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Telegraph Avenue (2012)

by Michael Chabon(Favorite Author)

3.35 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0061493341 (ISBN13: 9780061493348)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

HarperCollins

review 1: While not to the level of his Pulitzer Prize winner, Michael Chabon once again manages to capture the poignancy of lives being lived in the throes of change -- societal, personal, historical, and creates wildly funny and engrossing characters who could easily slide into caricature, but don't. Chabon's ability to recognize and celebrate the individual humanity of each of his cast is one of his great strengths as a writer. He should also be celebrated for being one of the few practitioners left of the Absurd ... Dust from Camus' crossroads is sprinkled liberally through this book.
review 2: I finished this about two months ago, and I didn't care enough about it to write a review. And now, two months later, that still sums up my feelings about the novel--I just... more didn't care. I didn't care about the characters, their predicaments, their relationship to each other, the place where they lived or what might happen to it. That might be because I got the sense the author didn't really care if I cared. We're just kind of dropped into these fairly boring characters' fairly boring lives and then watch for 500 pages as the author pushes them around trying to get them into trouble that we care about enough to finish the book. I think the issue is that Chabon, really for the first time in all of his books, confused quirkiness with characterization. Granted, all of his characters are idiosyncratic--Grady Tripp's shenanigans, James Leer's obsession with Hollywood suicides, Joe Kavalier's fascination with magic--but in each of those characters there's something running deeper, the quirks manifestations of some shit going on in their heads and in their lives (failure, depression, drug addiction, etc.). Here, in the middle class middle brow realm of Telegraph Avenue, these people are so strangely okay with themselves that there's not much running under their surface interests--mid-wifing, record collecting, band playing, screenwriting. These people are simply what they are. What's the point in reading a novel like that? less

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