Volume 54, Number 10 · June 14, 2007
Meshuga Alaska
By John Leonard
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
by Michael Chabon
HarperCollins, 414 pp., $26.95
Certainly, in almost every Michael Chabon fiction, there is this vanishing—subtractions, desolations, and abandonments; sinister design and rotten luck. In The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), his debonair debut novel, young Art Bechstein suspects that his mother was murdered by mobsters who were really after his father. In Wonder Boys (1995), his graduate school slapstick, Grady Tripp has lost one parent to postpartum complications and another to suicide. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), his magnum opus on art, work, buddies, genocide, and the bloodthirstiness of children, Sammy Clayman's father deserts him (twice!) and Josef Kavalier loses his whole family to the Nazis. In Summerland (2002), his stealing-home baseball fantasy for kids, Ethan Feld's mother, a veterinarian, dies of cancer, and his father, an inventor, is abducted by wolfboys and mushgoblins. In The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2004), his sly riff on Sherlock Holmes, a nine-year-old German boy named Linus, an orphan, a mute, and a refugee, wanders the English countryside in 1944 with a parrot that sings strings of numbers that refer to the cattle cars of the Holocaust. In Gentlemen of the Road (2007), his sword-and-sandals serial recently published in The New York Times Magazine, the vagabond physician Zelikman, variously described as a scarecrow and a ghost, drifts through the Dark Ages with a heart turned to stone after the rape and murder of his mother and sister.
Review, 4476 words
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