The District, as its residents call it, is a good place for Chabon because it’s a fictional nowhere he can populate as he pleases ... [Chabon] seems happy here, almost giddy, high on the imaginative freedom that has always been the most cherished value in his fiction ... It’s fortunate that the novel’s prose is so untrammeled, because murder-mystery plotting can be a confinement too, a dark locked room whose doors open only when the solution, Messiah-like, arrives at the end ... There’s a tremendous amount of plotting in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, both on the writer’s part and (naturally) on the part of his characters, and the most forlorn people are those who haven’t realized they’ve become entangled in the plots they’ve spun, or who realize too late that they’re stuck in somebody else’s plot ... A simple message about the power of everyday love might seem a dismayingly small payoff for this whirling, intricate story, but the book is also about how the grandest fictions raise expectations unreasonably high, paralyze us with anticipation, doom us to the perpetual check of chronic dissatisfaction, unshakable as an Alaska chill.

Reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union is like watching a gifted athlete invent a sport using elements of every other sport there is -- balls, bats, poles, wickets, javelins and saxophones ... There are elements of an international terrorist thriller, complicated by religious conspiracy and a band of end-of-the-world hopefuls, and yet the book has a dimly lit 1940s vibe ... The prose is Chandlerian, too -- lyrical, hard-boiled and funny all at once ... The pure reach and music and weight of Chabon's imagination are extraordinary, born of brilliant ambition you don't even notice because it is so deeply entertaining ... Toward the end, the book falters a bit ... The solution to the murder mystery feels like the last piece of a puzzle snapped into place instead of a startling revelation; the international thriller ticks away offstage; some of the banter is too Howard-Hawks-perfect ... Still, what goes before is beautiful and breakneck; Chabon is a master of such contradictions.

Michael Chabon's new novel is a brilliantly written fantasy with a not-quite-fatal flaw at its heart. The tone is world-weary in the manner of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett ... There's an undercurrent of sentiment in the writers Chabon has taken as his models, however gruff or steely, but it's nearer the surface here, though the dialogue never loses its salty snap ... Chabon is masterly at evoking reality through smells and rises to the challenge of differentiating his 'black hat' (Orthodox) characters with precise descriptions of beards ... The real problem with the book is the piecemeal way Chabon introduces his alternate reality ... There are still historical shocks being delivered a third of the way through the book (atomic bomb dropped on Berlin, 1946). Readers can't hope to be absorbed into the delicious texture of the writing if they're subconsciously waiting for another counterfactual shoe to drop.

Sprinkled with Yiddishims, the novel is replete with gangsters, grifters, cops and gamblers, who all agree on one thing: These are strange times to be a Jew ... Chabon, among the most acclaimed American authors of his generation, has by coincidence or design penned what could be considered a companion to Roth's book. But instead of following Roth into social commentary, Chabon has created an original, topnotch murder mystery. That's not to say there aren't moments of great revelation in Chabon's writing.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is many things at once: a work of alternate history, a medium-boiled detective story, an exploration of the conundrum of Jewish identity, a meditation on the Zionist experiment, the apotheosis thus far of one writer's influential sensibility ... Too often, though, despite the publisher's claim that The Yiddish Policemen's Union is an 'adult novel,' I had the funny feeling that I was trapped in a gritty wonderland invented for children ... Unlike Roth, who has made the specious claim that his alternate history of America has nothing to do with our present-day politicking, Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union wears its relevance on its sleeve—and achieves a rare authority because of it.

...an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its impending blockbuster superfame ... Chabon sculpts this alternate history down to a miraculous degree of detail—pious Jewish gangsters, abandoned strip malls with touchingly defunct Yiddish signage—so it feels natural and immersive and (despite being so clearly a gimmick) never gimmicky ... habon seems more interested in his alternate world as a novelistic challenge—how to bring something so outlandish to life?—than as some kind of subtly coded analysis of contemporary Middle Eastern politics ... His sentences are clean and cocky and loaded and at least as entertaining as the mystery itself. He lavishes incredible, almost impractical care on each little unit of description—characters who are barely even characters get identifying characteristics.

As with the first paragraph, almost all of this 432-page detective novel is quick and cheeky. It’s like Woody Allen doing noir: sharp and cynical, but far too intimately acquainted with humor to ever really get dark ... In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon’s fine writing is not limited to character descriptions. The entire book is redolent with fresh, imaginative prose, and often Chabon’s imagery doesn’t merely put a pretty picture in one’s head but also secretes surprising complexity ... Into this plot Chabon builds a poignant heart, as the centerpiece relationship between Landsman and his ex-wife Bina sizzles with intensity ... The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a fine piece of detective fiction, but it has aspirations toward loftier goals, and it is here that I think Chabon comes up short ... In the end, what we’re left with is a great set-up—an alternate universe with just enough resemblance to ours to be interesting, a plot that necessarily dips into a number of worthwhile questions, and storytelling strong enough to make us want to read all the way through—but a book that fails to make good on this promise ... A book split between two audiences.

Chabon’s writing has always preyed and played on traditionally disparaged forms, the pulp of fiction, with an unfashionable and unmodernist pleasure in plot ... The delight of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is in the detail, especially in the descriptions of the invented district ... Following Chandler’s form, Chabon’s narrative proceeds frame by frame, with static conversations linked by ritzy backdrop sentences. There’s a problem here, though. This method encourages redundancy: the book has a strange rhythm, as pure plot is followed by pure padding – sashimi with a side of fries ... The book is glitzy with imagination: and yet it is not quite imagined enough. It is too quick with scenes and emotions that require more exposition.

...its pages contain a perverse, stubborn glimmer of grace, an irrational hope that can't be crushed by the evidence of history or the plans of evil men ... Chabon creates a rich alternate history that turns like a slowly closing door, with everyone either yanking their fingers away from the hinges or wedging a black boot in the jamb. His gift for deadpan dialogue and ironic juxtaposition has never been better employed than in this permafrost noir.

For all of the book’s many accomplishments—the engrossing setting; the grotesque characters; the keenly coordinated scenes of adventure; the sly, meticulous chess game of the plot; the slow unveiling of fanaticism, corruption, and betrayal—its most wrenching (and funniest) may be the quiet drama that takes place in a bed Landsman shares, while recovering at Berko’s house from a bullet wound, with this pajama-wearing child ... The voice of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that of an experienced writer with tremendous skill, who has grown comfortable with what his words can do and, damn it, is going to have a good time ... What we have instead is a detective novel that is somehow Chabon’s most affecting work. It is a work of deep imagination—a truly speculative fiction—that advances the Jewish story, allowing us to carry for a moment the heavy bags of dispossession.

With The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon has finally made the only use of genre fiction that a talented writer should: Rather than forcing his own extraordinarily capacious imagination into its stuffy confines, he makes the genre—more precisely, genres—expand to take him in. This novel bursts with so many forms and styles, it’s hard to know where to start ... As such details demonstrate, Chabon has lavished an unfathomable amount of love on his creation, leaving no quirk of Jewish life unexploited for its comedic or absurdist potential ... In the finest Jewish tradition, Chabon has produced a paradox: a mass entertainment largely inaccessible to the masses.

It is—deep breath now—a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here ... Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies ... It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police.

Imagine a mutant strain of Dashiell Hammett crossed with Isaac Bashevis Singer, as one of the most imaginative contemporary novelists extends his fascination with classic pulp ... The Pulitzer Prize–winning author returns with an alternate-history novel that succeeds as both a hardboiled detective story and a softhearted romance ... A page-turning noir, with a twist of Yiddish, that satisfies on many levels.