Sunday, May 06, 2007
Kiss Kiss, Kvetch Kvetch, Bang Bang
My review of Michael Chabon's long-delayed The Yiddish Policemen's Union ran today in The Oregonian. I liked it. I think I'll probably like it more over time.Sammy Clay: "I didn't know they were making detectives out of Jews."
Detective Lieber: "They just started. I'm kind of the prototype."
--from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
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Lots of coverage of this one, which I have studiously avoided, first to avoid polluting my own limited faculties with other people's ideas, then to avoid highlighting the errant ways of my own writing. Help yourself, however:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/01/arts/bookmer.php (Kakutani in the International Herald Tribune)
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-ulin29apr29,1,6103230.story?coll=la-headlines-bookreview (LA Times)
http://www.esquire.com/fiction/book-review/jew0507 (Esquire...for the articles, I tell ya)
and this one that I did read, the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117763122648184171-b9edIOKICZmr0eOnlVX5XtVvH3I_20070526.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top
A quick look shows critics getting their yids in, dropping Philip Marlowe mentions, and pondering where Chabon has been since K&C.
My theory? Check Chabon's Web site, on which he was do his own coding, which he taught himself. You can't check it b/c it's gone. But the fact that he was teaching himself PHP or whatever, while committing himself to research, while ostensibly writing a book suggests that there were too many cooks in the creative kitchen. Just a hunch.
I had hoped to get to a quick review of David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which I recently read for the first time. It is outstanding (regardless of whatever Chabon's claims to research are, none of his homicide investigations approach that which David Simon renders). But hope, mon frere, gives way to paint fumes on this Sunday evening. Some other time, perhaps.
Labels: authors, books, crime, fiction, Michael Chabon, Oregonian, review, Yiddish Policemen's Union
