Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

Written by Michael Chabon

Narrated by Clarke Peters

New York Times Bestseller

“A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage. . . Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time."" — Benjamin Percy, Esquire

New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union); to discover The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us to Telegraph Avenue in a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. In Telegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop culture—Kung Fu, ’70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music—and delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories.

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.

When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complications to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Sep 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062207784

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, among many others. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

Reviews for Telegraph Avenue

[melissarochelle_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Sept 6-12, 2012 I'm sorry to abandon you after 93 pages, but I just can't focus on your really vague yet very specific character descriptions or the fact that I'm really never sure if we've just switched to a new setting, a new time period, or a new POV. I'll try you again later...when I'm not getting married in a month.

[meredk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book—what a roller-coaster ride! Chabon absolutely nails the Berkeley/Oakland culture, and does it with great wit and terrific writing. The characters—major and minor—are fully realized, and the plot, although a bit over the top in terms of complexity, is engaging. But it's the writing that really did it for me, those soaring, crazy riffs. For example, when one of the characters is searching for containers to transport a dinner he's just made for someone: "Like a dog in a cartoon, forepaws a turbine blur as he hunted up a buried bone in a churn of dirt, Nat excavated the cabinets and ransacked the drawers looking for usable serving containers and suitable platters. Piling up behind him mountains of mateless lids and lidless bottoms, rattling cake pans and pie plates. Souvenirs of ancient Tupperware parties, ice cube trays, thermos cups with no thermoses, Popsicle molds with no sticks, roasting racks, bamboo skewers, a kitchen scale."

[jldarden · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Have read a few of Chabon's and enjoyed them. This one not as much. There might have been too many characters and disparate threads. Could be I was a little busy during this listen and got distracted. I enjoyed his earlier works more I think. Lots of nice music references in this though!

[shellys_70 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've now read three of Chabon's novels and each has its own style. This one, revolving around a used record store in 2004, is densely written, full of descriptive metaphors and similes that seem to be an attempt to create an underlying soundtrack for the story. It took me a few scenes to get into the rhythm of the prose, but once I did, this became a compulsive read. The story covers race, class, culture, families (fathers and sons, wives and husbands), sins of the past, and trying to hold on to a dream when perhaps a new dream is needed. I came to really care about these characters, the two men who own Brokeland Records and their wives who are partners as midwives, as well as their sons, plus the group of regulars who spend time sifting through Brokeland's stock while hanging out, catching up. A threat of a megastore coming that could put Brokeland out of business sets the story in motion. I was not surprised to read that Chabon created Brokeland and its denizens for an aborted TV show; I was envisioning many of the scenes playing out in front of me.

[copyedit52 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I abandoned this book after about eighty pages, when Chabon's glib, too-clever-by-half narration got to be too much. I was hoping for an effort like his enjoyably riotous Yiddish Policemen's Union, but Telegraph Avenue--a locale I knew well as a Temescal mail carrier back in the day--was more like his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which I also gave up on in disgust.

[valentiner41 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ein Roman zum Niederknien. Mein Lieblingsbuch. Ein Roman, der zu Beginn des digitalen Zeitalters spielt, in Oakland, der schwarz geprägten Stadt in der kalifornischen Bay Area. Das Analoge überlebt hier nur mehr in kultigen Biosphärenreservaten. Herrlich die Beschreibung des Plattenladens von Nat Jaffe (weiß) und Archy Stallings (schwarz) in ihrer Kirche des Venyls, einer symbolpolitisch wahren Festung!

[amuskopf-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It had its moment but was ultimately bogged down with verbiage and extraneous detail. Too bad.

[abbeyhar · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

More like 3.5 stars. Chabon certainly has a wonderful and evocative way with words, and I found many of the characters nicely fleshed out (especially the two teenagers Julie and Titus.) others I felt were only partially formed, and at times the interplay between them could border on false. Also, the end was too pat. ALSO I dislike books with an "everything is connected and nothing is coincidence" theme which this teetered dangerously close to at times . To sum up: Not my favorite of his, but I didn't hate it.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“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.” “The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.” Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are longtime friends and they run a funky little record shop called Brokeland Records. It is located on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. Archy is thirty-six and expecting his first child. A big-shot, businessman wants to buy out their store and open a megastore. It is tempting, since the store is a fading relic and they struggle to survive but there are plenty of conflicting forces, keeping them from pulling the trigger.This novel is a mosiac of pop culture, filled with music references, mostly classic jazz and soul, films from the 70s, Blaxploitation and Bruce Lee movies. A Tarantino tapestry, told in smart, fast-paced prose, that Chabon makes looks so smooth and easy. The characters are vivid and memorable. A nice companion piece to High Fidelity and it is refreshing to see African Americans characters, front and center.

[kerns222 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Slogging, dragging through Chabon's Oakland. Somehow Yiddish in Alaska or even comic book blurbs in New York were easier going. Welll I ran out of steam about two hundred pages in and the library wanted it back. I am cheating and moving it over to read (past tense).

[katesherrod · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Telegraph Avenue is almost completely not what I expected Michael Chabon's latest novel to be. But isn't that always the case, with Chabon? He goes from imagining the biographies of a pair of golden age comics creators to swashbuckling medieval Jews-with-swords to crime/noir in an alternate history Alaska to a World War II era Sherlock Holmes story. And those are just the ones I have personally read and loved. A lot.

Telegraph Avenue has plenty to offer those of us who love Chabon for his nuanced and staggeringly deep appreciation of pop culture, past and present (this time he's picking on vinyl -- the location at the heart of the story is a used record shop specializing in rare and collectible LPs, 78s and 45s -- and blaxploitation kung-fu movies) and for his lovely prose style, but, as usual, these are merely ornamental, and there is even more going on around these grace notes than usual.

The aforementioned record shop is of the sort I always wish existed somewhere near me, preferably in walking distance: a "church of vinyl" that is also a neighborhood hangout for a diverse collection of musicians and music lovers. The co-owners, a white Jewish appreciator named Nat and a black musician named Archy, have wives who are also in business together, as midwives, and Archy's wife Gwen is expecting their first child (well, at least, their first child together. Ahem). Which is to say that family life and parenthood are themes in Telegraph Avenue that are way more compelling and important than a bunch of vinyl nerds sounding off at Brokeland Records, or the threat posed to the store by the looming possibility of an NFL star's deep-pocketed one-stop pop culture megastore just down the street. Way more.

"There was nothing a man couldn't do with three thousand doillars and a suitcase full of canned tuna fish and pregnancy brassieres."

Generations of Archy's family are complicating his life: an estranged father, Luther, who made a splash as a kung-fu actor in a series of blaxploitation hits in the 70s and then disappeared with his leggy co-star into the standard sordid-ness of drug addiction and petty crime but never gave up on the idea of making another sequel to his breakout film -- and whom now someone very much wants to track down and probably not for a good reason -- the bump in Gwen's stomach, and a teenaged-son, Titus, from a teenaged hook-up who has suddenly surfaced in Archy's life, about whom Archy never got around to telling his wife... Oh, and then there's Nat's son, Julius, who has a crush on Titus... Somehow none of this ever spins into melodrama, and that somehow is Michael Chabon, a prose poet of love and forgiveness and failure if ever there was one. Every single one of these characters has a deeply, richly imagined inner life, full of longing and aspiration and bitterness and regret. And moments of sheer transcendence are doled out to them, too:

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.

And that's just while they're watching TV, Titus and Julius indulging their curiosity with a round of films starring Titus' grandfather, quite possibly the Toughest Black Man in America of his day. Along the way we get a cameo from none other than Barack Obama, a long discourse on how the Pullman porter of yesteryear was the secret vector of black culture nationwide and the bedrock of what later became the black middle class of America, a flight over the streets and rooftops of Oakland in the company of a recently freed African Gray parrot; shards of possibility, of potential, some fulfilled and some not, all expertly evoked.

Some readers may dislike the picaresque meandering of the plot: this is by no means any kind of potboiler or thriller, whatever its dy-no-mite components. It's a character-driven story, and most of the characters are kind of losers, or suspect they are (Archy, for instance, considers himself a ponderer in a world of snap deciders: "A beautiful phrase to the ponderer, the day after tomorrow. The address of utopia itself."), and losers of this kind do not, as a rule, run around saving the world, solving problems, shooting bad guys and blowing stuff up. That only happens in Grandaddy Stallings' movies. Instead we are treated to a lot of scenes, scenes in which the inanimate objects in their obsessively cataloged order or strewn and neglected disarray say almost as much about Archy and Nat and Gwen and Aviva (Nat's wife and Gwen's boss) and Titus and Julius as they do themselves, in their sad, weirdly graceful way.

So no, Telegraph Avenue wasn't really at all what I expected, except in that I expected it would be great, which it absolutely was.

[altheaann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had high expectations for this book, based on the four other books by Chabon that I've read. Unfortunately, while there are some good things here, I didn't think this was as good as any of the others.

I'll admit that some of my lack of enthusiasm may stem from my lack of appreciation for jazz - and this is a book largely about jazz enthusiasts. However, on second thought, I absolutely loved Esi Edugyan's 'Half-Blood Blues' which is all about jazz and jazz musicians, so maybe I'll take that back.

The main problem is the pacing. The first half of the book is slow, slow, slow, and none of the minor, petty domestic dramas of the characters' lives dragged me in at all.

Archy and Nat are best friends and co-owners of an old-timey jazz record store in Oakland. Unfortunately, their flagging business is threatened by the proposed opening of a hip-hop mega-mall in their neighborhood. They and their friends and neighbors also have a remarkable amount of mostly sad and pathetic personal drama to deal with.

As I said, the first half focuses on showing the reader a very quotidian 'slice-of-life' view of this Oakland neighborhood. The second half picks up a bit, as things get a little more crazy, and we find out more about over-the-hill blaxploitation kung-fu star Luther Stallings' far-fetched plans for a comeback, and a hip-hop mogul's promotional blimp comes into play...

There's a lot here,too... fandom, friendship, what it means to be a father, the nature of loyalty, race relations, the importance of community... but overall, it's still only balancing out at 3 stars, for me.

[johnwbeha · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful characters, good plotting, extravagant writing (occasionally too much so) are all combined by Michael Chabon is this very twenty first century novel. It has a lot to say about relationships; between men and women, within families and between the races in Oakland, California. I am always a sucker for books s.et around music shops, even if this one specialises in music at the outer ranges of my tastes. It has taken me a long time to get around to reading this, despite enjoying Chabon's other books but I am really glad I finally did.

[caryn0rose · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was dense and impenetrable but I loved pretty much every minute of it. What should have been Chabon's easiest book for me to get through, given the subject matter, somehow became the hardest for me, given the subject matter. I loved most of it, some of the characters and scenes drove me crazy -- the set up with 58, only to leave us with that highly unsatisfying resolution didn't make sense to me, I didn't like the blimp and felt like another device would have been just as significant - but I still relished every word I read and was sorry when it was over.

[cynthiabelgum · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read many of Michael Chabon's books and I enjoy the way he thinks and writes. This book, however, was so full of digressionary material that the fairly simple story was almost lost in the interstices of descriptive verbiage. I persevered and enjoyed the book and would recommend it.

[kbullfrog · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A book with story potential, I chose it because it was about a local city i love, Oakland, about jazz musicians, and about a strong women midwife, but the delivery came across flat (pun intended?) and I really didn't feel that emotionally connected to the characters. It didn't have that sparkle i wanted. The best parts were in the sub-plot of Archy's wife Gwen, a practicing mid-wife, she herself currently pregnant, struggling with the infidelity her carousing husband's present and past keep blindsiding her with. This story seemed more tangible and interesting than Archy's haze of a failing store and friendship, a birth and death, and a teenage son surfacing from Archy's not-long-ago past.There are gems throughout the text though, and not an un-enjoyed read. I would like to read more of Chabon's oeuvre.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Archy and Nat own a music store in Oakland, specializing in old and rare vinyl recordings of jazz, funk, and soul. It's difficult to keep such an enterprise afloat, though, especially when a big, flashy multi-media megastore competitor is about to move into the neighborhood. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, midwives who attend to home births, also face some of the same small-and-traditional vs. big-and-wealthy conflict themselves after Gwen loses her cool at a disapproving doctor. Meanwhile, some people and events from the past raise their heads unexpectedly, and, well, a bunch of other stuff happens. Honestly, though, plot isn't the attraction here. Which is just as well, as it meanders around a lot and then just sort of peters out, possibly because it's reached the point where Chabon felt like he had enough pages and might as well wrap it up. But that is absolutely fine and does not make the book one whit less enjoyable. Because, holy crap, when he puts his mind to it, Chabon can write. Sentence after sentence proves to be an utter joy to read: smart and fresh and insightful, sometimes moving and sometimes fun. Also, packed with references to everything from science to comic books to 80s kitsch to kung fu movies to the entire complex history of African-American music. In fact, I'd say that at heart this novel is very much a celebration of culture. All kinds of culture: black and white, high and low, serious and silly and everything in-between, all stirred together into one great big glorious stew. The allusions to things I'm familiar with were all aptly and delightfully used, and the ones to things I wasn't familiar with, mostly musical things, made me feel as if I somehow were familiar with them. I'm not quite sure how Chabon manages that, but my hat is off to him for it.

[markus.bauer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Geschichte von zwei Freunden und deren Partnerinnen, Dreh- und Angelpunkt ist der Plattenladen, welche die beiden an der Telegraph Avenue betreiben. Die Geschichte ist komplex, spannend und anschaulich geschrieben. Soul, Jazz und Funk, Black Culture und Blaxploitation, Gentrifikation des Quartiers und die verschiedenen Intressenvertreter, Alternativmedizin, das Zusammenleben von Schwarzen und Weissen, Vinylkultur.

[figre · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Michael Chabon is a writer who deals in the details of life. His writing is full of characters with character – detailed individuals who he successfully brings to life for the reader. This book continues to showcase his ability. Further, it shows how well he handles characters who might fall too easily into cliché. In this story we have hippies and musicians and the African-American culture and Northern California culture and big businessmen and small businessmen and many others who - again, handled skillessly – might quickly descend into caricatures with whom the reader would have no investment.Michael Chabon is also a writer who can take small themes and make them big. And he can take big themes and make them apply to the individual in a private manner. What could be bigger than the intimate story of a big box entertainment store intruding into a tightly knit small community, threatening the existence of some of the local, home-grown establishments? What could be more private than learning the truth about one's father? What could be more intimate than the introspection to determine if one wants to continue one's life in the trajectory it has taken? What could be more fundamental than trying to define the soul of a community?And Michael Chabon is a writer who takes all these ingredients and makes entertaining stories. All of the above is evident in Telegraph Avenue. It is the story of Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, owners of Brokeland Records – a vinyl record store. It is also the story of their wives – Gwen and Aviva – who are midwives. The midwifery business faces unique challenges – in this instance primarily focused on maintaining their status in the medical community. Brokeland Records has an even bigger problem - a Dogpile entertainment store is coming and it will effectively destroy Brokeland Records. This is the framework upon which the lives of these and many other characters move forward. We've got a blimp, we've got a Blaxploitation Kung Fu star, we've got a master of the Hammond B3 organ, we've got a lot of fun, strange stuff. And the story of Dogpile coming in is simply the inflection point that makes these characters begin to learn (or not learn) more about themselves. All well and good. All the best we have come to expect of Chabon. All engrossing and entertaining and encapturing. But there was one stumbling block; there are some characters (important characters) with character flaws that just can't be forgiven. One or two of the important characters – the pivotal characters – are just not likable.Now I'm not the kind that has to have perfect people. I can really like the type that are despicable. I can truly enjoy the flawed. But sometimes there are character traits/flaws I cannot get past – I cannot accept as "Well, they are just a lovable person and I will forgive them." (Not related to this book, but it is why I disliked Zorba the Greek.)And that happens here – character flaw I could not get past. And those flaws kept me from cozening up to the characters as much as I needed to. (What do I mean? One example – cheating on your pregnant wife.)This does not destroy the book, but it does knock it down a peg or two. I enjoyed the book, I enjoyed a number or the characters, and I was glad to be along for the ride. But I took the ride with one eye out wondering if I would need an escape.

[m2snick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How could I not love this book? For the past twenty years I have lived a half block off Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. With this book Michael Chabon makes my world a colorful and vital place to live (which it truly is). It is a perceptive portrayal of life in a 21st-century urban American neighborhood full of cultural misunderstandings and larger than life personalities. It is a moving story about class and race, parenting, marriage, and friendship written with warmth and humor and enthusiasm. Telegraph Avenue is a mesmerizing read and I highly recommend it. (Oh, by the way, there is one twelve page sentence!)

[muddyboy · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

There are two principle problems with this book. First, it moves along at an absolute snail's pace. Second, the thoughts and observations of the main characters are more like an Ivy League educated Caucasian than an inner city dweller living in Oakland, California. For instance, upon looking at grass in a yard a lady observes that it looks like "pampas grass". Another time when watching a movie a character compares a technique to an old obscure Alfred Hitchcock belief. There are hundreds of things that wouldn't match up to the way people think in my neighborhood either. It was all writer talk and totally incongruent with the characters being portrayed. I liked Chabon's earlier award winning book but this one does not float my boat.

[jwarren42 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There are several long passages where Chabon gets so carried away in the desire to make his narrator hip that important plot elements get lost. The dialogue shines, though. I'm not wild about the way the gay characters get treated, especially coming from a writer who is normally so sensitive to those things. Still, this book has a lot of style, and encompasses some great 70s history. The book says some really complimentary things about Quentin Tarantino, and takes a cue or two from him in terms of its mix of pop culture with jazz culture. Recommended.

[thelostentwife · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I picked up Telegraph Avenue thinking that this would be it - this would be the time I fell in love with an author so many of my friends rave madly about. This would be it, damnit, and then I started to read. Then I stopped. I blinked several times, looked around, started again.. and this pattern repeated until I got to the end of the book - almost a full month later. Because that's how long this book took me to slog through. And, honestly, I hated nearly every minute of it.Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife.

[grandpahobo_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

After the first 100 pages or so, it felt like the purpose of the story and characters in this book were to provide the author with as many opportunities for similes as possible. After finishing the book, it turns out that was an accurate assessment.For the most part, the story dragged and the characters were mostly self absorbed and pretty boring.The only reason I give this two stars is the setting. I grew up in Oakland, not far from Telegraph Ave. All the places he mentions are places I remember. For me, the title represents the actual main character of the book.

[vintagereader · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I tried, I really did. I usually love Michael Chabon's work, but not this one. I just never got interested in any of the characters, and the pace felt off somehow--it seemed to keep going and going, but it wasn't going anywhere. After I renewed it twice and was still only halfway through it, I finally just gave up.

[johnluiz-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Count me among those that found reading this book a chore. Chabon is obviously brilliant and talented but reading his work is a bit like being trapped in the corner at a party by a manic genius, who feeds you dozens of brilliant different ideas at once, but at such a speed and with so many different tangents along the way that's it difficult to take it all in. Here, to slow things down, you often have to read sentences a couple of times just to keep track of what the noun and verb were in between all the independent clauses and tangential metaphors. Thank God for e-books with their at your fingertips dictionaries, because you also have to look up at least a word or two per page.

Clearly plenty of readers enjoy having their minds expanded by such a prodigious talent, but I found much of the information show-offy. It's amazing how many varied metaphors Chabon can spin, but occasionally it would be great to have a few sentences you don't need a road map to get through. A character can't simply reach for a tube of superglue, instead he has to get "a tube of superglue, the crusted tip of its nozzle, forever pierced like some allegorical wound in a story of King Arthur, by its tiny red-capped pin."

If that talent were used more judiciously, the reading might not be such a heavy slog.

In the previews, I saw a lot of praise for Chabon capturing the current cultural zeitgeist but I guess I didn't get that. He has four main story lines - an African American, Archy, and his Jewish partner, Nat. have a record store in Oakland that's under threat when a former NFL star turned businessmen is thinking about opening a megastore in their neighborhood; their wives are also getting into similar trouble as midwives when they have to rush a mother to a hospital during a difficult delivery and an obstetrician accuses them of negligence; a son Archy didn't know he had shows up in Oakland trying to connect with his father, and Nat's son, who's the same age, has developed a crush on him; and finally, Archy's father, Luther a martial arts expert turned crack addict is trying to rekindle his earlier days as a star in blaxploitation films while also blackmailing an old friend who is now a powerful businessman and city councilman, but who in his younger days killed a local troublemaker as a favor to Huey Newton of the Black Panthers.

It sounds like a lot, but the storylines themselves didn't feel like enough to fill up 465 pages. If you took out all the authors' efforts to prove his encyclopedic knowledge of every subject from the history of jazz to superhero comic books, it felt like each story could have been told neater and faster.

There are some interesting historical details about the loss of mom & pop-type stores with the invasion of corporate chains. Mixed in with that is an examination of the promise of urban renewal that a Magic Johnson-like figure offers by investing in the inner city. There are also interesting details about the history of midwifery and the conflict that Archy’s wife, Gwen, feels between the historical importance that midwives had in the black culture vs. what it is today – primarily an option of privileged white women. In one of my favorite passages, a night school instructor gives the 14-year-old boys and the other class participants a hysterically funny lecture on how Vincent Minelli’s The Bandwagon influenced Quentin Tarantino. But this novel, for me, doesn’t capture an era the way that Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities did (although admittedly Wolfe doesn’t have anywhere near the writing chops Chabon does.)

Too often, though, the novel gets bogged down with evidence of how smart Chabon is thrown up on every page. There are other novelists I love, like Robert Cohen, whose genius and prolific imagination are evident in every sentence. But Cohen fills his novels with great insights into what it means to be human. I don't need to read several pages about how to reassemble an organ speaker, as Chabon does, with the writer proving he knows the exact name for every part.

With Chabon, he also often makes you feel stupid for not having a Ph.D in pop culture. Not of all his references are self-contained. Near the end of the novel when Archy's wife Gwen is giving birth, Nat's son, Julius, is helping her deal with the pain by recounting scenes from Star Trek. He writes about an episode in which the female companion to the evil Kirk uses a "Tantalus Field" to overcome her adversaries. When Gwen faces the prospect of having the doctor who charged her with negligence deliver her baby, she asks Julius to cast a Tantalus Field on the doctor. Now I vaguely remember seeing that episode, but I don't remember what the Tantalus Field was, and I'm not reeducated on exactly what it was by Chabon's description.

My final complaint is one I've had with previous Chabon novels. He often writes gay lovemaking scenes in very specific detail, and while I don't have any problem with that, I wish he would give hetero lovemaking equal time. The two sex scenes in this novel are not for the squeamish because they involve sexual experimentation between the two 14-year-old boys and an episode when the philandering Archy sodomizes, consensually, his wife's transgendered assistant.

I don't regret finishing this one, although it took me a long while to get through it because I wasn't always motivated to pick it up. His writing reminds me of Zadie Smith. It may sound oxymoronic but there's just too much sheer brilliance on every page and in every sentence. Call me insecure, and maybe even a philistine, but I prefer to read novelists whose own writing style is less obvious so that I can get into the characters and be moved by the circumstances they find themselves in. I find Chabon's style, which constantly reminds me there's a much more brilliant mind than mine stringing these sentences together, keeps me too disconnected from the characters. And what is the infamous 11-page sentence, other than a break in the characters' story to show another explicit example of what a virtuoso Chabon is?

I didn't always feel this way about Chabon. I haven't read all of his books, but I did like Mysteries of Pittsburgh and the marvelous The Wonder Boys. But the Pulitzer-prize winning Kavalier and Clay left me feeling the same way this one did. After this experience, he may be off my must-read author list.

I'm sure this book will be on many "Best of the Year" lists, but it seems to me book critics and judges are mesmerized by the kind of writing that often turns me off.

[rocketjk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story of Telegraph Avenue grows out of a vintage record store, Brokeland Records, near the border of Oakland and Berkeley, CA, a farily gritty, urban neighborhood. More precisely, it is the story of the store's two partners, one black and one white, and their wives, in the face of the pending creation of a large nearby mall scheduled to include a vintage record section that will dwarf the collection offered by Brokeland and put the partners out of business. The wives are partners, as well, in a midwife practice, executing their own running firefight, sometimes offensive but mostly defensive, against the powers that be, in this case the medical establishment. And it is a multi-generational story of fathers and sons. The interweaving of all of these plot lines is accomplished smoothly, perhaps I might even say gracefully. But the key strength of the book for me is the wonderful, sometimes astounding level of Chabon's writing. The book is thought-provoking and very fun to read. My only quibble, really, is with a certain grooviness factor that Chabon laces the story with. A serious urban neighborhood is presented as almost wholly charming and benign, and characters who are threatening in nature are nevertheless devoid of the sense of menace we might expect. I guess what I'm getting at is that Chabon's Tom Robbins is showing a little too much for my taste. I don't want to over-state this complaint. I loved the book overall and recommend it heartily. The story holds many more issues than I've touched on here, such as nostalgia, maturity, friendship and commitment to ideals, relationships and community (there, I've touched on them). It is a book rich in ideas, in other words.

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

While I travel Telegraph Avenue most every day that I'm in the East Bay, I didn't find this novel entirely satisfying. It may be all of the midwifery, childbirth-as-topic that I had no interest in, but mostly, I'm sure, it was my unfulfilled expectation of reading more about a local, independent retailer being a part of a richly diverse neighborhood — Chabon was covering seemingly everything else in this story. This will cause me to reevaluate and most likely I'll wait for his next book to come out in paperback, before I take the Chabon route again.

[lxydis-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Over written, with too many digressions and overboiled metaphors. Some scenes and characters likeable, but overall it's a tedious book.

[brianrmartin23 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Ugh. Horrible. Got through 210 pages before stumbling upon a entire 5 page chapter composed of one, long run-on sentence.