good alternate history. I’ve tried his other stuff, and it has been a lot of sound and fury.
I’ll wait until a cheap eBook or paperback comes along, maybe. So many other books to get through!
Of course, this could have been worse. What if you stopped reading, say, Godwhale…
:-$
I agree that the story sagged and didn’t really seem to go anywhere. Yeah, I know that maybe the main plot was a little secondary to the lives of the characters, but I expected mysteries to be *solved*, and be a search down on the solution rather than a meander. Yeah, its a great concept but I would have expected a bit more meat on its bones. I would not have nominated it for the Hugo, and suspect that its a “SF is legitimate literature—-see, see!” thing as opposed to its literary merits.
Well, it says “Yiddish” right there on the cover, so if you’re not interested in puzzling out Yiddish language and Yiddish cultural references, you can’t say you weren’t forewarned.
TYPU is essentially a film noir with an ethnic angle and should be judged on that basis. IMO the story moved right along and was always involving. It is a skilled genre work and not at all “literary,” compared to most of what passes for “literary” these days.
FWIW, I though Ragamuffin was a cliched, stale and one-dimensional reading experience. I won’t be reading anything more by Bucknell if it’s similar to Ragamuffin.
I enjoyed this book a lot but it certainly was much more about character growth and the alternate history premise than the mystery itself. In a review (http://smofbabe.livejournal.com/335327.html), I did wonder whether the extra layer of meaning from knowledge of Judaism and Yiddish would get in the way of complete comprehension of the novel by those not as familiar with that background.
However, your implication that the book only won a Nebula because it was written by someone with “respectability” in the outside literary world seems a bit of a stretch. As others have already said, just because you don’t like a particular well-reviewed book doesn’t mean that everyone else who liked it is only being a sheep buying into some outside judgment. It also doesn’t mean that your disliking it means there’s something wrong with your personal taste.
I’ve never been able to finish Moby Dick myself, despite several people telling me I couldn’t be considered truly literate unless I had. I don’t think that they secretly hated it but were pushing it because it was “serious literature.” I just figure they have a lot more tolerance for the reading about whaling than I do!
Oh, how I agree. Chabon, like Stephen King, is at his best when he’s at his shortest; AAKC was one of the most boring books I’ve ever read. I’ve always wondered if it’s because UCI tried to hammer the genre out of him in favor of a more ‘literary’ style (if so, they mostly succeeded). His Spiderman script is sort of fun, as is his The Final Solution, but otherwise I generally pass.
I think Chabon is a guy who writes what he wants to write and regardless of where his work is pigeonholed, he’s someone who supports the growth of the genre as a respectable form of literature, in it’s own right, and not the other way around (see the McSweeney’s anthologies he’s edited for proof of it).
I agree that his shorter works being much more enjoyable though. I had to force my way through to the end of K&C, but enjoyed the shorter – but still novel length – Final Solution. Even after a Nebula win, I doubt I’m going to put myself through another Chabon novel, but I like his comics, essays, and overall, welcome his contributions to the genre.
As for the literary aspirations of SF/Fantasy and the continued distribution of awards to authors who, more or less, write within the literary scene rather than being full participants in the SF/Fantasy genre, I believe that there “is” a group of genre writers who want respect from the literary circle and are trying to force themselves into it. I assume that they are doing this as a means to either increase sales (not likely as the average literary bestseller gets pasted in sales by every crappy Piers Anthony, Star Wars or Star Trek book), or to stroke their own ego’s as “writers” and their acceptance as such.
I am, however, not referring to those writers who are tired or bored, or whatever (?), of writing genre material and eventually break off into writing more diverse and less fitting material – God bless’em and good luck with it. Bill Gibson stopped writing cyberpunk and who can blame him – he mastered the form and seems to now be trying to write out the path to our technical future by showing us the path to it through modern culture. I liked Neuromancer better than Pattern Recognition, but it was still a damn fine novel.
As for specific awards, the Nebula is handed out by the SFWA membership, and their choices over the years have not been completely reflective of the actual tastes, or likes and dislikes of SF/Fantasy fandom – but that’s what the Hugo Award is for, so big deal.
The World Fantasy Award, is handed out by a small committee each year whose unique membership makes it difficult to pin down how some of the books that won that award actually won it? But the group that gave the award to Murakami for “Kafka on the Shore” have been, justifiably from my perspective, blasted for handing out a genre award to a literary work as a means of reverse assimilation. There’s at least one party on that committee who wears the glass slipper too easily on this issue to miss so I’ll leave it at that…
Overall, this argument is more articulately handled by brighter folks than myself, but I think you’ll find that genre readers by and large want to read genre works and typically enjoy genre works more than slipstreamish/literary stuff. Although I do like some of the slipstreamish stuff, I don’t see why the establishment of boundaries for genre material is a bad thing unless you want to see it change. Frankly, it seems that right now there are as many new and exciting authors working in the field as there have been in many years. That being said, I don’t see the need to expand the boundaries… just leave’em alone and it’ll work itself out.
Brainshades: If I’m the glass slipper, you’re a moron. I didn’t push for the Murakami. I voted for it, but I did not introduce it into the conversation, nor sustained it through the conversation leading to it being included on the finalist list. Now, if you think someone else on the jury was a glass slipper, you’re still an idiot.
And we simply enjoyed the book. It could’ve been by John Norman and we would’ve enjoyed it. Go figure. Idiot.
JeffV
JeffV, you don’t have defend your choice. It’s your choice and you were in a position to make the decision and you did. End of story. You didn’t do it to please a mass audience so don’t worry about people who don’t like your decision.
However, if you are going to respond, try to do it on the merits and avoid attacking the author personally. You can state that you really like the work and so did others, and let people know that you weren’t the one to introduce it for consideration. But calling the author names weakens your arguments to the point where I say “I think he doth protest too much.” Did Brainshades hit a little too close to home, I’m forced to wonder, to generate a visceral response?
JeffV, you dare call someone an idiot having voted KotS for anything?
i stuck with the book til the end even though i felt like Chabon was calling it in.
he’s a great literary writer but he’s been playing around with genre fiction for the last few years and i don’t think he’s putting out his best stuff.
i felt the same way about his earlier book, ‘Final Solution.’ the end felt like he just got bored and walked off the stage in the middle of the act.
steve
JewishLiteraryReview.com
If you don’t like a book, should you feel the need to finish it? I was listening to an interview with Charles De Lint where he talks about doing reviews: He only writes positive reviews. Why? Well, if he doesn’t like a book, he tosses it and goes on to the next.
So many books, so little time, so many ex-lovers to bury.
:-$
I couldn’t finish the book either. I am an eclectic reader of sf/f, romance, mystery, thriller and anything else (cereal boxes,etc.).I thought the premise was interesting, but to set up a murder mystery and then have no progress made toward trying to solve the mystery is annoying. The last straw for me was too many Yiddish words and phrases thrown in without any context.
All my life, I’ve been a really lazy reader. I’ve started lots of books that I feel I ought to read, only to give up on them. So, in the last few years, I’ve tried to do better. I started TYPU and saw it was going to be a hard slog, for the following reasons: Firstly, the pace is terribly slow. Secondly, the novel is a tribute to the hard-boiled detective genre, more than anything else, and that is a genre that has never interested me. Thirdly, the murder mystery that is unpacked at the beginning of the book doesn’t work for me. At no point did I find myself caring about who had committed the murder, nor did I feel any suspense on that score.
Still, I finished the book, partly because I’d undertaken to start finishing books if I started them, partly because the book wasn’t THAT enormous, and partly for a rather surprising reason: I found the aspects of Jewish culture dealt with in the book, and the different Jewish characters and bits of Yiddish slang, interesting and entertaining.
After that I read Kavalier & Clay, and I loved that one. I felt sad when I had to part company with the book. I think it certainly ranks in the top three works of fiction, in terms of length, that I’ve ever read (other than books I had to read for some course or other). So the lazy reader is reforming, just a little.