Title: Telegraph Avenue
Review:
A great novel should not be a chore to
read.
The
first 30% of this book crawled along introducing many characters with too
little action. So I had the double
problem of both trying to be engaged in the limited plot and trying to figure
out who was who and why they were even present.
The story did finally get moving as you got (way) into it, but it was
work, not enjoyment. And then he hits
you with part 3, an 11 page sentence. I
have read elsewhere that this demonstrates a masterful command of the English
language, but it struck me as tedious and extremely hard to follow.
Is
there value to getting to the end of this book; most definitely, but you have
to really want it. It reminds me of a
gourmet food that initially tastes terrible, but the connoisseur will say it is
an acquired taste. If you keep working
through it you will end up loving it. I
think Chabon is asking a little too much of his readers to work through
it. It seemed he was trying too hard to
write an ultrahip book, to show off his unique writing devices, and anything
else he could think of rather than just write a straight forward tale. Of course it could just be that I wasn't quite smart enough to get it, and I will leave that to other readers to decide
In
the end I was disappointed especially after loving his previous works so
much. Specifically I can highly
recommend Kavalier and Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Summerland.
Publisher: Published September 11th 2012 by
Harper Collins
Copyright: 2012
Pages: 480
ISBN:
9780061493348
Quick Review: 3 Stars out of 5.
Where Did I Get the
Book: Sent by the publisher for review.
Synopsis: "An immensely
gifted writer and magical prose stylist."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and
Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and
co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the
borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva
Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who
have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia
at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.
When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest
black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on
a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom
for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find
themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that
tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to
the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner,
the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old
Julius Jaffe's life.
An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat
of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style
all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we've been waiting
for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is
Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.
Author
Biography:
Michael Chabon (b. 1963) is an acclaimed and bestselling
author whose works include the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures
of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Chabon achieved literary fame at age twenty-four
with his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which was a major
critical and commercial success. He then published Wonder Boys (1995), another
bestseller, which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas. One of
America’s most distinctive voices, Chabon has been called “a magical prose
stylist” by the New York Times Book Review, and is known for his lively
writing, nostalgia for bygone modes of storytelling, and deep empathy for the
human predicament.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this book for the tour.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post (I'm on the tour as well http://manoflabook.com/wp/?p=6537), I love your analogy of the gourmet food, on the nose.
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