I went to Ohio for the weekend and that involves airports and planes and hotels, which means I read a lot. In the past two weeks I’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Remainder by Tom McCarthy, Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. The Road and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union were Not Science Fiction Books. I happen to be a fan of Not Science Fiction. (I posted about The Road and Not Science Fiction on my blog.) Briefly, then, Not Science Fiction is a genre of books which are declared Not Science Fiction, usually by the publishers and the critics. There are dozens of reasons why a book that takes place in the future (The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood) or describes a fantastical break with space and time (The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger or Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing) or even a journey to another planet in a spaceship where the hero meets aliens (The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell) are declared Not Science Fiction and they range from the legitimate to the pernicious. But as a person navigating a bookstore, I find it a useful category. Certain types of books are never Not Science Fiction. So I know that if I go wandering off to find my title in the general fiction stacks, there are certain characteristics of genre it won’t have. (They aren’t usually series, they tend not to emphasize the science, and they tend to avoid certain conventions like Galactic Empires–tropes I don’t dislike but that I don’t like all that well when it comes right down to it.)

I liked all of the books. I really liked Harry Potter. I loved The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Michael Chabon has written Not Science Fiction before. Technically, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is Not Fantasy, since the genre convention that raises it’s head, literally, is a golem. Kavalier and Clay is also a loving riff on comic books. But I will admit that for me, the category for Not Science Fiction is really better described as Not F & SF but face it, how catchy is that? The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is pure alternate history. It’s clever alternate history. In the world Chabon has created, we dropped a bomb on Berlin in 1946, the Jews were shoved out of Palestine by the Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians and Arabs in 1948, there is no state of Israel, and the United States established a temporary resettlement zone for Jews in and around Sitka, Alaska.

Chabon never stops extrapolating. It’s an alternate history tour de force. The Jews and the local Tlingit Indians don’t get along. There are two million Jews in the resettlement zone (where the language is Yiddish) and they keep trying to establish settlements in the areas where the borders between the Indian lands and the settlement are fuzzy or disputed. The bad guys wear black hats–because they’re Ultra-Orthodox Hasidim, of a sect called Verbover, and like many of the Hasidim, they wear black hats. The cars have different model names than ours.

Although I know why alternate history is genre (it started from the theory that that there are multiple universes, parallel, differing only because of some moment of chance or decision where our present deviated from the alternate, but I don’t think that alternate history, as it is usually practiced outside of, say, Star Trek episodes, is really especially science fiction) it could just as well have been lumped into some weird variety of historical fiction but by cultural accident ended up in our ghetto. But I don’t know that we could really try to claim The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, because it’s also Not a Detective Novel. (This is, at times, ground trod by Jonathem Lethem, who is named in the acknowledgements.) The hero is a police detective and the novel starts with the murder, execution style, of a chess playing heroin addict. The novel carefully ticks off the conventions of that genre just as adeptly as it deftly extrapolates the area that Americans in the novel sometimes refer to as Jewlaska. (American Jews are nicknamed ‘mexicans’ because they come from down south. American Jews call the Alaskans ‘penguins.’ Someone in the book mentions in passing that the bridal shower for am Alaskan who was marrying and American Jew was done with a Cinco De Mayo theme and that the pinata was shaped like a penguin.)

The thing that makes the novel so compelling is that it’s fun. The mystery is fun. The story is fun. The setting is fun. When the half Tlingit, half Jewish partner of the main character, a 6′ 8″ bear of a man named Berko Shemets feels the need to settle a streetcorner crowd of thugs–Orthodox boys who argue about koshering pot–he climbs out of the squad car with a Tlingit warhammer.

That’s when Berko opens his door and displays his ancestral Bear bulk in the street. His profile is regal, worthy of a coin or a carved mountainside. And he carries in his right hand the uncanniest hammer any Jew or gentile is ever likely to see. It’s a replica of the one Chief Katlian is reported to have swung during the Russian-Tlingit war of 1804, which the Russians lost. Berko fashioned it for the purpose of intimidating yids when he was thirteen and new to their labyrinth, and it has not failed its purpose yet, which is why Berko keeps it in the backseat of Landsman’s car. The head is a thirty-five-pound block of meteorite iron that Hertz Shemets dig up at an old Russian site near Yakovy. The handle was carved with a Sears hunting knife from a forty-ounce baseball bat. Interlocking black ravens and red sea monsters writhe along the shaft, grinning big toothed grins. Their pigmentation used up fourteen Flair pens. A pair of raven feathers dangles on a leather thong from the top of the shaft. This detail may not be historically accurate, but it works on the yiddish mind to savage effect, saying:

Indianer.

Can I tell you how much I love that? Can I point out how smart that is? How much is going on there in terms of extrapolation, of grounding in reality (the Sears hunting knife, 40 oz baseball bat, and 14 Flair pens.) Can I tell stress enough how FUN that all is?

I could quibble about this book. I had issues with the ending, yadda yadda yadda. But mostly, I just want to say, if this is mainstream literature (and it is, Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay) science fiction has won the war and established a legitimate foothold in the world outside the genre. And as someone still sitting in the ghetto, I can only admire as Michael Chabon struts his stuff.