i just finished the yiddish policemen union and i have some thoughts to unload.
noir: i love noir like the next person (who loves noir), but i must say that it plays a number on my psyche. the number is 8 — the only number that reads the same upside down and means something different on its side. whichever way you turn it, it means something. i’m buying time while i try to figure out what it is about noir that upsets me. because it does, upset me. noir is deep while being flippant. that bothers me. noir is about aloneness. noir is about the pain of men. noir plays on existential dejection. noir is about failure — most notably, the failure of love. noir is about the rottenness of the city. noir is about institutionalized, un-rectifiable injustice. noir is about defeat.
all this i could handle. what i cannot handle is this together with the fast reading pace, the quick humor, the banter, the sassiness, the light-heartedness, the well-disguised cynicism, the brilliance and shininess of the language.
noir forces me to read fast when i should read slow and weep. noir forces me to laugh when i should reflect and take action. noir forces me to taste the bitter juices while whispering in my ear “all resistance is futile.” noir makes me want to drink and smoke instead of taking to the streets. noir kills my hope with a grin and a wink.
this said, this is a superb noir. this is as good as the best easy rollins and the best philip marlowe. i hope we’ll get to see landsman again, though, sadly, i doubt it.
fathers: like many Male Authors, chabon is obsessed with bad fathers. i had a bad father myself, but am more obsessed with the failings of my more-than-okay mother. i wonder why that is. are women writers more obsessed with their mothers and men writers more obsessed with their fathers?
politics: in his reading at books & books in miami chabon said that he is totally uninterested in politics and that TYPU’s got nothing to do with politics. there’s a passage in the book (i wish it were easy to find it now) in which someone expatiates upon the concept that telling a person not to think about x makes the person immediately think about x. i take that chabon knows that his readers can make connections and draw inferences. the Thesis of this book, if i read it correctly, is that when there are one of more jews united in the pursuit of a homeland, all hell is bound to break loose in the middle east, whether the aforementioned jews live in eastern europe, north africa, or alaska. it is part of this thesis that americans would rather have friendly jews than friendly arabs in palestine. another part of this thesis is that americans are second-coming fanatics and evil nutjobs.
abortion: funnily for a book that, one assumes, comes from the ideological left, TYPU’s protagonist’s existential disintegration hangs on a regretted abortion. that landsman perceives himself as a Bad Father can be explained with the fact that his story is rife with bad fathers. that his Bad Fatherhood should take the form of a possibly misguided abortion is really interesting.
there certainly are other things, but i’ll stop here while i get my thoughts in order.
Took me a minute to find the comment button.
I want to come back to two of your points, especially–first, to grapple with the point on abortion. I agree–it was very intriguing, and thoughtful, and I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it.
Second, to think about/debate noir, and the collision of the ironic and the ’serious’. While counterexamples abound, and a certain chic cynicism pervades many in the genre, I have often found the best works–even at their most hopeless–to be profoundly engaging as political, social critiques. (You already mentioned Moseley, and Hammett maybe got that strain–and the whole genre?–going strong.)
But one of the things that fascinated me about Chabon which I’d like to add to our potential mix-up is alternate history. Certainly I’m struck by this novel’s recent predecessors–coming on the heels of Roth’s _Plot Against America_ which I dug even more, although it was more like a memoir disguised as counterfactual (whereas Chabon masks its historical play in the hardboiled). What brings (American?) writers to attend to a vision of the what-if? at this stage in American social and political life? It has always struck me that the subject of such alternate histories is always the nature of historicity and historical consciousness–what systems and forces shape us, told via the fractured mirror of systems slightly skewed from our own. So despite Chabon’s protests against a political agenda, the two generic parents–the noir and the alternate history–seem to lean, if not to lecture, about the nature of our social realities.
I admit, though, that I really enjoyed this–but I think when I get talking about the book I find myself more intrigued by its general (or generic) sensibilities than by the particulars of its vision. I could be talked into another view, though.
Oh–and this site looks great with its new design, G. Let’s keep it from Arnab.
I love the combination of the flippant and the serious in “noir.” I just finished Hammett’s Red Harvest which is noteworthy for describing the annihilation of a small city in the most casual terms. for me the appeal of noir is indicated very well by two lines from one of the great films Out of the Past . The girlfriend of the mob boss says of him “I wish he’d die.” The laconic detective responds, “Give him time.” sometimes one can’t take to the streets (especially if one feels ridiculous shouting group slogans), so you just open up the bottom drawer, pour a shot of rye and stare at the wall.
michael, of course you love the noir! you are made for the noir. you are the ultimate cool, smartelecky, hard-bitten sonovabitch.
me, i can’t take the pain. plus, i don’t have any rye equivalent (either inside or outside me) to allow me to stare at the wall and not go mad. really, the three days i’ve read this i felt more depressed than i have since i read my last easy rollins. books have more power on me than drugs, therapists, and good or bad friends. books keep me safe or ruin me. this came close to ruining me.
right, the alternate history! i forgot, but of course it’s one of the most fascinating (and tragicomic) aspects of this book. and by the way, michael, i think you would like this. it’s so fucking intelligent and so incredibly funny. in any case, hard not to connect everything to 9/11 (not the event, the culture) and the need we all feel to imagine how things would have been if 9/11 (as metaphorized here by another historical event that didn’t happen, namely america’s turning away of jewish refugees) hadn’t happened. would bush still be president? would we still be in the process of kissing goodnight to our civil liberties? would we still be so scared? would the destruction of new orleans have happened? and so on. a bold move on chabon’s part is to substitute hiroshima & nagasaki with berlin. wow.
simon was very tickled by the image of moose-hunting jews. i suppose some things you’ve got to be jewish, or at least american, or at least a new yorker, to appreciate, but i really liked the subtle transformation of the collective jewish character, the fact that the largest concentration of jews on earth looks a lot more like (a caricature of?) some-time-ago american jews than contemporary israeli jews (simon?).
and of course the novel is pervaded by jewish paranoia. except now, in the real world, paranoia is the predominant feeling of the whole west, not only of the jews. will we end up ruled by evil and fanatic ragheads? interesting, then, how in TYPU the quarantined, contained, beleaguered minority are, not the palestinians, but the jews, and how it is their imminent displacement that has everyone nervous. except not really, because it is much more nerve-wracking, just like in the real world, to think of the middle east totally in the hands of arabs.
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the eeriest scene in the whole book was for me the jews’ dancing in the streets when the mosque comes down. it’s a really cool sleight of hand on chabon’s part, bound to resonate in the minds of americans with images of arabs dancing when the twin towers came down.
ah, this book. brilliant.
2 quick things–but I still want to come back to this thread. I want to pull the book out and take another quick look at what really caught me as I read, but for now:
–Regarding noir, I just read a piece in the Guardian by James Ellroy, commenting on Chandler and Hammett: “Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be – gallant and with a lively satirist’s wit. Hammett wrote the man he feared he might be – tenuous and sceptical in all human dealings, corruptible and addicted to violent intrigue.” For me the best noir is not mere smartassery, nor pessimistically nihilistic, but a tightrope along the opposition Ellroy outlines. Or maybe, better yet, a dialectic: the appeal of cool, collected, fuck-you witty dislocation from the systemic shit of the world, in tension with a scathing self-appraisal which sees one as part of that shit, and doing the best you can to get out of it. My favorite protagonists, my favorite novels, work that tension ’til it thrums.
–Regarding alternate history, even more than the uncanny impact of the mirrored scenes (like the one Gio notes, which is–yeah–just astounding), I think there’s something about the counterfactual which de-naturalizes our notions of how things came to be the way they are (rather than taking some otherwise direction). 9/11, the clash of civilizations, the war on Iraq — the cauldron of the Middle East: all get reconstructed, even if only a small step to the side, and evoke in the reader a confusion which discombobulates whatever we take for granted in our view of history as the way things simply are. I’m not saying this well, but I think the counterfactual establishes a contingency for the factual which forces us to question, even if eventually to reaffirm, the course of events as we know them.
Admittedly, I’m struck by how many “alternate histories” of the JFK assassination take for granted that no matter how you mess with events, the assassination will still occur. I think a recurrent trope in alt. histories is actually an ideologically suspect premise that history is, in fact, governed by inescapable forces which confirm certain “events” as pivotal and crucial. Not to mention confirming that “events” are what matter in history, a conservative premise to start with.
But even in the most conservative versions of the genre, I think the blurring of certainties is stronger than their underscoring.