Has anyone here read this novella? I have to say that although I really Chabon’s writing I thought it was terrible. I just do not see the point of a writer with Chabon’s obvious talent stooping to the level of this crap. It is not that I have problem with him writing a genre piece, but that he did it so badly. Did he purposely try to write like a hack? For example, Chabon is always modifying said with adverbs (he said wearily). The prose is always weighted down. It reads like someone trying to clever about writing like someone who is trying to clever who is not clever.
To quote the critic - It stinks.
And he should have kept the original title - Jews with Swords.
(I have heard The Final Solution is bad for similar reasons. Anyone read that one?)
You can read the whole thing on the NY Times to judge for yourself.
Chapter One:
Conclusion with links to all previous chapters:
I read the first 2 or 3 chapters a couple of months ago and abandoned it…
I just finished Gentlemen of the Road and enjoyed it. The story was originally published as a serial (in the NYT Magazine, since the pulps are long gone) so he used a different style than he used when writing all those stories for the The New Yorker. There’s a lovely map in the endpapers & an illustration for every chapter.
Chabon hasn’t made his affection for “genre” fiction a secret. After the Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay (and all those stories in The New Yorker), there’s no danger his books will dumped back in the Kilgore Trout Department. Kavalier & Klay was a serious novel–about the lives of two guys who wrote comic books! The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is an alternative-history detective story. It will be interesting to follow his career, as he boldly goes where no serious literary critic has gone before!
I wouldn’t mind reading further adventures of Amram & Zelikman. After all, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser had long careers.