Black Wave
by Michelle Tea
The Feminist Press at CUNY
320 pages, $18.95
MICHELLE TEA’S new novel—for lack of a more precise label—is a work of meta-fiction, a narrative about a writer trying to write while also trying to survive the 1990s, when the world was expected to end with the millennium. Michelle, the narrator, introduces the reader to gentrification in San Francisco, and the search for hangouts where the non-genteel (the young, the poor, the queer) are still welcome: “Michelle wasn’t sure when everyone started hanging out at the Albion. She had managed to pass the corner dive for years without going inside, simply noting the dank, flat-beer stink wafting from its open doors, catching the glow of the neon sign hung above the bar—service for the sick—in hot, red loops.”
