Telegraph Avenue

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am a huge fan of the brilliant Michael Chabon, but I almost put this book down a dozen times. I stayed with it because I loved the characters, two nerdy, struggling guys who run a used record store in a run-down neighborhood, and their wives, fathers, and sons. Every character took up a place in my heart, and so I followed them through the swamp of details about jazz artists and producers in the days of vinyl. Unless you share Chabon's passion for the subject--I do not--you'll be wishing an editor had cut the book to its real story, which is about friendship, fatherhood, changing cultural values, and the clash of big-box commerce with local culture and business--all worthy themes explored with Chabon's usual originality, humor, and sensitivity. And the man can still write more consecutive beautiful sentences than anyone else I've ever read.

I'm going to go back to The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which I have somehow never read, to renew my faith in my favorite writer.

When We Were the Kennedys

This lovely book quickly became one of my all-time favorite memoirs. Monica Wood's ability to describe childhood experiences rivals Harper Lee's in To Kill a Mockingbird. Although her subject is very sad--the sudden death of her beloved father when she was ten--it is also filled with characters full of love, kindness, and resilience, as well as grief and confusion. It also paints a vivid picture of a mid-century industrial town where working in the factory brought pride, unity, and security to families like Wood's.

And the writing is gorgeous--one gracefully crafted sentence after another. From the introduction: Her family's story was "powerful and engulfing, erasing all that came before, just like the mill that had made this story possible. In each beholden family, old languages were receding into a multicultural twilight as the new, sun-flooded story took hold: the story of us, American children of well-paid laborers, beneficiaries of a dream. Every day our mothers packed our fathers’ lunch pails as we put on our school uniforms, every day a fresh chance on the dream path our parents had laid down for us. Our story, like the mill, hummed in the background of our every hour, a tale of quest and hope that resonated similarly in all the songs in all the blocks and houses, in the headlong shouts of all the children at play, in the murmur of all the graces said at all the kitchen tables. In my family, in every family, that story—with its implied happy ending—hinged on a single, beautiful, unbreakable, immutable fact: Dad. Then he died."

Breaking Up With God: A Love Story

Breaking Up With God: A Love Story by Sarah Sentilles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sentilles describes the evolution on her faith in God as if they had been lifelong friends and lovers.
The strong, comforting faith of her childhood led her to study religion at Harvard, work as a youth minister, and decide to become an Episcopalian priest. As she learned more about both religion and human experience, she came to realize that her relationship with God wasn't working. In her struggle to decide whether to stay on the path to priesthood, her mother told her, "Part of life is discerning when you need to stay and when it's time to go. Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference." Her journey was long and painful, but ultimately Sentilles did "break up with God." Here's how she describes it:

"I didn't lose my faith. I left it....God is gone....Too many terrible things done in his name. Too much suffering in the world. Too much violence. Too many disasters. I let go of a personal God. I let go of all of it."

The metaphor of God as boyfriend may seem sacreligious to people of faith, or trite and facile to skeptics. For me the metaphor worked perfectly, maybe because my own experience has been similar. If you struggle with belief or have outgrown your faith, you'll like this book.

Just Kids by Patti Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Until I read her memoir, Patti Smith was only a vague TV image. I was turned off by the scary darkness of her looks, and her music made me change the station as fast as I could. Robert Mapplethorpe made a stronger impression, also negative, when he achieved notoriety for his homoerotic photographs of male nudes. But when I read Just Kids I found two very different people: rebels, yes, but also passionate creators yearning to produce great art and fulfill great love, willing, even eager, to sacrifice comfort and security. Before she was a musical performer, Patti was an artist and a poet, living with Mapplethorpe in New York--first on the streets, then in a warehouse loft without a bathroom, and finally in the Chelsea Hotel, a famous hangout for artists ranging from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan. In their early years as a couple, they gave themselves only to each other and to their art. "'Nobody sees as we do, Patti,'" Robert would say. "Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was if we were the only two people in the world."

Robert's drug use (Patti claims to have never used drugs) and his anguish about his emerging bisexuality eventually led to their split, but they remained close. She set her poetry to music and became a successful performer, married a musician, had children. He achieved the notoriety of the cultural rebel as well as respect as a photographic artist. He died of AIDS in 1989.

I'm glad I read this. It humanized two people I'd known only as caricatures, gave me insight into the process of creating art, and provided an interesting tour of the New York art world of the 70s and 80s.  



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The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While not as good as his second novel, Angelmaker, this one is just as inventive and entertaining. Here the catalyst for doomsday is a weapon that will simply make the enemy go away. Seems very efficient until it goes awry, of course, and the gone-away victims return in grotesque, threatening forms. Only a mysterious substance called Fox, carried in a pipe around the world, keeps the remnants of civilization safe, and now it's threatened by a fire on the pipeline. Our Heroes, a crazy but lovable bunch of veteran trouble-shooters, must respond, led by the able Gonzo Lubitsch (think the Channing Tatum character in Magic Mike) and his best buddy, who's the narrator. What follows never fails to surprise as it leads us down labyrinthine paths punctuated by digressions that are probably the best part of the book except that there are so many of them and they get in the way of finding out what happens next. Ultimately I lost patience with them, but only because the central story, a moving quest for identity embedded in a pow-bang-boom action story, demanded resolution. Harkaway's mind seems to be hyperactive in the best sense, popping out more weird and wonderful inventions than can fit in one story. I can't wait for his next book.


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Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had more fun reading Angelmaker than I've had with a book since I was twelve. It's a comic book wrapped in a literary novel, an incredibly inventive and beautifully written story of an ordinary guy who comes to realize that it's up to him to save the world. Throw in a bit of political commentary, a little philosophy (does knowing the truth bring salvation or doom?), a wealth of characters both real and larger-than-life, and you have an unforgettable novel. If you like Michael Chabon (especially "Gentlemen of the Road") and Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, you'll love this. Check out the cool promo on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxJn0W....

A few favorite passages:

A few decades of calm, she reasoned at the time, and the world would set itself straight. But somehow it all went wrong instead. The onward march of progress has wandered off down a dark alley and been mugged.

Picture a man, the tale [of the Recorded Man] went, in a bed of silk sheets. And picture all around him wires and cameras and men taking notes. Everything about him is written down. They are making a record of him: his breaths, his words, his pulse, his diet, his scent, his chemistry—even the fluctuations of electricity in his skin. As he grows weaker—for he is very old now, and injured, and sick—they press filaments of metal through holes in his skull and into the fabric of the brain itself, and record the chasing flashes of thoughts running from fold to fold of the grey stuff inside his head. And through all this, he is conscious, and aware. Is he a prisoner? A millionaire? Does he feel pain or horror at his own predicament? Does he have any idea why this is happening? It’s so bizarre. And yet somewhere, somewhere, it is real, and he is lying there. Perhaps, when he is gone, they will need someone else. Perhaps they will need you.

Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one who deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which use humans to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own weird little ecosystems.

So he cheated back. He abandoned Daniel’s world in order to preserve it, and from that lesson drew his entire life. He broke laws, cracked safes, smashed windows and shattered the public peace, and from destruction he drew consolation. The biggest lie was that the world worked the way it was supposed to, and having seen through it, Mathew Spork was free.



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An African Childhood

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read both this memoir and its sequel, "Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness," via audiobooks with terrific narrators, but Fuller's writing is just as beautiful and evocative in print. The daughter of white British settlers in central Africa in the mid-twentieth century, she grew up during the revolutionary years when colonials were losing their power, their land, and sometimes their lives to native peoples reclaiming their country. Fuller's childhood stories are both harrowing and hilarious, as are her descriptions of her amazing parents--gutsy, passionate people surviving tragedy and betrayal through sheer stubbornness and large amounts of alcohol. Like so many stories of Africa, Fuller's tales reveal through the chaotic lives of unforgettable individuals a wider perspective about a place and a culture so different from my own. I can't ask much more from a book than that.


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