book review: Telegraph Avenue
Apr. 26th, 2013 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraTelegraph Avenue is Michael Chabon's most recent novel (came out last year). I like Chabon best when he's doing genre (I like everyone best when they're doing genre) and this is straight-up literary fiction; I kept with it because oh *man* can Chabon turn a sentence, but I struggled with the usual lit-fic issues of not really liking characters, being frustrated with people doing dumb things, moral ambiguity meaning I didn't really have an outcome to be rooting for, etc. Which makes me sound more negative about it than I actually am - Chabon is an amazing writer, and it was a pleasure to read for the reading of it, if not so much the story aspects like I'm usually looking for in my reading.
(There's also the issue that, insofar as this novel is addressing things like black/white race relations in 2004 Berkeley/Oakland, and the relationship of midwife traditions to the black community, and breaking the cycle of black fatherlessness, I cannot help but feel that maybe if I was interested in these things it would make more sense to be reading something written by someone who is actually black? I mean, not that these aren't worthy subjects for anyone, or that all fiction should be autobiography, or whatever, but, like, I don't want my brain to think that I've now heard more authentic voices around these subjects than in fact I have.)
One plot thing I did like was the fourteen-year-old boys being naive and messing things up. I mean, I read a lot of YA, and teenagers are constantly grasping things before the slow adults and taking decisive action to save the world, and that's great and all, but occasionally it's nice to see teenagers being clueless and doing dumb things as that is also part of the teen experience as I recall it.
(There's also the issue that, insofar as this novel is addressing things like black/white race relations in 2004 Berkeley/Oakland, and the relationship of midwife traditions to the black community, and breaking the cycle of black fatherlessness, I cannot help but feel that maybe if I was interested in these things it would make more sense to be reading something written by someone who is actually black? I mean, not that these aren't worthy subjects for anyone, or that all fiction should be autobiography, or whatever, but, like, I don't want my brain to think that I've now heard more authentic voices around these subjects than in fact I have.)
One plot thing I did like was the fourteen-year-old boys being naive and messing things up. I mean, I read a lot of YA, and teenagers are constantly grasping things before the slow adults and taking decisive action to save the world, and that's great and all, but occasionally it's nice to see teenagers being clueless and doing dumb things as that is also part of the teen experience as I recall it.
