Can a White Author Write Black Characters?

When a man routinely hailed as one of America’s “greatest living writers” publishes a new novel, one hardly expects it to draw reviews posing questions along the lines of “Can he do it? Can he actually pull it off?” Because when you’re Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner, the act of writing a decent novel ought to be taken as something of a given. But Chabon’s newest book, Telegraph Avenue, out last week, is set against the backdrop of race, and its author undertakes the task of inhabiting and giving life to characters whose skin color is different from his own. The book is a sprawling narrative about the intertwined lives of Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, two proprietors, one black and one white, and a used vinyl store trying to survive on the shifting, gentrifying frontier between hippie-dippy Berkeley and its neighbor, the historically black enclave of Oakland. Or, as Chabon neatly puts it, “the ragged fault line where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted.” Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2012-09-19 00:00:00 UTC ]

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