Telegraph is a signal success
Fatherhood is at the root of Chabon’s sprawling new novel
A reviewer’s best method for determining the anticipation level of a new release is to note the condition of the galley when it arrives in the mail. My copy of Telegraph Avenue came coffee-stained, spine-broken and pulpy — as though it had been flogged by a particularly nasty barista. This means that any number of publicists, editors, mailroom clerks — people who handle a new title — couldn’t resist the allure of this object entrusted in their care.
And in the case of Michael Chabon’s playful buffet of a novel, this anticipation is more than justified.
The subject is Telegraph Avenue, a real-world artery that connects the unlikely East Bay neighbours of Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., a zone where the whitest of urban white Bohemia butts up against a predominantly black workingclass enclave.
The plot tracks Nat Jaffe and Archy Stallings, friends and proprietors of Brokeland Records, a dwindling record store catering to audiophiles and rare vinyl enthusiasts, a cultural garrison much like the store in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, where, as Chabon puts it, “common sorrow could be drowned in common passion.”
When word comes that a rival megastore is moving nearby, financed by wealthy former NFL MVP Gibson “G Bad” Goode, the two set about saving the store and preserving their livelihood. Here Chabon gleefully subverts the expected race and class narrative: the big bad intruder is an African-American mogul, who is arguably going to benefit the neighbourhood, if only Nat and Archy can let go of their nostalgia and accept it.
Woven into this narrative are the travails of Gwen and Aviva, Archy and Nat’s wives, respectively, who share a midwifery practice. When faced with a troublesome birth that necessitates physician intervention, Gwen, an AfricanAmerican woman who is also herself late-term pregnant, has a heated exchange with a racist doctor that culminates with her blowing her stack, threatening their practice at the hospital.
Gwen and Aviva’s scenes are expertly told, constituting perhaps the most searing portrayal of contemporary midwifery and birth that I’ve yet read. Chabon also finds an interesting resonance between the medical establishment’s attempts to marginalize and discredit midwives, and American society’s general treatment of blacks.
Other plot elements include the return of both Archy’s estranged son, Titus, and his father Luther, a former blaxploitation/kung-fu movie star who skipped town years before after a botched hit ordered by Huey Newton on a drug dealer named Popcorn Hughes that serves as the mysterious backstory.
In another arc, Titus befriends Nat’s son Julie, and the two adolescents strike up a charming relationship founded on mutual nerd-dom and cultural obsession, as Titus circles Archy with alternating rage and a need to connect with his father.
At its core, this is a novel about fatherhood — both the over-obsessed and neglectful — and one can’t help but note similarities with the work of another great American culture-mulcher: Jonathan Lethem, and his coming-of-age in Brooklyn novel The Fortress of Solitude.
But Chabon’s book is in no way derivative — more like the West Coast Gangsta to Lethem’s East Coast Backpack Rap.
As he did in the Pulitzer Prize-snaring The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon expertly crossbreeds high and low culture, while also somehow dressing and disinfecting a deep cultural wound in the process. (Last time: comic book culture and Jews. This time: funk music/ blaxploitation films and African Americans.)
But Telegraph Avenue is not without its potholes. The superficial fixation on Quentin Tarantino’s films, another high and low culture synthesizer, at times seems unrealized and shoddy. And then there is that cringe-inducing cameo by none other than Barack Obama: “Those guys are pretty funky,” observes the rising Senator from Illinois in a scene that already feels sentimental for all that change that has yet to materialize.
Most troublesome, however, is this story’s awkwardness in the year it is set — I had to remind myself repeatedly that this was, for the most part, 2004. Perhaps this is because of a general philosophy of nostalgia expressed by many characters.
However, in light of the sheer breadth of Telegraph Avenue, these concerns are like chiding a sprinter for his or her dropped hundredths of seconds. The truth is that Michael Chabon writes the hell out of every single square inch of this book, and for that reason alone it’s worth picking up.