The Yiddish Policemen's Union

I first read Michael Chabon several years ago when his Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay came out.  The book is easily one of my favorites.  I was immediately drawn to the characters, the language, the setting.  After Kavalier and Clay, I backtracked and read Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, both equally impressive.  When he edited those two wacky McSweeney's anthologies, I read those and quoted and cited his insightful intro about genre-bending literary fiction.  Same thing with his intro to Houghton Mifflin's 2005 Best American Short Stories.  Then I read a few flops: his young adult novel Summerland and his most recent detective novel The Final Solution.  I thought, OK, he's trying something fun--writing in the detective and young adult genres.  But neither novel satisfactorily bended the conventions of those genres and neither was aesthetically satisfying the way his earlier work was.  So I was thrilled when I found out that he was finally going back to something like his successful Kavalier and Clay: his new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

I'm about halfway through the novel right now, and I don't exactly know where to start.  The novel begins well--with a murder--but then flounders.  I just finished teaching a college course on form and theory of the novel where my students and I collaboratively wrote a gumshoe detective novel.  I see Chabon borrowing many of this genre's conventions.  The novel is set in Alaska, in an alternate reality where the US government has established a homeland for displaced Jews after WWII.  The colony of Sitka is a year before reversion, at which point all Jew's residency is uncertain.  The novel has all the ingredients for a delectable novel but the pieces, at least right now, don't seem to be coming together.  Chabon's protagonist, Meyer Landsman, has potential, but instead of the novel moving forward, we spend the first hundred pages wandering through his past, taking diversions that eddy around his discontent.  Granted, Chabon's prose is still phenomenal, but the novel so far has failed to suspend my disbelief.  But I'll keep plowing ahead.  Hopefully by the end of the read I will have something glowing to say, but right now I'd rather be playing Scrabble.