Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  The blurring of the boundary between high and popular literature is becoming a critical commonplace in contemporary critical discussions of genre fiction; it is crucial to note that many detective writers in the early decades of the century saw their work as inferior to the standards of high literature. The codification of the genre by members of the Detection Club occurred as a response to its popularity, which promised less-than-quality writers the opportunity to make easy money as the genre gained fans. Its members worked to create standards for the genre but were unwilling to make a claim for their work’s placement on the high/low divide. This case for detective fiction as literature was something many writers of the golden age of detective fiction were unwilling to make. This attitude of self-abnegation toward detective fiction by its authors is exemplified by Dorothy L. Sayers, who explains the Detection Club in a preface to the 1931 anthology The Floating Admiral as

  a private association of writers of detective fiction in Great Britain, existing chiefly for the purpose of eating dinners together at suitable intervals and of talking illimitable shop. . . . If there is any kind of serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organization of the Detection Club, it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standards that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, claptrap, and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past. (qtd. in Brett, Detection 186)

  This linguistic juxtaposition between Sayers’s “serious aim” and the “avowedly frivolous organization” is typical of even current writers of detective fiction, like modern author P. D. James, though this attitude is becoming less prevalent than it was during the golden age due to the genre’s burgeoning popularity.

  Detective fiction had become so fashionable during the golden age that publishers were willing to print novels that were of less quality simply to fulfill the public’s demand. As Colin Watson, mid-twentieth-century detective fiction author and critic, states in Snobbery with Violence, “In no other field of literature was there a comparable influx of hopeful newcomers. . . . While demand matched and even exceeded supply, it was not to be expected that the general standard of detective fiction should be high” (97). The Detection Club responded to this threat of inferiority in detective fiction by attempting to keep the genre free from the popular sensational literature through attempts to formalize and codify what made a proper detective story.

  There has long been an internal fight in the attempts to maintain popularity while keeping the genre free from the negative connotations that a “popular” novel might have; the battle between popularity and quality is one that continued through midcentury. Raymond Chandler argues in “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950) that the genre of detective fiction in the hands of what he calls an average (rather than gifted) writer is depressing, formulaic, seldom realistic, and is doomed to mediocrity because of its popularity:

  The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does. Not only is it published but it is sold in small quantities to rental libraries, and it is read. . . . And the strange thing is that this average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is not terribly different from what are called the masterpieces of the art. It drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a little grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvious; but it is the same kind of book. Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way. (209)

  Chandler, like Watson, saw how the popularity of the detective story endangered its literary credibility. Though he made his living writing hard-boiled detective stories that evolved from the writers during the golden age, Chandler was embarrassed by the genre’s popularity because it resulted in lower standards for its writers; its very popular appeal to the public meant that the genre’s writers could be “lazy” and sell books without having to work at their art (214). The unrealistic nature of the genre, according to Chandler, excluded good writers from pursuing it because “writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction” (214).

  This attitude of the one of genre’s most popular writers is echoed in the debate between high and low culture. Andreas Huyssen suggests in After the Great Divide that the distinction between high and low literature arose in the early decades of the century with the rise of modernism, which understood itself as separate from the marketplace and works of popular consumption. Beyond historicizing the emergence of the high/low divide, he also challenges the idea that separation between the two is necessary; Huyssen argues for a consideration of merit without the confines of assumptions about genre and quality (ix–x). The detective fiction novel flourished because it brought a sense of comfort to readers, reassuring them that within the confines of several hundred pages someone was keeping order and making sure justice was administered and a peaceful equilibrium restored by the last page. Scarred after the brutality of World War I, British citizens felt betrayed by a government that had allowed such atrocities to continue. Popular detective characters from the golden age—like Christie’s Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey— were able to work outside the law and solve crimes that were either incorrectly solved by the police or beyond the purview of the established authority. Though Meyer Landsman is initially part of an established authority—a member of the Homicide Section of the District Police, Sitka Headquarters—the instability of his role as a Jew with the upcoming transfer of power back to the United States and his later suspension from the police force turn him into an outsider who is fighting established authority in a quest to solve the murder of a fellow resident of his run-down hotel.

  Chabon and the Complication of Genre Categorization

  The categorization of Chabon’s novels has proven problematic because of the elements of various genres included. Chabon has even spoken of his distaste for such classification by referencing the inherent simplification and reductivity present in such an exercise. He recounts his issues with the labeling inherent in genre fiction during a 2004 radio interview with Steve Inskeep for NPR’s Morning Edition. In this interview, appended to The Final Solution, Chabon claims:

  I’m really annoyed by pigeonholes and categories and labels. I view them as iniquitous to the spirit of play and of experimentation and of storytelling. The fact at a bookstore, the fiction is divided into fiction and mystery and science fiction, I don’t understand why it has to be that way. To me it’s all fiction, and I think the best science fiction, the best mystery fiction, the best horror fiction ought to be put on a par with the best quote-unquote “literary fiction.” You know, there’s this famous thing, Sturgeon’s Law, named after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who said that 90 percent of everything is crap. Maybe he said crud, actually. I think that’s true, and it’s just as true of the so-called literary fiction as it is of the science fiction and mysteries. So, you know, if I owned my own bookstore, I would just have the best 10 percent of everything and I would stick it all together in one section and call it fiction and have done with it. (8)

  Chabon’s stated unwillingness to categorize his own work is incongruous with his use of the most well-known character from detective fiction as the protagonist in The Final Solution. Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and appearing in fifty-six short stories and four novels, the Sherlock Holmes character, though never specifically named as such, is recognizable by his mental acuity (or more specifically, an awareness that he is no longer possessed of the intellect so formidable in his younger age), fondness for bees, and the geography of his Sussex Downs retirement. Any reference to Sherlock Holmes
, though the character may not be named as such, carries with it certain expectations about the character (brilliant, focused, and energetic) and the plot (detail oriented to an extent that highlights Holmes’s ability to see details others have not). While Chabon includes the latter, his lack of the former serves to emphasize the deterioration of the Sherlock Holmes character. Including this decline serves to alter the characteristics of the genre through a focus on the character more than the mystery. The audience continually contrasts the infirmities of Chabon’s Holmes with the active and shrewd energy of Conan Doyle’s Holmes. Refocusing the audience’s attention away from the mystery serves to emphasize how far The Final Solution is from the conventions of novels from the golden age of detective fiction.

  After the old man seems to make a deductive leap about the owner of the parrot, “Inspector Bellows was too flummoxed to gloat. He had heard the tales, the legends, the wild, famous leaps of induction pulled off by the old man in his heyday, assassins inferred from cigar ash, horse thieves from the absence of a watchdog’s bark. Try as he might, the inspector could not find the way to a mute German jewboy from a missing parrot and a corpse named Shane with a ventilated skull” (25–26). Holmes assists the police in capturing the murderer and returning the parrot to the boy. This restorative act is typical of the genre, which Dennis Porter defines as “committed to the act of recovery, moving forward in order to move back. The detective encounters effects without apparent causes, events in a jumbled chronological order, significant clues among the insignificant. And his role is to reestablish sequence and causality” (329). However, though Holmes has always acted as an outsider and frequently taken the cause of justice into his own hands, the iconic character predates the golden age of detective fiction and stories featuring him do not exhibit the sense of trauma typical of texts from the era. While The Final Solution is an homage to popular detective fiction, its references to the genre predate the golden age, and its dearth of that era’s literary characteristics identify the story with Holmesian canon but not golden age texts. Yet, Chabon, by inviting a contrast with the infirm Holmes to the vibrant Holmes familiar to the audience, also upends the Holmesian tradition of detective fiction by focusing on the limitations of the usually inexhaustible Holmes.

  The Yiddish Policemen’s Union as Golden Age Text

  The Yiddish Policemen’s Union echoes themes of trauma and loss with the alternate history that still sees great loss of life from the Holocaust and a sense of impending doom with the reversion of the Jewish settlement to the United States. Landsman numbs himself to the chaos of his life with alcohol and work. Chabon recounts how, “according to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead. . . . The problem comes in the hours when he isn’t working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from a blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down” (2). In this way, Chabon works to “map the ‘Yiddish sensibility’ onto ‘hard-boiled fiction,’ as he told the Manchester Guardian” (qtd. in Myers 582). Landsman’s characterization represents an echo of hard-boiled detective fiction heroes like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

  These detectives, fighting for decency and justice in dark worlds, often found themselves entwined in criminal underworlds that Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would have been adrift in. Though he may be “the most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka” with “the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker,” Landsman has become numb and crippled by grief (Yiddish 2). This awareness leads him to alcohol and self-destructive behavior, even though he “has been told, by the same loose confederacy of physicians, psychologists, and his former spouse, that alcohol will kill his gift for recollection, but so far, to his regret, this claim has proved false. His vision of the past remains unimpaired” (3–4). Yet Landsman does not represent a thoroughly hard-boiled archetype because of the trauma present in his setting; Martin Priestman argues in Detective Fiction and Literature that “in a very different way from the English whodunnit, the American hardboiled novel can also be seen as a version of pastoral” (170). Chabon’s alternative Sitka contains too much chaos and too many remnants of trauma after war to be considered a pastoral. However Chabon’s text does exhibit a “sense of division from other books and other lives [that] is enforced by the specialisation of the private eye’s work; in this one perspective, from this one point of view, the complex life outside looks simpler and cleaner” (170). In the acts of having a murder in Landsman’s hotel, one of the victims being his sister, and the culprit his uncle, Chabon keeps the disarray strongly focused on those connected to the life of Meyer Landsman. It becomes possible to consider the entire mystery as revolving around Landsman, with the plot twists simply an extension and, perhaps, manifestation, of Landsman’s internal breakdown.

  By detailing Landsman’s spiral from husband and successful policeman, Chabon is recreating the standard of the golden age hero: a man who has been scarred by trauma. Chabon’s exposition has shown Landsman to be “ambivalent, despondent, and with no faith in anything” before the death of his sister and the breakup of his marriage (Yiddish 15). Coupled with the loss of his unborn child, Landsman spends his nights “ranting and rambling in an alcoholic dialect of grief” (7). This sense of damage permeates his work, which he had thought of as compartmentalized from his personal problems, though his ex-wife is his boss. Upon meeting the Verbover rebbe, Landsman considers the rebbe’s

  light eyes, somewhere between green and gold. They’re nothing like the pebbles abandoned by mourners on Baronshteyn’s tombstone puss. Fatherly eyes that suffer and forgive and find amusement. They know what Landsman has lost, what he has squandered and let slip from his grasp through doubt, faithlessness, and the pursuit of being tough. They understand the furious wobble that throws off the trajectory of Landsman’s good intentions. They comprehend the love affair that Landsman has with violence, his wild willingness to put his body out there on the street to break and to be broken. (137)

  Landsman feels his sense of loss is apparent to the rebbe even as he has come to inform the rebbe of his son’s death. It is a death that the rebbe does not mourn as he had already considered his son lost. Landsman, too, is lost, lost in a sea of personal grief over what his life has become, and cultural grief, for the trauma of the Holocaust (though Chabon’s alternate history indicates the number of lives lost to be smaller than actual historical data), and for the cultural rift that will take place when governance of Alaska is passed back to the United States. Even his detection skills, which he was able to take pride in, are no longer serving him, leading him to reflect, “Even when I have good luck . . . it’s bad luck” (187).

  Landsman’s breakdown is a physical one, too. While climbing to the Beth Tikkun Retreat Center, he considers how he is “in worse shape now than he was when he tried to conquer the stairway in the Shemetses’ apartment building on Friday morning. Last night he lay awake on the stiff gritty packet of a motel mattress. Two days ago he was shot at and beaten in the snow. He aches. He wheezes” (251). He pauses to recount his injuries and discovers, “There’s some kind of mystery pain in his rib and another in his left knee. He has to stop once, halfway up, to smoke a hortatory cigarette. He turns to watch the Cessna wobble and hum its way into the low morning clouds, abandoning Landsman to what feels, right then, like a lonely fate” (251). Landsman’s physicality is representative of his mental state: broken and no longer the man he once was. What helps him to heal is solving the mystery and reconnecting with his wife, Bina. She can offer what he has been missing; Chabon even describes her as able to produce from her “bulging tote bag”

  a small plastic box with a hinged lid. It contains a round pill box with a threaded lid from which she tips out a vitamin pill, a fish-oil pill, and the enzyme tablet that lets her stomach
digest milk. Inside the hinged plastic box she also carries packets of salt, pepper, horseradish, and hand-wipes, a doll size bottle of Tabasco sauce, chlorine pills for treating drinking water, Pepto-Bismol chews, and God knows what else. If you go to a concert, Bina has opera glasses. If you need to sit on the grass, she whips out a towel. Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass—Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another. (155)

  Bina is also able to provide Landsman with a sense of himself as protected and safe from trauma. She can remind him that his world does not need to collapse simply because of the trauma that has befallen him. He can look to her for an example of “the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka” (155). Bina becomes to him the embodiment of recovery. She dealt with the same personal trauma in the loss of their child and their marriage. She shared with him the Grinshteyn case, which ended in the death of a child. Yet she remains, in his mind, “methodical, organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared . . . Bina would flourish in any precinct house in the world. A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag” (155). In this way, Bina continues in the tradition of female characters from the golden age who have supported and loved detectives recovering from trauma.