Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue

They say that as you get older, time speeds up. I'm certainly experiencing that lately. Seems I just posted that last blog entry about my patient gardening only a few days ago, and here it is the middle of September, and another Men's Book Club meeting is upon me. The book this month is Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue (2012), a fairly recent novel by an author I've known about but haven't read. I did, however, enjoy the film version of Wonder Boys (1995), which came out in 2000 and had that great Bob Dylan tune "Things Have Changed." It struck me that Telegraph Avenue might make a pretty good movie as well, but then again maybe not. There's certainly a lot more going on in this later book, sort of like that impossible to finish magnum opus that Grady Tripp (the creative writing teacher played by Michael Douglas in the film) is working on in Wonder Boys.

I will say that Chabon knows how to create atmosphere, especially where cities are concerned. Just as Pittsburgh was essential to Wonder Boys, Oakland and Berkeley are fundamental to everything that transpires in Telegraph Avenue, which is named for the street that joins (or divides) these two distinct enclaves of retro self-consciousness: one black, one white. The book is also supposedly another homage. As Wonder Boys was a sort of tribute to Chuck Kinder, Chabon's writing teacher at the University of Pittsburgh, Telegraph Avenue is a celebration of Quentin Tarantino's films of the 1970s. I suspect I might have got a bit more out of the novel's many filmic allusions had I been willing to revisit some of those movies, but life is too short to repeat every possible journey down memory lane, or in my case down roads not taken. So I enjoyed the book for what it seemed to be and will await the group's discussion to learn more about what I might have missed or failed fully to appreciate.

When I finished my book club reading for this month, I returned for a time to Isherwood's diaries. But then while we were sorting through the hundreds (or is it actually thousands) of books in boxes in our garage, I uncovered a copy of Lions and Shadows (1938), the first of Isherwood's more or less explicitly autobiographical books. So I have been reading that and filling in the earlier parts of his life: the school and university days, and the friendships that would help define him and set him on his life's journey. In light of what I've learned from my earlier reading of Christopher and His Kind, I also find myself interpreting and somewhat embellishing some of his rather guarded comments, particularly about several of his friendships, and especially his relationship with Hugh Weston (the name Isherwood gives to Wystan Hugh Auden). When I've finished Lions and Shadows, I do want to return to those earlier diaries and pick up the story again as Isherwood settles in the U.S. and begins his life in California. 

I can't entirely explain this late fascination with Isherwood. Part of it, of course, is his placement squarely in the center of that period I've been reading about for several years now, the generation of English authors who came of age during and just after World War I, and then came to prominence as writers in the years just before, during, and after World War II. Isherwood's career, however, also extends well into the latter part of the 20th century. And the range of his acquaintance is extraordinary, as I think I remarked in an earlier post. He seems to have known everyone, and everyone knew, and apparently liked, him. There's that comment of his about being a camera, and perhaps that's the answer. He is a very honest observer of himself and everyone he comes in contact with, and his insights always seem to penetrate to the underlying strata of emotional and psychological conflicts in all of his relationships with other people. It's also that those other people are W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Tony Richardson, Charles Laughton, Julie Harris, and so many others.