Review by New York Times Review
EARLY IN "BLACK WAVE," Michelle Tea's new novel, her protagonist, also named Michelle, lingers over her books. The list - including Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Allison, Eileen Myles, Chris Kraus and Mary G aits kill - perfectly suits Michelle, a 27-year-old in San Francisco's Mission District circa 1999: It's a Gen-X queer girl's version of the bohemian counter-canon. Although Tea doesn't name-check herself, there might well be a Michelle Tea book on that shelf. For 20 years, Tea has recorded the history of her communities - writing novels, memoirs and essays, editing anthologies, founding a performance series and a publishing imprint. She has written about growing up working-class and the struggle for trans inclusion at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Most recently, she has written a memoir called "How to Grow Up," described her experience of becoming a mother and started a website of nonconventional parenting stories. But "Black Wave," part fictionalized memoir, part apocalyptic fantasia, blends dark humor with touches of mysticism to suggest how misleading the phrase "settling down" is. In Tea's hands, sobriety, love and something like happiness are stranger and more unsettling than bohemian decadence could ever hope to be. The first half of "Black Wave" is deceptively familiar: Michelle and her friends drink, hook up, break up and hold on tightly to their low-rent apartments. Michelle pushes her adoring girlfriend aside for a series of young, androgynous obsessions. She worries about her gay mothers, who have stayed in the beaten-down Massachusetts town where she grew up. Like the New Yorkers of James Baldwin's "Another Country," Tea's bohemians are not refugees from middle-class propriety: Sexuality and poverty cast them out from the start. They stake everything on passionate, toxic bonds because they have nowhere else to go. Baldwin's novel, published in the early '60s, is filled with tragedy. Tea's is filled with humor - and also with a determination to find a nontragic end that doesn't rely on the traditional formulas. It's a story about sex that doesn't end with true love, a story about poverty that doesn't end with steps up the ladder, and a story about drugs and alcohol that doesn't end with sobriety. Or rather, it does, but only insofar as sobriety becomes a reaction to and a metaphor for the end of the world. Midway through, Michelle leaves San Francisco for Los Angeles, with vague plans to write screenplays, connect with her brother and get sober, or at least cut back a bit. But instead of shifting to an earnest story of self-acceptance, the book breaks itself open. Multiple versions of events and overlapping timelines serve as reflections on why we end up with one person or another and what right we have to tell their stories. Intimations of doom start piling up as the outlines of an impending apocalypse come into focus. People retreat into lucid dreams and post ads to find the people they dream about. "I Was So Great In The Dream?" Michelle asks one girl. "Better than this," the girl answers. "Black Wave" retains the off-kilter realism of the best apocalyptic writing: The nightmare is like our world, only a little more so. Crazed mourners circle the Scientology center when Tom Cruise joins a rash of celebrity suicides. Michelle keeps going to her bookstore job as bodies pile up. When her boss can't take it anymore and gives her the store, she realizes a dream of sorts. What happier ending for a bohemian writer than to run a bookstore, even if it had become, as Tea writes, "a place for addicts and fragile people to come out of the killing sun and find some peace"? Fewer customers means more time to read - or to therapeutically hurl books at the wall. Is this one last drugged-out hallucination? A vision of sobriety as tumultuous rebirth? Or wish fulfillment for the hungry girls for whom only a cosmic reckoning can do justice to their need and hurt? LAURA TANENBAUM'S work has appeared in The New Republic, Jacobin and Dissent, among other publications.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 2, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the first half of Tea's (Valencia) autobiographical latest, set in San Francisco's Mission District in 1999, sex and drugs are the primary occupations of the protagonist, also named Michelle. As Michelle gets drunk one evening, like most evenings, she watches the sunset from the doorway of the bar: "The hue of the sky was the visual equivalent of the alcohol settling into her body-dusky blue shot with gold and darkening to navy." In Tea's skillfully loose, lusty prose, Michelle is both vulnerable and brash, blitzing through lovers and bags of heroin, terrified but also convinced of her own invincibility. This tension emphasizes the reckless force of youth as well as the waning freedom of life before cell phones and the full-blown Internet, making this book an important portrait of the late '90s. The second half of the novel, however, in which Michelle moves to L.A., morphs messily into a metacognitive excavation of what it means to write, rewrite, and revise one's own story into art. This section of the book, which also plays with chronology, the approaching apocalypse, and the fabrication or conflation of characters, is less successful, in part because it ultimately feels less honest. The one exception, however, is the appearance of Matt Dillon in the used bookstore where Michelle works, a perfect, hilarious celebrity interaction subplot, anchoring Tea back down to the awkward dialogue and fierce desire she does so well. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The author of ten books exploring queer culture, pop culture, feminism, and more, plus founder of the literary nonprofit RADAR Productions and cocreator of Sister Spit, Tea makes great literary content from the stuff of her on-the-edge life. This book started as a memoir aimed at examining the end of a long relationship and her sense of finally transitioning to adulthood. Soon, however, it morphed into a closely observed novel starring the hyperkinetic, probing Michelle, who moves from major drug taking at a San Francisco bar to a lucid grappling with life and love. It takes a moment to adjust to third-person Michelle-as-protagonist, but the pleasures of the prose, which is energized and exuberant (one might even say goofy), are the reward. VERDICT Tea paints a terrific portrait, but her great gift is how she makes readers look more closely at themselves. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
