The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel

Author: Michael Chabon

There's an idea you sometimes come across that the dividing line between mainstream "literature" and genre fiction is rigid and unbreakable. That's nonsense. Writers have always crossed backwards and forwards across the line as the spirit took them. One of the most successful has been Michael Chabon who, alongside his Pulitzer Prize winning fiction, has also produced a YA fantasy, steampunk, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, a comic and this brilliant alternate history novel.The Jonbar point is early in the Second World War, when a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees from Europe is established at Sitka in Alaska. As a consequence, only two million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, but the state of Israel fails. But now, at the beginning of the new century, a new President is determined to end the temporary settlement.The story focuses on Meyer Landsman, a Sitka detective whose investigation of a murder leads to a rabbi who is also Sitka's leading crime boss, and to a conspiracy to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Murder, religious identity, politics all get mixed up in a complex story full of mysteries and sudden revelations. It's a deep and absorbing work, but it's also great fun. The Yiddish Policemen's Union won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Sidewise Awards; it is unprecedented for someone from outside the genre to win so many of the major genre awards.

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Alternative Choice
Another novel that illustrates how permeable the barrier between mainstream and genre really is, is Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Indeed, according to the critic Brian McHale, there is a feedback loop by which Gravity's Rainbow influenced William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Neuromancer went on to influence later novels by Pynchon. Set towards the end of World War Two, the novel is a phantasmagoria of ideas and puns and weird coincidences. For instance, the sexual exploits of one American soldier map precisely onto the targets of the V2 rockets. Meanwhile there's a mysterious "black device" whose secret is at the heart of the novel.