The novel is on its surest footing when it treats race with a light hand, less the novel's subject than its setting - a constant but matter-of-fact backdrop for the action. Archy has not exactly been a model husband himself, and the fact that his wife is expecting a baby any day makes him the novel's epicenter.īut there are other cracks to explore: brewing trouble for Nat and Archy's wives, who run a midwife business called Birth Partners a budding romance between Archy's and Nat's teenage sons, Titus and Julie the grudge-driven politics between Oakland power brokers even a feint at suspense involving Luther, an old shooting and the Black Panther Party. Archy is visited both by the teenage son he didn't know he had and the father who abandoned him, a former kung fu blaxploitation star named Luther. Much of this novelistic terrain involves fathers and sons. This is really more frame than plot the story unfolds like a topographical map, revealing the fissures that branch out from the two men and their changing neighborhood - "the ragged fault line where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted." "Telegraph Avenue" revolves around best friends and bandmates Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, whose aptly named Brokeland Records store is threatened with extinction when a retired NFL superstar named Gibson Goode (the fifth-richest black man in the United States) announces plans to open a Dogpile "Thang" superstore nearby. "What kind of heaven is that," a character muses early on, while perusing a dead man's album collection, "you can't have your records?" In fact, the novel is so musical, in Chabon's riff-writing and repeated album citations, it ought to come with a soundtrack (cue Curtis Mayfield, Charles Kynard and Minnie Riperton). And, as with much of Chabon's work, "Telegraph Avenue" is in thrall - in mad, crazy love - with its own cultural influences, in this case, kung fu, blaxploitation films and that currency of cool, vinyl, primarily 1970s soul and jazz.
Exuberantly written, generously peopled, its sentences go off like a summer fireworks show, in strings of bursting metaphor. "Telegraph Avenue" might best be described as Chabonesque.
What follows is an expansive strip-stroll through family, funk and the flow of neighborhood, but it's the prose that soars in this Joycean tour of Oakland's Temescal borderland, circa 2004.Īctually, forget Joycean or Bellovian or any other authorial allusion.
Michael Chabon's "Telegraph Avenue" begins with a small, hopeful vision - "A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike."
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