Originally published at Thus Sayeth the Lord…. You can comment here or there.

Back in May, the online opinion mill Slate carried a review of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Ruth Franklin said, among other things:

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.

and

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.