Book: The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
Something bothers me about this book. It's the same thing that bothered me about The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
In that book, he spent chapters and chapters developing the character of Kavalier. He detailed his adventures with a Golem he brought in from the old country, his time in the arctic, and his time in the military.
When it came time to develop Clay's character, he did only one thing. He made him a closeted gay. What's more, this feature of Clay's personality caused the character to be focus of a government raid and also to be publicly outed before a Congressional committee. Basically, by being who he is, his life is ruined.
In this book, a Mendel Shpilman is the scion of a powerful Jewish Rabbi in a militant sect. He may also be the messiah.
But he is also a closeted gay. This feature of his personality causes him to break ties with his family, reject his possible destiny, decent into the depths of heroin addiction and eventually leads to his murder.
Now, best case scenario, Chabon simply went to the same well twice when it came to character traits. However, it could be portrayed that the point being made is that being a closeted homosexual is bad. A less enlightened person might just interpret this as simply that being gay is bad. I'm not sure that I am comfortable with people thinking that or being encouraged to think that.
It seems, and this is just speculation and opinion, is that Chabon has some kind of personal issue regarding this topic and is using his characters to work it out. To have two characters in two separate novels be closeted gay and have their lives ruined by it seems to be more than a coincidence. And I don't just don't like the point these two occurrence could be making.
Other than that slight annoyance, the book was very good. It is a detective novel with an "alternate Earth" twist. Instead of settling permanently in Israel after WW II, the Jews settled temporarily in Sitka, Alaska. The murder of Shpilman comes at a time when the lease in Alaska is up and the Jews are in a state of uncertainty. The investigation of the murder leads to the discovery of a conspiracy that is wide ranging and pervasive.
The characters are well defined and the plot rolls deftly through a variety of twists and turns, coming to a satisfying conclusion. I liked this book, but I would have liked this book more if not for the thing I mentioned above.
