![]() (Well, irritating mostly because it's predictable.) ![]() I have issues with the story Chabon wants to tell - an Obama-era zeitgeist tale of black-white racial tension and cultural change, rooted in black music and blaxploitation film, and recapitulating the ideas and emotional dynamics of Kavalier & Clay in ways both predictable and irritating. ![]() Telegraph Avenue is as ambitious as Kavalier & Clay in scope and subject matter, and rather more ambitious stylistically. Now, if you'll forgive the switch of metaphors, he's back on the high wire, and he really wants you to know it. He won the fiction Pulitzer for that book, and in the 12 years since he has been content to fish the shallows, trading on his pop culture/high culture crossover credentials to write screenplays ( Spiderman 2, John Carter), young adult fantasy (Summerland), alternate history ( The Yiddish Policeman's Union) and a range of other keeping-busy projects. He was balanced precariously on its back when he wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, his magnificent, overblown, self-sabotaging Opus Maximum about holocaust survival and the New York underground comics scene in the 1940s and 50s. I'm calling it: Michael Chabon has jumped the shark. ![]() Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon (4th Estate $34.99) ![]()
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