Word: landsman
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...Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” Chabon fulfills that essay’s promise, and entertains wildly. Set in a fictional universe in which Jews inhabit not the Middle East but Alaska, Chabon’s novel tells the hardboiled tale of Meyer Landsman as he attempts to solve a strange and seemingly inconsequential murder while dealing with the burdens of his depression and alcoholism, his disintegrated marriage, and the coming reversion of his Jewish homeland to the American government. In both form and content, Chabon’s novel is a true expression of pluralism, firmly...
MICHAEL CHABON'S NEW NOVEL is a Raymond Chandler-- style pulp mystery set in a bizarro alternate universe where (as supposedly really almost happened) Alaska, not Israel, was designated as the Jewish homeland. Your hero is Meyer Landsman, a drunk and divorced detective working the case of a murdered drug-addicted Hasidic chess prodigy. As premises go, this one is half-baked, hard-boiled and frozen solid all at the same time...
Chabon's prose is so awesome, it's a crime not to quote it. "Look at Landsman," he writes, "one shirttail hanging out, snow-dusted porkpie knocked to the left, coat hooked to a thumb over his shoulder. Hanging on to a sky-blue cafeteria ticket as if it's the strap keeping him on his feet." There's hardly a mot here that's not juste. Likewise, a cartoon dog evokes "the obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy...
...Maturin repairs the wounded are real, borrowed from history (the two are passengers on H.M.S. Java when the U.S.S. Constitution, now a tourist attraction in Boston Harbor, defeats the British ship off Brazil in his sixth novel, The Fortune of War) and retold in language nearly understandable to a landsman ("A burton-tackle to the chesstree. Lead aft to a snatch block fast to the aftermost ringbolts and forward free. Look alive there!"). In the new novel Napoleon has just escaped from Elba, and the two heroes must block a huge shipment of Algerian gold intended to pay the Emperor...
...Coomer is another sort of adventurer, a landsman who falls in love with a 60-year-old, 28-ft. wooden motor launch with a short mast and a steadying sail. Coomer buys the boat for a reasonable price, which is much like adopting, for a reasonable price, a child who must shortly be sent to Princeton. He names it Yonder (that's the easy part), learns to hoist anchor, percolate about the harbor, and dock again. Also to sail a bit, and what to do when the diesel fails: call for a tow, then call the diesel wizard, then deploy...