Ironically, Telegraph Avenue-even as it might be accused of embodying a form of gentrification-is itself a novel largely pitched against the physical gentrification of the neighborhood in which it takes place. Put simply, is the story of “Brokeland,” whatever it may be, really Mr.
What this means is that “literary genre fiction” now runs the risk of becoming a kind of sophisticated “literary gentrification”-a process by which a predominantly black milieu is appropriated by a white novelist as a springboard. Chabon is white, much of the milieu providing the “brand” of Telegraph Avenue (soul and jazz music, Blaxploitation films, the Black Panthers, Oakland and its environs) is unmistakably black. Even more common is the practice of saturating a novel in a given milieu to such a degree that the milieu itself comes to serve as the “brand” of the novel. Reappropriating genre literature under the aegis of high culture has become a familiar convention of postmodern literary fiction really, “literary genre fiction” is arguably a genre of its own at this point. Chabon’s “comic novel” and Policemen’s Union his “Yiddish noir” novel, then Telegraph Avenue is supposed to be something like Mr. Chabon takes his cues from soul and jazz music-the two main characters run a used record store in the neighborhood of “Brokeland” (between Berkeley and Oakland)-with a little help from the Blaxploitation and Kung Fu films of the 1970s. Just as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay (2000) captured the kinetic ebullience and polychromatic fervor of comic books, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) synthesized noir detective fiction and fantasy heartbreak Yiddishkeit, so Telegraph Avenue dives into a highly specific, stylized milieu.
Chabon himself reveals an awareness of these problems and attempts to mitigate them.
To do so, however, would require not only ignoring the problems that afflict the book, but also neglecting the ways in which Mr. It’s easy to see what kind of novel Michael Chabon set out to write with Telegraph Avenue-and it would be easy, as well, to pretend that it succeeds at being that kind of novel.
0 kommentar(er)
