Word: chabon
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Lahiri's rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren't born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic). They're transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status...
...past eight years Michael Chabon, who is probably the premiere prose stylist--the Updike--of his generation, has written a novel about superhero comics; a fantasy tale; a mystery starring an old man who may or may not be Sherlock Holmes; and a pulp crime book set in an alternate time. (That last would be The Yiddish Policemen's Union, about a murder in a what-if world where Alaska becomes a homeland for the Jews, or as they're called there, "the frozen Chosen.") Chabon is still a literary novelist, but he's having a hot, star-crossed flirtation...
...Chabon is playing a double game here: he's a Pulitzer winner with the verbal chops of a mandarin writing in the voice of a junk-sick 1950s pulp hack who dreams of being a Pulitzer winner. He seems to find the masquerade liberating. For once he never has to stop the action or worry about the prose being too purple or not purple enough. Gentlemen contains only trace amounts of irony. Best of all--and this is good for Chabon, who, unlike Updike, has a sentimental streak--the characters feel emotions only when they want to, and never more...
...Michael Chabon—whose “Yiddish Policemen’s Union” is my book of the summer—problems like evil, exile, redemption, faith, and identity become so much more: questions contained in plot and action, character and style, dialogue and metaphysical meditation. Chabon has made no secret of his interest in genre fiction and desire to obliterate the supposed highbrow/lowbrow divide. In 2005, he wrote a passionate defense of entertainment, arguing that rather than handling “the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs...
...there's not much that Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, can't do with words. But he's almost too clever: there's something too cute about The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the kind of cuteness that a really passionate writer drops from time to time when there's serious work to be done. Chabon may be incapable of writing a bad book. But it's still not clear if he can write a great...