Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Telegraph Avenue #5

Well, boys and girls, this is the end. This is our final Telegraph Avenue readalong post. This one will cover the final section, Brokeland. This readalong is sponsored by Emily of As The Crowe Flies and Reads and Harper Collins. If you would like to pre-order Telegraph Avenue, please visit Odyssey Bookstore. Interested in some other views on this novel? You can find the other read-along participants here.


I closed the cover of this book and I felt...unsatisfied. This has never happened to me while reading a Michael Chabon novel and I'm trying to put my finger on exactly what rubbed me the wrong way about this ending. I think, after spending almost 500 pages with the characters, I wanted more to happen. I'm not saying that everything had to end happily ever after, but I wanted things to change more than they did. I felt in some cases (Titus and Julie, for example) that things sort of went backwards. I expected to finally have a strong reaction to Archy, the character who is the center of this story, but I still felt mostly ambivalent towards him. I think the only character who really had a journey during this book was Gwen.


Somehow, I also felt like the major themes in this novel were introduced but then skirted around.Chabon set up these great explorations of race relations by giving us a white couple and a black couple whose lives are intertwined on so many levels. But I feel as if I've spent more time trying to figure out which characters are actually which races than thinking about the ways in which we perceive each other. He also set up a competition between a mega media mogul and a small town record store. There was an initial confrontation, but somehow the end is reached without really addressing the issue of mega stores and mom and pop stores. 


Michael Chabon is an incredibly talented author and I have enjoyed several of his books. This one didn't work for me as well as some of the others. There is still some very beautiful writing here and interesting relationships. If you are a Michael Chabon fan or someone who is really into music, you should definitely grab this book when it comes out in September.


I'm going to end my musings with two of my favorite quotes from this section:


"For years his life had balanced like the world of legend on the backs of great elephants, which stood on the back of a giant turtle, the elephants were his partnership with Archy, and Aviva's with Gwen, and the turtle was his belief that real and ordinary friendship between black people and white people was possible, at least here, on the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California. Here along the water margin, along the borderlands, along the vague and crooked frontier of Telegraph Avenue. Now that foundational pileup of bonds and beliefs was tottering, toppling like the tower of circus elephants in Dumbo. Not because anybody was a racist. There was no tragic misunderstanding, rooted in centuries of slavery and injustice. No one was lobbing vile epithets, reverting to atavistic tribalisms. The difference in class and education among the four of them canceled out without regard for stereotype or cultural expectations: Aviva and Archy both had been raised by blue-collar aunts who worked hard to send them to lower-tier colleges. The white guy was the high school dropout, the black woman upper-middle-class and expensively educated. It just turned out that a tower of elephants and turtles was no way to try to hold up a world."


"Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life - feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream - struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations." 


Emily asked us also to talk a bit about our experiences reading and discussing this book before publication. It's a really interesting experience to read a book before there is any buzz about the book. There are no other opinions that are stuck in your subconscious. I think it works really well to read it with a group, though. You come to your own conclusions, but then you have people to bounce ideas off of instead of waiting for someone to share your love of a particular character or passage. 


Thank you to Emily of As the Crowe Flies for hosting this readalong! 


Curious about what happened earlier in the novel? You can check out post #1, post #2, post #3, and post #4

10 comments:

  1. Ooh, good comments, ma'am. And I totally get what you mean about Julie and Titus going backwards. Their story kind of upset me, but 14's a confusing age and Julie'll be fiiine.

    Ah, new bloggers! So much fun to meet.

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    1. Thank you, m'lady. I was frustrated by not knowing exactly what happened between them. Dear Michael Chabon, why do you tell us some things but not all of the things?

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  2. It is an odd experience to come to a book with no previous reviews. It made me really realize how dependent I am on bloggers and reviewers. I don't consider that a bad thing, as apparently I'm still able to come up with an opinion all by myself. :-)

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    1. Haha, isn't that a good thing to know? I often skim other reviews when I'm done with mine, just to see what the consensus is.

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  3. I found the ending oddly satisfying (though I always crave a tidy, happy ending, despite my better judgment, and then rant when a book's ending is too tidy and happy) because I thought it was so realistic. And i liked the ending because it wasn't tidy, because these characters are going to go on to live rich, messed-up, interesting lives and as readers we only got a small window on those lives.

    But as somebody who manages a small mom-and-pop store, I was wanting something more decisive about the Dogpile vs Brokeland situation.

    overall, though, i mostly just loved the readalong experience!

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    1. Grr...way to skirt the question by taking both stores out of contention, Chabon! Sigh.
      Thank you again, Emily. This was great fun!

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  4. Good thoughts - and you're right. I thought he was fairly successful with the race relations portion of it. But as far as the American Dream and the Big Box thing goes, that kind of fell flat at the end. ESPECIALLY after he really leaned on that portion of things in Return to Forever.

    Oh well, I'm glad to have done this read along and meet some well read, well spoken bloggers!

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    1. Yes, this was wonderful. It was so much fun scrolling back through everyone's blog and seeing what else they had been up to in the past few months.

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  5. As a person who works with adolescents every day, Titus and Julie didn't disappoint me in the least. I'm thoroughly confused about why you and others thought they "went backwards". How so?

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    1. I think I was confused by the shift they went through from being in a romantic relationship (or at least being best friends) to only interacting with each other online. Because we didn't get to see the shift or the falling out or the conversation when that change happened, I felt confused. I thought their relationship was growing stronger, but then it seemed to be taking a backseat to other things in their lives.

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