Telegraph Avenue audiobook

“They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wished to cut away.” ― Michael Chabon, Telegraph AvenueI lived for several idyllic months during my virgin adulthood in Boulder, Colorado. There was a term often tossed around, at least then, that Boulder was 20 square miles surrounded by reality (I've since heard the same line used for Madison, Austin and Berkeley). Like Boulder, the real Telegraph Avenue exists in an idealized borderland surrounded by reality that stretches 4.5 miles from downtown Oakland to U.C. Berkeley. On this street you find the restaurants, used clothing shops, street vendors, bookstores, RECORD SHOPS, college students, hipsters, eccentrics, tourists and the homeless. This setting, like Brokeland itself, is in many ways the natural habitat of Chabon. That very setting is both a blessing and a curse in this novel. First, it allows Chabon to do what he does best. He can vamp about people, sing with the language of the street, jump, jive and pirouette with English prose in a way that makes writers drool with envy. 'Telegraph Avenue' is 26,784 sq in (9 in x 6.2 in x 480 pps) surrounded by reality.The downside is, in 'Telegraph Avenue', Chabon gives us (for the most part) almost exactly what we expect. It is a ostinato playground with strong and confident prose riffs, but offers the safety of repetition and the comfort of Nat's call and Archy's response.But let's just get real. I'm reviewing this novel because I loved it. Because I was waiting for his book to drop like my young son waits for his favorite balloon magician to go to start blowing and twisting.Both Chabon's successes and his literary failures grow from the reality that he takes more risks in one sentence than many writers take in one chapter. If I judge him harder than this book deserves, perhaps it is only because his previous novels (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, etc) have cast such huge, intense literary shadows in my mind. Any future work by Chabon has a helluva fight for recognition or equivalence. Reading 'Telegraph Avenue' I was tempted to believe that even Chabon's farts must sometimes sing when he is walking from Oakland to Berkeley.

An epic novel about friendships, community, marriages, family and love. This is the first book I've read of Chabon's. I plan to read more. He is gifted and hilarious. Although the book cover makes it seem that it's a novel about friends whose businesses are undergoing duress, I think it's a loving saga about community, love, friendships and compassion. It's full of flawed people just trying to make it; and a few flawed people who are just, well, flawed. It's a book that you want to reread paragraphs just to make sure you didn't miss anything the first time. The guy is a genius.

CRITIQUE:Brokeland RecordsThe front cover of my copy of this novel suggests that it might be the equivalent of a five-track E.P. (and there are indeed five lengthy chapters), but it is in fact more like a double album concept album.My preconception was that it was a music novel, perhaps concerning a band, but it is, instead, set in and around a second-hand record store called Brokeland Records. Although two of the characters (the joint owners of the record store) have also played in a band together, this aspect of the novel is relatively underdone. It's closer to "High Fidelity" than it is to "Elizabethtown" and "Almost Famous".Of the nine main characters (they're like a Pynchonesque "whole sick crew" or "chums of chance"), six are male, and three are female.Archy Stallings (a black man) and Nat Jaffe (a Jew) are the two owners, while their wives are Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, both of whom are midwives. There are two boys, Julius Jaffe (called Julie) and Titus Joyner, the latter of whom is Archy's child of a previous relationship. The boys meet each other at a Tarantino lecture ("Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in 'Kill Bill'"). Luther Rawlings, Archy's father, was a well-known blaxploitation actor, while his partner, Valletta Moore, was an actress who played Candygirl Clark, "an ass-kicking soul sister", in the same movies, and who, like Gwen, is capable of being "sugar-sweet and kick-ass at the same time." Sometime, it's possible to imagine her as a black Uma Thurman with an afro. The ninth character is Cochise Jones, a customer who plays the Hammond organ.Brokeland NeighbourhoodThe other focus of the novel is Telegraph Avenue itself, a street that passes through Oakland and Berkeley, California. At the time of the novel (it's set in 1974 and 2004), it's an ethnoracially diverse and independent neighbourhood with lots of bars, clubs, cafes, restaurants, book stores and record stores. Gwen recalls that "the other night, somebody told me how Archy is lucky to have found something he can really put his heart into." Unbeknown to Gwen, Brokeland Records is under threat from a large chain that wants to establish a megastore called Dogpile Thang. Archy is "tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.""Brokeland Creole"Still, Brokeland Records is the glue in the community. A customer says: "It contains...black history, Oakland history, neighbourhood history, my history...""The merchandise was not the thing, and neither, for that matter, was the nostalgia. It was all about the neighbourhood, that space where common sorrow could be drowned in common passion as the talk grew ever more scholarly and wild." Cochise Jones describes Oakland as "Brokeland Creole": "That means you stop drawing those lines. It means Africa and Europe cooked up in the same skillet. Chopin, hymns, Irish music, polyrhythms, talking drums. And people...Around here used to be Mexico, before that, Spain, before that, Ohlone. And then white people, Chinese, Japanese, black folks bringing that bayou, that Seminole, that Houston vibe. Filipinos. Toss 'em on the grill, go 'head. Brokeland Creole. And some more Mexicans, Guatemalans. Thai, Vietnamese. Hmong. Uh, Persian. Punjab..." "Working the Hyphens"No single musical genre dominates. Everything is hyphenated: "That's your thing, right? Soul-jazz. Soul-funk. Walter tells me you like to work the hyphens." In the end, this novel is Chabon's homage to a world that is disappearing in the face of both corporatism and the digital economy. It is to music and film what "Kavalier and Clay" was to comics. Ironically, at the end, Brokeland Records is about to convert into an online mail-order business.For all its sentimentality, the novel does drag in the second half. Sub-plots are sometimes perfunctory and don't contribute much, except to the heft of the book. The compound sentences are not always as well-constructed or quotable. Unfortunately, I couldn't quite justify a fifth star, despite my customary adoration of Chabon and his writing.SOUNDTRACK:(view spoiler)[SIDE ONE:Childish Gambino - "Telegraph Ave"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3f-e...Billie Eilish - "Telegraph Ave"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3X70...Yvonne Elliman - "I Don't Know How to Love Him"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS2nX...This version of the song sounds like it could be the basis of keyboardist Cochise Jones's cover on the fictional album, "Redbonin'":"Then, as [drummer] Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and [bassist Gary] King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy."The description of the organ sound could apply to Charles Kynard on "Wa Tu Wa Zui" (listen below). Idris plays drums on this song as well.Cat Power - "The Greatest"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X8eI...Carole King - "It's Too Late" [Live]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HW1n...Lyrics by Toni Stern.SIDE TWO:The Beginning of the End - "Funky Nassau"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L762H...Gary King - live bass solo intro to "Lucille"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mslpS...Donald Byrd - "Street Lady"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufqED..."[Is it] soul jazz, or is it more to the side of jazz-funk?"Miles Davis - "Black Satin"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbbCZ...SIDE THREE:Sun Ra - "Rebellion"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Q8x...James Brown - "Funky Drummer"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoQ4A...Booker T and the MG's - "Melting Pot"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8wvt...Charles Kynard - "Wa Tu Wa Zui"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0fH...Featuring Melvin Sparks on guitar, Idris Muhammad on drums and Charles Kynard on organ.SIDE FOUR:The Rolling Stones - "Soul Survivor"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbFFh...Stevie Wonder - "Higher Ground" [Live]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV1DK...Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Higher Ground" [Live]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQVKf...Romeo Void - "Never Say Never"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x0fP...Dead Kennedys - "Holiday In Cambodia"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr6NO... (hide spoiler)]

Telegraph Avenue, a strip of mostly hanging-in-there shops and a funeral parlour in Oakland, California, is home to Brokeland Records, a rare and secondhand vinyl record shop run by old friends, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe. It's August 2004, Archy's wife Gwen, a midwife, is thirty-six weeks' pregnant, Nat's only child, Julius, is having a sexual relationship with his new friend, Titus, and the record shop is barely scraping by, partly dependent on the records bought by their long-standing customers, locals who hang out at the shop as if it were a diner.Gwen and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, Nat's wife, run their own midwife partnership, and it's on this day that a home birth ends badly. Tired and stressed, especially after having caught Archy with another woman, Gwen loses her cool when the hospital OB, Dr Lazar, accuses them of nearly killing mother and child and of practicing voodoo. When he makes some ill-judged comment about black women's hair, things turn ugly, but it's Lazar who threatens proceedings against the women.Things are just as strained at Brokeland Records, where the end of the shop looms now that Gibson Goode, fifth-riches black man in the United States, has won council approval to build a new "Dogpile Thang" - a giant music shop - on Telegraph Avenue. Archy's father, Luther Stallings, an ex-blaxploitation movie star and martial arts world champion who's spent all Archy's life being a flake, a drunk and a has-been with delusions of fame, is back in Oakland, stirring up trouble which comes knocking on Archy's door, in the form of Chandler Flowers, director of the funeral parlour, and his many nephews, one of which now works for Goode. And to make a strained marriage even worse, Gwen learns about Titus, whose resemblance to Archy is clear. The sudden death of a dear friend gives Archy time to put off making any decisions about the shop, Titus or his marriage. As Michael Chabon's new novel, Telegraph Avenue is an impressive work, being both a keenly astute depiction of people who feel distinctly real, and an artistic display of writers' craft: one of those books that reads like a work of art. Because of that, there will be a great many people who won't enjoy this, as it makes it even more subjective to interpretation and appreciation - just like not everyone likes Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers, for example (c'mon, I can't be the only one who finds it ugly and depressing!). Rich with pop culture references, everything from music to film to books to furniture, Telegraph Avenue sometimes reads like a time capsule, a documentary capturing a time and place and the people in it, with all their scabs revealed. It unobtrusively incorporates themes of race and class in America, and explores our oft-times fragile relationships in times of stress. A book as layered and complex as this cannot be summed up neatly, but requires a deeper look.As a character-driven book, rather than a plot-driven one, it excels. The characters really come alive, being both familiar and strange, simple and complex. Chabon uses an omiscient "telling" style of narration, yet so much is not revealed that you are still an active reader in the process of understanding them. Archy is more-or-less the main character, the one everyone else has in common, and the one who stands out the most. Which is interesting, considering his inability to make decisions or take a stand. The most assertive he gets is in dealings with his unreliable father, Luther, who has a rather sad scheme of making a come-back with his long-time girlfriend, Valletta Moore. For all the omniscient detail, you never get very close to any of the characters - for every thing you learn about them, that seems so intimate and a peering-into-their-soul, there're two things more you don't. Important conversations are not included, and it's hard to tell whether they even happened, off-page. It can make you feel a little frustrated.Unlike similar "real people, real stories" novels, novels about "dysfunctional families" (i.e. normal families), like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (a book I really didn't like), the omniscient narrator is an observer as much as we are, rather than a "let me tell you how it is, now shut up and listen" voice. There's so much more respect here, for the characters, and sympathy. Nothing's black-and-white (a deliberate irony?). No one is that easily summed up, no matter how tempting it can be, and Chabon excels at capturing nuances, and secret thoughts, and how we react to things. The characters were a mesmerising mix of familiar and utterly strange - I've never lived in the U.S., I know about their race and class issues only from the outside, and my American history is patchy. I don't have, I didn't inherit or learn, their whites vs. blacks dichotomy and prejudice. But unlike with Franzen's unpleasant yuppy characters, I could actually relate to Chabon's. For as heavy with detail as Telegraph Avenue is, there is so much more to intuit.None of these echoes prepared Titus for the truth of the greatness of Luther Stallings as revealed in patches by the movies themselves, even the movies that sucked ass. None readied him for the strange warmth that rained down onto his heart as he sat on the couch last night with the best and only friend he'd ever had, watching that balletic assassin in Night Man, with those righteous cars and that ridiculous bounty of fine women, a girl with a silver Afro. Luther Stallings, the idea of Luther Stallings, felt to Titus like no one and no place had ever felt: a point of origin. A legendary birthplace, lost in the mists of Shaolin or the far-off technojungles of Wakanda. There in the dark beside Julie, watching his grandfather, Titus got a sense of his own life's foundation in the time of myth and heroes. For the first time since coming to consciousness of himself, small and disregarded as a penny in a corner of the world's bottom drawer, Titus Joyner saw in his own story a shine of value, and in himself the components of glamour. [p.268]Another strong aspect of this novel, and one that will make it stand out from other, similar family stories, is the wealth of pop culture references and the strong sense of humour. It is awash, it is swimming in references, many of which I didn't get, being of the wrong generation, the wrong nationality, or simply from having different interests. But whenever I did get a reference, I was filled with such glee! It was almost like a game. The ones I didn't get barely impeded my progress - it would have been fun, and more satisfying, to understand the connotations behind "the A-side of the late Bob Benezra's copy of Kulu Sé Mama (Impulse!, 1967)" record, or be able to picture Captain EO as depicted on Archy's jumper, but you get the gist from the context and that's enough for it all to make sense.While the pop culture references make it lots of fun, as well as creating a character out of time and place, the humour saves the storylines and characters from becoming bleak and depressing, a la Franzen's epistle to worthless people (yeah, I really didn't like that book!). Reading Telegraph Avenue was rather like watching Saturday morning cartoons, in a way. Has that feel to it. Possibly aided by references to comic books and kung fu movies, and by the sense that this book is actually a movie, was written as a movie (it has recently been optioned as a film) - it would adapt extremely well to the screen, even without the vivid prose.The language is sophisticated, intelligent and witty, the sentences and structure of the narrative requiring your time and attention. The narrative meanders in and out of the scene, going off on tangents, taking the time to describe something in a more convoluted way than is strictly necessary It can take a while to get the hang of it, though it's very much worth it. And hear and there are such great lines as this, referring to Gibson Goode's zeppelin: "Archy regarded the big black visual pun on centuries of white male anatomical anxiety and felt it trying, like Kubrick's melismatic monolith, to twist the wiring of his brain." [p.218] Part III, in fact, is one gigantic 12-page-long sentence that - again giving it the feel of a movie - follows a talking parrot called Fifty-Eight as it crosses paths with the central characters, giving us a birds'-eye view, a montage of what's happening in a moment of time.The themes of race and class are not forced into the story, but are simply there, rising to the surface every now and then, as they become relevant. Telegraph Avenue offers a gentle social commentary on what it means to be black in Oakland, California, but more than that: race becomes not a separate issue, or even a defining one, but one often forced onto the characters by others, usually whites. One of the interesting things about reading this book is how long it takes you to realise, and figure out, which characters are black and which, white. And because you find yourself consciously pondering this, you realise, too, how important this has become, perhaps socially or culturally, something we've learned as we grow up: to look for markers, ways of identifying people, categorising them, in order to understand and even predict them. Race isn't an "issue" until we make it one; before that, it's as if the characters themselves weren't aware of a black/white dichotomy. And at first, Telegraph Avenue defies this. Later, when it's all straight in your head and seems obvious, it delves into it a bit more. Gwen, in particular, is a conduit for the themes of race and class.Gwen recalled a lecture of Julie's, delivered one night when he was ten or eleven, on the difference between terraforming and pantropy. When you changed a planet's atmosphere and environment to suit the needs of human physiology, that was terraforming; pantropy meant the alteration of the human form and mind to allow survival, even prosperity, on a harsh, unforgiving world. In the struggle to thrive and flourish on the planet America, some black people had opted for the epic tragedy, grand and bitter, of terraforming; others, like Gwen's parents and their parents and grandparents before them, had engaged in a long and selective program of pantropy. Black pantropy had produced, in Gwen and her brothers, a clutch of viable ad effortless success-breathers, able to soar and bank on thermals of opportunity and defy the killing gravity of the colony world. [p.287]It was hard for me to read the parts of Gwen and Aviva's trouble with the hospital board over their midwifery - it was hard to believe there are doctors who not only think such things about midwifery, but would say them too, and for much of the book I didn't understand why Gwen was being called - or why - and not the doctor. I didn't see that they'd done anything wrong at Lydia's home birth, and the doctor was the one who said insulting, derogatory things to them; Gwen just rose to the bait. (And I thought, too, that we give heavily pregnant women some slack for having less patience than usual.) It was confusing and uncomfortable, and I'm not sure how much of it is due to it being set in California. There's so much to talk about when talking about this book - I expect to read other reviews and feel like they read a different book, just based on the tropes that other readers will pick out for discussion. There's a lot I haven't touched on, either for space/time considerations or because I want to avoid spoilers. It comes down to this, for me: it's a book I'm extremely impressed by, and did enjoy reading, but I'm perhaps more impressed by its craftsmanship than in love with how it's written. I don't generally love clever writing, it has to be something special to not seem plain wanky, and there were times when I leaned towards thinking this was over-written. But the writing and the story, the characters, couldn't be separated - the writing makes the characters, the prose voice shapes them and reveals them, I couldn't imagine it written any other way. So I'm torn. Overall, though, I very much enjoyed it, and can see that you would glean even more from it on a second or third reading.My thanks to HarperCollins for a copy of this book.

Michael Chabon is an incredibly talented guy. He strikes a perfect balance of geeky and erudition that makes him an absolute pleasure to read, and while I enjoyed “Telegraph Avenue” a little less than “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”, it was still an amazing and nuanced novel, though it feels like a challenge to review and summarize.I found myself thinking a lot about 18th century novel structure reading this one: just like “Middlemarch”, this book is more of a kaleidoscopic view of a specific time and place than a simple single protagonist story. One could argue that Archy is the main character, as he is the linchpin around which all the other strands of the story revolve, and the other characters sometimes only have their connection to him in common. But this structure serves the purpose of highlighting the delicate strands of connection between people, who at first sight, may have nothing in common at all. Archy runs a record store with his friend Nat. With the inexorable crawl of gentrification, their business is now hanging on by a thread. His wife Gwen, and Nat’s wife Aviva, are midwives and business partners. Gwen is expecting their first child and dealing with the fallout of a home-birth that could have easily ended in tragedy. Nat and Aviva’s son Julie is experiencing the pangs of first love in the weirdest possible way. Archy’s father is trying to come and reclaim what he feels is his due from a local businessman and city counsellor. A wealthy athlete is making plans to install a huge media store that would definitely put Archy out of business.The way a small neighborhood can be rattled by events is captured beautifully with this whirlwind of a story. Chabon’s prose gives this colorful tapestry an incredible texture: I often had to pause in my reading to just take a second and appreciate the beauty of the language, which is not something I do half as often as I wished with books written this century. I also found myself often wondering which experiences Chabon drew inspiration from to put such layered, endearing and infuriating characters and their inner struggles on the page. At no time did I ever really feel like he was crossing lines or being inappropriate in his depiction of lives that must undoubtably be so different from his own.When I wrote at the beginning of this review that I preferred “Kavalier & Clay”, it has much more do to with the structure of the two books than their objective quality. “K&C” is very tightly plotted and moves along at a great rhythm, as where “Telegraph Avenue” is more meandering, and occasionally flounders and drags a bit. It comes together as it should, and I found the ending both satisfying and puzzling at the same time – which takes skill! I think that if it had been just a bit more focused, I would have loved it just as much.A beautiful novel about fatherhood, gentrification, choices. Very recommended!

Telegraph Avenue is a major commercial thoroughfare in a minor California city. It is also the setting of Michael Chabon's brilliant slice in the life of Archie, the half-owner of a used record store, struggling with impending fatherhood, and Gwen, his wife, a fast-talking, hormonally-challenged midwife, who is determined to have her baby with him, or without him, and to salvage her career after an unfortunate encounter with a smug physician. Two of the many people who complicate their struggles are Archie's estranged father, a minor film star from the 1970's and a recovering addict, clamoring for forgiveness, and Archie's illegitimate teenage son, Titus, desperate for a Dad, even one as ambivalent as Archie. Chabon takes on a lot in this sprawling celebration of life in an American city in the throes of reinvention. He conjures up unforgettable, lyrical descriptions of a time and place and offers a template for renewal-both urban and personal- which factors in both individual and collective responsibility. The book cover calls it an intimate epic, bursting with joy and humor, that is as profound as it is magical. I agree.

So love digging into this contemporary, real world, adult Chabon. THIS is the Chabon I love, the book I'd been waiting for. Contemporary(ish) Oakland, two middle-aged guys with a gradually dying record store, two midwives in the real world, a universe where the "old days" keep coming back at you--lots of gorgeous, crap-Seventies overtones here--and man can he write. You laugh out loud just because the mots are so bon, the specificity of description so brilliantly exact, everything from the intricate interactions of decades-long friends to the quality of beat-up-ness of a '70s muscle car--"...and the hood was held shut by a frayed knot of nylon rope looped through the grille, several vanes of which had fallen out, leaving the unfortunate car with a gap-toothed and goofy Leon Spinks grin." That kind of writing. I don't mind the fanboy aspects of this, because they are so deeply couched in the poignant-pathetic-virtuous-realworld context of his Brokeland, the area right between Berkeley and Oakland and the name of the record store... these guys have wives and kids and lives and unslick parents, the texture of reality. I am thrilled beyond thrilled--love as ever his comic eye, a gentle one and yet too keen not to see the dark side, clear on the baddies and the forces against which the good must struggle.

Chabon has a gift for taking things that are mass market, pulp, and pop culture and spinning them into credible literary gold. I love him for this. In Telegraph Avenue, he tackles old R&B and jazz vinyl, blacksploitation films, and Kung Fu thrillers. He also captures a corner of Berkley that Chabon and his wife have lived in for years. It’s all in the service of a story about fathers and son – how father succeed, how they fail, and how sons carve their own paths because of or in spite of their own fathers.That’s the part that makes Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue endearing. Unfortunately, it also robs it of a bit of the whimsy and creativity Chabon’s other works possess in spades. Telegraph Avenue is still an engaging, heartfelt book; it’s just not as fantastic. It’s still a totally worthy read, and I can understand why others have it on their Top 2012 Books lists.That being said, Telegraph Avenue does get off to a slow, confusing start. There’s a 70s-famous Kung Fu actor – a black father with a criminal record, drug issues, and abandonment problems – he’s trying to restart his career. Then there’s his son – the main protagonist – who, with his best friend, is trying to keep their record store afloat as a famous football player makes a move to cut their business out from under them. The partner, the men’s wives – both midwives, the men’s two boys (one who’s realizing he’s gay), the football player, local jazz musicians, and even Obama make appearances.It all comes together eventually. When Archy – the record store owner – takes over the story and becomes its center, we see a flawed man on the verge of ruining his marriage. He has a son from a long-ago affair he’s all but forgotten about. His wife is also expecting a baby. Archy, though, still wants to be young, sow his wild oats, feel sexy, get in touch with the jazz music he loves so well – in short, be anything but a staid and stable husband and father.There has been no little discussion about Chabon, a Caucasian, creating and speaking through Archy, a black protagonist. Most of the somewhat-tense conversation has centered around the hip, jazz-infused language that Chabon has Archy and a lot of his friends use. Most of the time, it worked for me, though there were a few moments when Chabon’s creation got comically awkward; I felt Chabon might be trying to hard and using too many adjectives. Perhaps, though, this was Chabon’s risk in this book – creating a semi-ridiculous, “hip” black language. However, next to the wild risks of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or even The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Telegraph Avenue does seem less thrilling and almost silly.Smaller feats - like the chapter that is all one sentence - are still awesome. The struggle that the wives go through as midwives, the politics, and the red tape, are also fun to read. The kids are well drawn, too.Telegraph Avenue's crux – the updating of the 1950s view of fatherhood - is also cool and vital. Chabon knows to balance the shifting image of “dad” against the changing times. Vinyl and jazz are from bygone eras; so is the Kung Fu movie that Archy’s Lothario-leech dad was famous for. Archy’s partner’s son is coming out of the closet; that’s a newer experience for modern fathers. Archy’s own son both needs his dad and wants to assert his independence.In the end, Telegraph Avenue is still a beautiful and often funny novel, even when it misses those flights of fancy or literary experimentation that Chabon has practiced in other novels. At its heart, we can sense that Chabon himself has been on a soul searching about his own role as a father. Also ingrained is a sense of how to entertain readers. Finally, we also sense Chabon’s love of vinyl music and the community of Berkley that he captures. It adds certain warmth to Telegraph Avenue that replaces some of the previous whimsy and risk-taking I love in Chabon.

A good novel digs a hole in you and fills it with its own loam, an invasive kudzu strangling some delicate, native species of scrub. A great novel works the other way around—its beautiful, beaming stamen bursts forth, normally only growing on the impossible cliffs of some tropical island and yet somehow here it is anyway, cutting through your mind's backyard bougainvillea to illuminate, elucidate, aspirate.Telegraph Ave is, naturally, in the latter category. Its drama is of a familiar, familial sort: the foibles of fuckup fathers and their shiftless sons. The central patres familias, Nat (obsessive, bipolar, Jewish) and Archy (listless, shirkful, black), are top-notch Chabon men: there are echoes, ripples of Sammy Clay, Joe Kavalier and Meyer Landsman, but the pool of aether has calmed down. Telegraph Ave does not deal in immense, international crises or awful, blood-curdling murders but instead the quiet inner world of the family where nonetheless Panzer tanks do rumble quietly across the filial battlefield albeit slowly, thirty years slow in Archy's case.If the novel has a fault it is the inscrutability of the leading ladies, both wifed to the leading men. Passages involving Archy, Nat, and their sons all have a lived-in, inside-out feeling, like the ending of Being John Malkovitch—we're on the inside looking out. We don't quite penetrate Aviva and Gwen's shells, their secret tunnels on floor 7½ boarded up. (I greatly dislike novel-as-analysis but offer that Aviva, Nat's wife, feels awfully, uncomfortably close the passages in Manhood for Amateurs where Chabon describes his own wife.)Whatever the reason for the above shortcoming, it ultimately does not harm the book, for although Chabon does show, glimmering from the depths like the Rhinemaiden's gold at the bottom of the river, enough talent for writing women that I think he could easily forge a novel centered around one, no help from poor Mime required, Telegraph Ave is, like his last essay collection, an adjudication of Manhood and Men and Fathers and Sons and Uncles and (Male) Cousins. In fact, a first-order, ultimately unworthy reduction of the novel would be: Manhood for Amateurs in novel form.Telegraph Ave is more though than just a da capo. To my eye, Chabon has, between these ugly, silver-papered cardboard covers (although the red dust jacket is quite attractive), developed significantly as a prose stylist, really and truly letting it rip at times. The novel, written with the near-and-dear-to-my-heart Scrivener, is divided into five broad parts, perhaps tracks on the most epic A-side never committed to wax. (Thankfully the novel ends with enough of a preview of the B-side to satisfy our frontal cortex's hunger for object permanence.) Part III, A Bird of Wide Experience, is a single slick sentence that unfolds over twelve pages like a Tony Scott montage as we follow a particular parrot across the North Oakland landscape that Chabon, ever the map maker, has drawn for us and survey the momentary happenings of the novel's characters. Simply put: it's a cool, fun device that doesn't overstay its welcome.Throughout the book, Chabon's themes and language are tighter than ever before, slowing the normally Nat Jaffe–level thundering of his mental jumpcutting to a slower, more contemplative pace which gives his metaphors enough room to put down roots and bind the novel together on their superstructure. A grab bag of the preceding: so-called soul, funk and jazz records, circa '68–'78; all things cetaceous, with a double word score when combined with anything parturient; a veritable field guide to East Bay horticulture; the canon of film atop which Quentin Tarantino has built his career; careful attention to the vocabulary of both male and female fashion.In toto Chabon has wrought his best, most cinematic, most down-to-earth novel yet. As he eases into (what we can only hope is) his middle period, in his mid-to-late-40s, we see a novelist in touch with both himself and his characters and also pulling off the hardest trick in the figurative book: translating from one's own set of experiences to other, more alien lands, blasting off into the imagination like Julius Jaffe—call it bootstrapping, call it mapping, call it damn good writing. Whatever the rest of the balance sheet of Telegraph Ave says, Chabon remains on the plus side of the ledger by succeeding at corralling orneriest steer to roam the American mundus: race.I'm going to just lay it out, no tiptoeing from this here white boy: Chabon manages to write convincingly and sensitively about the subject of race and racism from the perspective of both white and black characters. Are some things essentialized, too on-the-nose? Yes, on both sides of the titular avenue that divides tofu-white Berkeley from Bump City. But, my god, this is a novel. Such complaints (see Slate's review for a survey) ring in my ears like schoolyard complaints about the "disturbing" lack of bathroom usage in Star Trek.A small example of Chabon at work that should silence the haters: he nails the cadences and forms of a bouquet of black pidgins, creoles and patois without using ugly, awkward devices like phonetics, contractions or onomatopoeiae that serve only to lower their speakers to Morlockian illiterates, especially when contrasted with this microrant's subjunctive white speakers who monologue in perfect Standard Written English. In Telegraph Ave you see no more apostrophes or slang when black characters speak than when white characters do, and yet Chabon's black characters still manage to sound black, each in their own individual, characteristic way.So pull off your gardener's gloves and wipe the sweat off your brow. You've trimmed back the kudzu enough. Telegraph Ave needs only sunlight, water and the fertile soil of your open mind to flourish.

I could detect the alluring smell of Flint's Ribs wafting up from this book that captures the atmosphere of Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, where I lived in the early 1980's, my early twenties. Junior Wells and buddy Guy playing at the Omni, local blues at Eli's Milie High club. Oakland is still a happening place to be, still in mid-flourish while S.F. is getting so expensive its culture is threatened. Chabon captures small moments with tender clarity. His characters are diverse in type and in temperament and ring true because while he stretches widely in his characters, he knows how deep to go. From 80 year old Chinese Kung Fu female master to '70's stone fox chick to gay teen he gets each character and we know them by the end of the book. Gwen and Aviva own this book just as much as their husbands. He takes chances as a writer not only in the variety of characters he renders but in style. Section III is one long sentence that goes for 10 pages and it works! By this time you know the characters so well you are right there with him. That section reminded me of William Gaddis' JR. This novel takes place mostly in 2004 but it is all about links and the 1970's are never too far below the surface. Shared history links people together and so does music. The music itself is a living series of chain links that the astute listener like our protagonists Archy and Nat can articulate. Behavior too is recurring, and, like music, it can and must strive for its own identity but they are both boats against the current. This is the kind of book whose greatness lies in the fact that honors real lives, not the rich and famous but the true heroes, midwives who perform an often belittled service, musicians who never sold out, record store owners who are keepers of the flame. "What else am I fit for, you know? The ice melts, where do you put the penguin?" So, this is the kind of book unlikely to be made into a movie, but could I suggest Terrence Howard as Archy and Adam Goldberg as Nat Jaffe? He was in the Jewish blaxploitation film the Hebrew Hammer so...

Addendum from 2020 -- this neighborhood has changed significantly in the past 8 years, gaining a new identity as epicenter for hipsters. Thus, the book Telegraph Avenue can be regarded as a work of historical fiction even if the requisite 50 years have not passed.For the record, I am a resident of Temescal, have lived for the past 17 years on the Oakland side of the Brokeland Divide. At a recent appearance, Chabon said he was writing for his neighborhood, including Oakland although he lives on the Berkeley side. Unlike his recent work, Telegraph Avenue, not rooted in fantasy or dystopia, is a magnificent example of storytelling filled with well defined intriguing characters, people I see every day and who have had life breathed into them due to the puckish wit and generosity of spirit of Michael Chabon. He is a keen observer, a sponge, who fills his pages with detail that only a writer possessing such keen observation can accomplish. I asked at an appearance whether he felt "vaguely malevolent" walking around the neighborhood as he had strolling Sitka when preparing Yiddish Policeman's Union (his words), and he said it was just the opposite. So that a reader can recognize when a character reaches into his glove compartment and finds a spork from Nik's Chaat. And we do, yes, we do. All that being said, I wonder if people not living here will be as intrigued as local readers. They well should be. He firmly plants his feet in the East Bay and seldom refers to the more glamorous city at the Western terminus of the Oakland Bay Bridge. He has also matured as a writer which some fans may find disconcerting, in that fun as his latter work was to read, it is wonderful to know that he is willing to move on into other territory.

Video-review: https://youtu.be/84xYrbZvKsQ#7 in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIWkw...Three words: Chabon goes late-Pynchon.After trans-continental tales of triumph and revenge, swashbuckling stories of oriental adventurers and compelling narratives of an impossible Jewish Alaska, Micheal Chabon writes an urban novel about the death of the twentieth century. The book compensate its somewhat sombre theme with an exuberant style that shows Chabon at his best: when people in this book get up and have a glass of water, old Michael tells it through three metaphors, a simile, and a reference to obscure B-movies of the 70s.The book features the least lovable MC in the whole of Chabon's productions, and it's not like his other MCs are exactly Captain America; that might be sort of a turn-off at first. It's still Chabon, and he's still quite the best.