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A review by ridgewaygirl
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
3.0
Plans led to disappointment, to regret, to chain-smoking and sadness. Michelle refused to be tragic. She would resist having plans.
Michelle is a young lesbian living in a run-down apartment in San Francisco during the 1990s, and also as the world is ending. She works in a bookstore, but she wrote a book once, and so she's collecting experiences for her next book, which mainly means she drinks a lot and takes whatever drugs are offered to her. In the name of artistic experience, of course, she's not an addict or anything.
Their hard drinking was a sort of lifestyle performance, like the artist who wore only red for a year, then only blue, then yellow. They were playing the parts of hardened females, embodying a sort of Hunter S. Thompson persona, a deeply feminist stance for a couple of girls to take. They were too self-aware to be alcoholics. Real alcoholics didn't know they could even be alcoholics, they just drank and drank and ruined their lives and didn't have any fun and were men.
The first half of Black Wave follows Michelle and her compatriots as they carouse around the dying city. It's a self-destructive artist novel in the style of the many published during the nineties, from Suicide Blonde to The Story of Junk. I read a slew of them back then and the story remains the same, although the characters always believe they are forging new ground.
The second half of the novel is an entirely different animal. Here, Michelle Tea makes the dystopian end-of-the-world theme explicit, while also going meta and becoming a novel about the writing of the novel, where what is happening in Michelle-the-character's life becomes a topic of debate. Tea also makes the decision to have Every Thing That Michelle Says Capitalized and has everyone else speak in italics. I had thought that I was fairly open to stylistic quirks, but this annoyed me to the point that I couldn't concentrate on what Tea was doing, or even what was going on in the story.
With Black Wave, author Michelle Tea takes big risks. That they don't entirely work means that the book doesn't hold together the way it might had she played it safe. But I can't help but admire her courage.
Michelle is a young lesbian living in a run-down apartment in San Francisco during the 1990s, and also as the world is ending. She works in a bookstore, but she wrote a book once, and so she's collecting experiences for her next book, which mainly means she drinks a lot and takes whatever drugs are offered to her. In the name of artistic experience, of course, she's not an addict or anything.
Their hard drinking was a sort of lifestyle performance, like the artist who wore only red for a year, then only blue, then yellow. They were playing the parts of hardened females, embodying a sort of Hunter S. Thompson persona, a deeply feminist stance for a couple of girls to take. They were too self-aware to be alcoholics. Real alcoholics didn't know they could even be alcoholics, they just drank and drank and ruined their lives and didn't have any fun and were men.
The first half of Black Wave follows Michelle and her compatriots as they carouse around the dying city. It's a self-destructive artist novel in the style of the many published during the nineties, from Suicide Blonde to The Story of Junk. I read a slew of them back then and the story remains the same, although the characters always believe they are forging new ground.
The second half of the novel is an entirely different animal. Here, Michelle Tea makes the dystopian end-of-the-world theme explicit, while also going meta and becoming a novel about the writing of the novel, where what is happening in Michelle-the-character's life becomes a topic of debate. Tea also makes the decision to have Every Thing That Michelle Says Capitalized and has everyone else speak in italics. I had thought that I was fairly open to stylistic quirks, but this annoyed me to the point that I couldn't concentrate on what Tea was doing, or even what was going on in the story.
With Black Wave, author Michelle Tea takes big risks. That they don't entirely work means that the book doesn't hold together the way it might had she played it safe. But I can't help but admire her courage.