Black Wave by Michelle Tea
Michelle moves south to LA in an effort to escape her drug and alcohol addiction, catastrophic romance, and nineties in San Francisco. However, as soon as it is declared that the world would end in a year, things start to get strange in the vast city.
Michelle begins a new work, a meta-textual study to support her pledges to embrace responsibility and maturity, while living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping a watch on the approaching apocalypse. The lines between fiction and daily life start to blur as she struggles to create LGBT love and art without giving in to violent desires, and Michelle wonders how much of her creative process she will have to sacrifice in order to survive the end of the world.
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
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It is a masterpiece, Black Wave. A rambling, dystopian account of healing, reading, working in bookshops, having sex with Matt Dillon, living in Los Angeles, coming out to LGBT teenagers, and the end of the world. Yes, we receive some of the same wonderful descriptions of queer misfits and mayhem from Michelle that we’ve come to expect (the fact that there are now Michelle Tea imitators out there is indeed a sincere form of flattery—before her lesbian fiction was undoubtedly less colourful, less hip, less outrageous, less sad and hilarious at the same time, less wise). But don’t assume that this is a queer novel because of the stereotypes around it. Black Wave delves deeply into the gloomy night of our shared soul.
Getting sober as the world burns becomes one last act of defiance, a cry for life amidst the ashes, in stealthy Michelle Tea form, and doesn’t something about it sounds all too prophetic at this time? If you read this book for comfort or pure enjoyment, don’t anticipate it to leave your mind peacefully afterwards.
The tale is intriguing, and the character is lively and entertaining. All of these settings and scenarios are vividly brought to life by MT. The conclusion was strange and unexpected!
Tea places our contemporary situation in the 1990s retroactively, making the environmental and political crises visible—a crisis that we can only now fully recognize. So perceptive, humorous, and upsetting! A beach read for the closed, polluted beaches of today.
