Book Review: Last Night at the Telegraph Club

She couldn’t put into words why she had gathered these photos together, but she could feel it in her bones: a hot and restless urge to look — and, by looking, to know.
(The Last Telegraph Club p. 23)

Last Night at the Telegraph Club
Malinda Lo

This book is many things, but a quick read is not one of them. Last Night at the Telegraph club takes its sweet time setting up characters and plot points, but without realizing it you’re too steeped to stop reading. It follows the story of Lily Hu, a seventeen year old high school senior in San Francisco who has mostly known Chinatown for her whole life, and her self-discovery of her identity as a lesbian when she falls in love with Kath, a fellow student and social outsider.

“That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.” And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.

America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

Goodreads

Another pick for my Teen Intersectionality Book Club, this was my first time reading Malinda Lo’s work. Despite being historical fiction set in the late 1950’s, there were times that Last Night at the Telegraph Club didn’t feel like it was too far out of the realm of the contemporary — something that wasn’t jarring at all, but felt like a wonderful reflection of how much the teen experience is universal to an extent. (This was also verified by my teens commenting on their reading experiences too).

I was initially slow to like this book; mostly because the pacing in the beginning is very plodding. It reads almost like loosely connected vignettes, but once Lily becomes more self-aware, the story begins to be more cohesive between chapters because there’s enough meat from the previous chapter ending to carry you through the set up of the next one.

There were seemingly random interludes set at different times, following Lily’s extended family in their new adult lives. At first glance, their meaning eluded my teens, and in truth, I think is Lo using an extended literary technique for a book that, in other areas, doesn’t quite merit the level of critique applied to understanding them. In truth, I think they are what will make this book appeal more to adults because of the unexpected nature of breaking the narrative in addition to Lo splitting the book into “parts;” not to mention protagonists of them– because they do serve a purpose.

In my analytical opinion (which I really don’t get to break out on this blog too often); they provide a foil to the teenage experience of Lily as the adults in her life reckon with the ways their childhood and teenage years were riddled with trauma that affects them to this day — and highlights their casual passiveness when it comes to allowing Lily and other teens to do what they want, thereby giving them the childhood they never had. It also explains their lack of compassion for the struggles Lily and her peers face, because they had it so much worse than them, how could their children possibly struggle or experience traumas?

Continuing with speaking about the adults, nearly everyone’s favorite character (maybe even more than Lily) was her Aunt Judy. She’s written in such a way that she comes off as the right amount of empathetic and compassionate, especially given the lack of knowledge when it comes to LGBTQ+ topics. In my head I read her as potentially closeted, maybe even on the Ace- spectrum, but if there were hardly words to describe lesbians back in the fifties, it’s no wonder Aunt Judy’s story is so ambivalent about romance.

Despite being set during the Red Scare, and definitely has those plot elements brewing about in the background, this is largely a story about self-discovery in all its awkwardness, tied with the secretive nature of needing to hide that awakening since people very much believed anything under the “queer” umbrella term was an evil, communicable disease of not just the mind/body, but of the soul. Lily’s experiences are at once universal, and also wholly a product of her time — especially when it comes to her experiences with people (friends and family) outside the LGBTQ+ community. The dovetail within the Red Scare is perfectly encapsulated within the plot subtly at first, but comes together in a terrible, yet beautifully executed, way later in the novel.

[Spoilers for discussion of ending!]

I don’t know if I’d hand this to any kid looking for an LGBTQ+ story; it definitely still has its niche, and while it isn’t gentle or kind at all times, there’s an ambiguous ending that leaves you with a sense of uneasy completion — a feeling that truly does equate to the best that one could envision or hope for Lily. It’s a book with scenes that feel authentic, and could be potentially triggering to some readers, despite the ending.

[end of spoilers]

The themes of otherness and tethers deftly weave their way in and out of this book, and I relished how much craft Lo put into making this novel. I’m looking forward to picking up more of her works in the future, and I think this book will do well in the hands of a historical fiction-inclined teenager, and is best suited for grades 8+ due to some saucy/steamy bits that younger readers may not be mature enough for (you know your readers though).