I’d like to begin this post by reminding readers
how much I LOVED The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This is an
incredible novel! Buy it! Read it! Also, I enjoyed The Mysteries of Pittsburgh very
much and if you recall from my most recent post, Wonder Boys fulfilled every
hope I had for a summer of immersive novels.
So. I didn’t like the The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Reading it
was arduous for me, an exercise in will but not the free kind. Every moment
felt like I was in a very loud restaurant, trying desperately to hear
what the waiter was saying. The prose was like a thick stew spanning a creek; I
couldn’t see the water. And I read this book on vacation! We were at
the beach one day, and several young men were playing soccer on the sand before us. One
of them was a bit older, blonde curly hair and slight paunch, and he had taken
to the role of coach, barking out plays and in a slightly condescending way, encouraging
effort from the members of the recently-formed teams. My daughter looked at him and said to
me “He’s a try hard.” And I got what she meant, and I looked down at this book.
Listen, I feel badly about it, but Michael Chabon doesn’t
need my support for this novel; it did quite well. So I moved on to Telegraph Avenue. And I have to tell you, the first several
chapters had me worried. But
maybe thirty pages in, the novel started to open up for me and I enjoyed most of the rest. Sure, at times I had to come
up for air and resolutely dive back into the stew with rededicated focus, but
in the final analysis, the characters kept me coming back. If you’re
interested in such things, on a five-star scale, I’d give Telegraph Avenue a
3.5. I'm not doing a plot-based review of either of these, because you can find tons online for both books.
And now I’m feeling the pull back to short stories, so I’ll
be taking a break to read a collection everyone’s been talking about (Jamel
Brinkley’s A Lucky Man and I’m sorry! I have to! I miss stories!!), then I’ll
be back to Chabon action with the final book of my summer challenge, Moonglow.
In the meantime, if you’re riding the Chabon train with me and might be interested in
the author’s favorite reads (spoiler: lots of classics by men), here you go: Michael Chabon's Top Ten List.
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