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Thursday, July 05, 2007
Writing Fat
More unplanned Valve synchronicity. John H. is planning to read Michael Chabon’s latest, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, a book I’ve just finished. It’s awfully good, too: a very sharply and wittily realised neo-noir tale set in an alt-historical Jewish-settled Alaska. Our hero, a likeable heartbroken drink-sozzled copper called Meyer Landsman, is investigating the murder, in a seedy run-down hotel, of a leading rabbi’s son. The victim’s name is Meyer Shpilman, and when alive he was a chess genius, and a homosexual, and the Messiah, and a heroin-addict, and a recluse. If that summary looks contrived, I can only say that Chabon does a bang-up job on the page of making all the elements not only believable, but making them cohere into a single, plausible character. The plot rattles along, the dialogue is sharp as a scalpel, the whole thing is excellent.
If I have a reservation about the book it might be that the ending feels a tad letdowny, although perhaps that’s an unluckily integral part of the puzzle-solution-meh trajectory of the genre. It’s a shame because the earlier portions of the novel are so very well written; but that very excellence raises the bar so high that it’s hard to see how the novel could vault it. A weak ending can leave the sort of aftertaste in the mouth that spoils the whole meal. But the strength of Chabon’s worldbuilding endures, I’d say. Jewish Alaska is brilliantly rendered, and his copious Yiddishisms act as modulated estranging textual strategy more effective (because, though unusual, the idiom is real) than the standard SF-fantasy neologisms (that whole regrettable ‘Quinn watched as the bryygo warrior saddled his gzzlyu; his looghsu gleamed in the fchhu light’ sort of thing). I wholly believed in Chabon’s imagined reality. This is one of the two best sf novels I’ve read so far this year—the other being Ian McDonald’s Brasyl.
So, enough gush. Here’s one specific thing. Chapter 16 opens with this account of Rabbi Heskel Shpilman, the father of the murdered man. Not what you’d call a Good Guy, even in the compromised moral universe of the text. But perhaps you can gauge that from the description.
Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favour of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn’t make any difference in what you see. [p.135]
Very nice writing, that. Now, a good deal of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union has to do with chess; and the author’s endnote acknowledges borrowing a ‘Zugzwang’ from ‘Reb Vladimir Nabokov’ who ‘presented [it] in his Speak, Memory’. The Zugzwang has a part to play in solving the murder mystery, although this solution, like the whole loose-end-tying-up-ing, is not the best handled part of the novel.
Here’s Nabokov in Speak, Memory, remembering one of his childhood nurses, Mademoiselle:
A large woman, a very stout woman, Mademoiselle rolled into our existence in December 1905 when I was six and my brother five. There she is. I see so plainly her abundant dark hair, brushed up high and covertly graying; the three wrinkles on her austere forehead; her beetling brows; the steely eyes behind the black-rimmed pince-nez; that vestigial mustache; that blotchy complexion, which in moments of wrath develops an addition flush in the region of the third, and amplest, chin so regally spread over the frilled mountain of her blouse. And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three buttons on the side, lowering itself warily; then, at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling. [p.438]
Chabon’s writing is vivid and droll and effective. But this is better written. It may be that Chabon’s fat man is described in too cartoony a manner, too much a blob of plasticine and not enough a real human; too much
and not enough
But the Nabokov is cartoony too. It’s just that its cartoonnishness is more alive. I wonder if the difference isn’t that Chabon’s wit is focussed on mockery: his fat man is objectified into a great mass of stuff, albeit expensive stuff (the Rolls Royce under its cover, the object of stufy of ‘the eighteen greatest sages in history’). We are being offered him merely as an object for humorous astonishment. The brilliance in Nabokov’s account, the moment when, if we translated it into chess notation we’d be compelled to add the ‘!’, is the terrified chair at the end of it. Nabokov also reifies his fat woman, beetling brows, steely eyes, a succession of chins, ‘the frilled mountain of her blouse’, but then at the last minute he reverses the strategy: as human flesh becomes objectified (as very large flesh is prone to do in our minds) so he humanises an actual object, and the chair lets loose its terrified crackles. The reverse movement, somehow, increases the humanity of the whole description; as does the presence of the narrator himself in the scene (‘There she is. I see so plainly her abundant dark hair…’). It feels, for all its deliberate rhetorical hyperbole, more like life; more than just point-and-laugh-at-the-fat-person.
So, in sum: Chabon, an excellent stylist, perhaps not quite as good as Nabokov at his best. A contentious conclusion, I know.
Comments
No, I think you were right with “cartoony” vs. photographic. (Welles was wearing loads of make-up for that part, but it’s still a photograph.) Chabon riffs into verbal abstractions; Nabokov stays tight on the physical. Chabon reads faster and lighter, since Nabokov forces visual processing alongside the verbal. Chabon risks conveying nothing more than amusing chatter; Nabokov risks falling apart into a cacophony of overwrought details. The chair catches him.
A weak ending can leave the sort of aftertaste in the mouth that spoils the whole meal.
Neal Stephenson, call your office.
The first half of the book is excellent, the second not. The plot is overly complicated, as if Chabon tried to dazzle us with his razzle à la Ludlum. The chess theme never gets fully integrated, the plane crash is never explained, the resolution is incomplete. (As David Lodge says, there are three kinds of endings, and this is the third kind, the kind that doesn’t really end at all.) There are errors (e.g., a full moon in the west at sunset) and credulity-straining moments (why didn’t the last of the Zilberblats kill Landsman?). Worst of all is the intrusive Kingly supernatural embodied in the Wunderkind.