Staff Pick
Since winning the Pulitzer Prize for his spectacular 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon has gone on to write a diverse array of books restrained by neither style nor genre. Of the distinctive qualities to be found within whatever form his versatile storytelling may take is a prose marked by eloquence and vivaciousness, an uncanny ability to immerse his readers within the lives of his characters, and a narrative structure propelled mainly by his imaginative plots. All of these strengths are on full display in Telegraph Avenue, Chabon's resonant new novel and his most mature, accessible fiction to date.
Its genesis an unproduced television pilot he wrote over a decade ago, Telegraph Avenue is an engrossing, well-crafted drama of family and friendship. Set during the summer of 2004 in both Oakland and Berkeley (where Chabon himself has resided for the last 15 years), the novel focuses on the intertwined lives and ensuing hardships of two East Bay families. Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are best friends and coproprietors of Brokeland Records, a used vinyl record shop whose continued existence is threatened by plans for a nearby megastore helmed by a wealthy, former NFL quarterback. Their spouses, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are popular midwives, but both their friendship and their livelihoods become jeopardized following a delivery that quite nearly turns tragic.
As with much of Chabon's fiction, a rich cast of supporting characters and interwoven subplots lend the novel a vibrant breadth. Julius, Nat, and Aviva's 14-year-old boy, an ardent film enthusiast, falls in love with Titus, Archy's long-unacknowledged teenaged son. Luther, Archy's father, is a former kung fu and blaxploitation movie star whose delinquent past and scheming present ensnares the lives of everyone close to him. When community members rally against the proposed megastore, friendships are tested, motivations are questioned, and allegiances are revealed.
Telegraph Avenue, perhaps Chabon's strongest and most complete effort to date, is a sonorous, sweeping portrait of a contemporary American neighborhood (inspired, somewhat, by his own childhood spent partially in Columbia, Maryland — a planned community that sought to eliminate the racial and economical divisions that stunt so many modern metropolises). Chabon's incorporation of a racial element into this novel (of the four leading characters, two are black and the others white), in addition to being a brave decision, serves not as the banal, forced multiculturalism and feel-good liberalism that would likely have come across as mere stereotype in less-adept hands, but instead as a perceptive, faithful portrayal of life in the 21st-century American city. Chabon's compassion and sympathy for his subjects translates into lifelike, relatable characters that struggle with many of the same adversities, frustrated aspirations, and need for perseverance as anyone in the real world.
Throughout Telegraph Avenue, Chabon makes clever, playful use of jazz, soul, and vinyl-related imagery and metaphor, beginning with the touching dedication to his wife. Many of the thematic elements that have so distinguished Chabon's previous works are conveyed anew and will be warmly familiar to his longtime readers. Peppered throughout the novel like a recurrent bass groove are moments of delightfully unexpected and potent humor that act as a welcome complement to its rhythm of crescendoing drama. Michael Chabon's storytelling gifts seem to know no bounds, and the dexterity with which he crafts his beautiful prose is often breathtaking. The book's third chapter, composed of a single, 12-page sentence, is magnificently rendered and acts as a testament to Chabon's remarkable literary prowess. Telegraph Avenue is indeed an exceptional novel, one demonstrative of the considerable talent Chabon brings to nearly everything he composes. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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, between them, more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland Records.
When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in the United States, 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 complication 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.
Review
“A magnificently crafted, exuberantly alive, emotionally lustrous, and socially intricate saga....Bubbling with lovingly curated knowledge about everything from jazz to pregnancy…Chabons rhapsodically detailed, buoyantly plotted, warmly intimate cross-cultural tale of metamorphoses is electric with suspense, humor, and bebop dialogue….An embracing, radiant masterpiece.” < b=""> < i=""> Booklist <> <> , starred review
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“Virtuosity is the word most commonly associated with Chabon, and if Telegraph Avenue, the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Yiddish Policemans Union, is at first glance less conceptual than its predecessors, the sentences are no less remarkable.” < b=""> < i=""> Publishers Weekly <> <>
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"Expect its publication to be one of the bigger literary events of the year, akin to the release of The Marriage Plot this year or Freedom in 2010." < b=""> < i=""> The Atlantic <> <>
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“An end-of-an era epic....A Joyce-an remix with a hipper rhythm track.” < b=""> < i=""> Kirkus Reviews <> <> (starred review)
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“An exhilarating, bighearted novel.” < b=""> < i=""> O magazine <> <>
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“If any novelist can pack the entire American zeitgeist into 500 pages, its Chabon....Ambitious, densely written, sometimes very funny, and fabulously over the top, heres a rare book that really could be the great American novel.” < b=""> < i=""> Library Journal <> <> (starred review)
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“A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage…Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time, powering out sentences that are the equivalent of executing a triple back flip on a bucking bull while juggling chain saws and making love to three women.” < b=""> Benjamin Percy, < i=""> Esquire <> <>
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“Chabons hugely likable characters all face crises of existential magnitude, rendered in an Electra Glide flow of Zen sentences and zinging metaphors that make us wish the needle would never arrive at the final groove.” < b=""> < i=""> Elle <> <>
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“A beautiful, prismatic maximalism of description and tone, a sly meditation on appropriation as the real engine of integration, and an excellent rationale for twelve-page sentences.” < b=""> Kelsey Dake, < i=""> GQ <> <>
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“An amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story….[Chabons] people become so real to us, their problems so palpably netted in the authors buoyant, expressionistic prose, that the novel gradually becomes a genuinely immersive experiencesomething increasingly rare in our ADD age.” < b=""> Michiko Kakutani, < i=""> New York Times <> <>
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“Astounding....steamrolls the barrier that has kept the Great American Novel at odds with the country its supposed to reflect....[A] huge-hearted, funny, improbably hip book.” < b=""> John Freeman, < i=""> Boston Globe <> <>
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“Chabon has made a career of routing big, ambitious projects through popular genres, with superlative results….The scale of Telegraph Avenue is no less ambitious….Much of the wit...inheres in Chabons astonishing prose. I dont just mean the showy bits…I mean the offhand brilliance that happens everywhere.” < b=""> Jennifer Egan, < i=""> New York Times Book Review <> <> (cover review)
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“Telegraph Avenue is so exuberant, its as if Michael Chabon has pulled joy from the air and squeezed it into the shape of words....His sentences spring, bounce, set off sparklers, even when dwelling in mundane details….Fantastic.” < b=""> Carolyn Kellogg, < i=""> Los Angeles Times Book Review <> <>
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“Fresh, unpretentious, delectably written….For all his explorations into the contentious dynamics of family, race and community, Mr. Chabons first desire is simply to enchant with words. Eight novels in, he still uses language like someone amazed by a newly discovered superpower.” < b=""> Sam Sacks, < i=""> Wall Street Journal <> <>
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“Witty and compassionate and full of more linguistic derring-do than any other writer in American could carry off.” < b=""> Ron Charles, < i=""> Washington Post <> <>
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"Spectacular." < b=""> Mike Fischer, < i=""> Milwaukee Journal Sentinel <> <>
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“As always, Chabons gorgeous prose astonishes, particularly in the Joycean chapter ‘A Bird of Wide Experience….Like that colorful bird, Telegraph Avenue dazzles and soars.” < b=""> Cliff Froehlich, < i=""> St. Louis Post-Dispatch <> <>
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“A stylized, rapturous novel….Telegraph Avenue entertains with a riotous mashup of comics, kung fu, ‘70s jazz and family strife, but at the core lie some startlingly sober revelations.” < b=""> Zane Jungman, < i=""> Austin American-Statesman <> <>
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“One of Chabons great gifts is an ability to beguile us with prose that exudes warmth into seeing ourselves in others, to even know them as ourselves. Its a feat that parlays Telegraph Avenue, with its diverse population, into an All-American novel, one of the great ones.” < b=""> Sherryl Connelly, < i=""> Daily News <> <>
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“Forget Joycean or Bellovian or any other authorial allusion. Telegraph Avenue might best be described as Chabonesque. Exuberantly written, generously peopled, its sentences go off like a summer fireworks show, in strings of bursting metaphor.” < b=""> Jess Walter, < i=""> San Francisco Chronicle <> <>
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“A buoyant novel, written with the authors typical stylistic elegance and empathetic imagination….His prose is as energizing as ever, in part because hes always willing to try high-risk maneuvers up on the figurative balance beam.” < b=""> Troy Patterson, < i=""> Slate <> <>
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“The writing - stylized, humorous and often dazzling - is inflected with tones of jazz and funk. But its Chabons ear for the sounds of the human soul that make this book a masterpiece, as his vividly drawn characters learn to live at the intersection of disappointment and hope.” < b=""> Robin Micheli, < i=""> People <> <> (4 out of 4 stars)
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“He writes with such warmth and humor and sheer enthusiasm - for his characters, for the rhythms and atmosphere of Oakland, for geek culture, for the mysterious power of music, which he captures with uncommon descriptive virtuosity - that by the end its hard to resist this charmingly earnest book.” < b=""> Rob Brunner, < i=""> Entertainment Weekly <> <>
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“A jam that grooves, entertains, entrances and sticks in your head with infectious melodies….[Chabon] is a hypnotizing master of language, crafting fresh descriptors for familiar functions, poetic detours that never sacrifice narrative flow, well-oiled metaphorical machinations, and seamless time travelling that makes the phrase ‘flashback seem obsolete.” < b=""> Jake Austen, < i=""> Chicago Tribune <> <>
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“[Chabon] is a truly gifted writer of prose: He writes long, luxurious sentences that swoop and meander before circling back in on themselves, not infrequently approximating the improvisational jazz that Archy and Nat hold so dear.” < b=""> < i=""> Associated Press <> <>
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“A moving, sprawling, modern-day tale that uses the improvisational shifts and rhythms of jazz and soul to tell the story of two couples….With seeming ease, Chabon shifts from high-wire flourishes…to moments of crystalline simplicity.” < b=""> Robert Bianco, < i=""> USA Today <> <> (4 out of 4 stars)
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“This is a novel rich in story and character, rich in its dialogue and descriptions, rich in spirit and invention - and full of sharp, funny writing….The spirit of Telegraph Avenue is one of union and reconciliation, a welcome, exuberant voice in our fractious times.” < b=""> David Walton, < i=""> Cleveland Plain Dealer <> <>
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“Chabon has a near effortless ability to reveal the huge universal human truths that scaffold absurdly specific circumstances, and he does so on nearly every page here.” < b=""> Emily SImon, < i=""> Buffalo News <> <>
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“A sparkling, mesmerizing read….Thats what Chabons books do, sentence after sentence, page after page: they force you to bring your game up to his level….His writers eye makes the world a more vivid, vital place to live.” < b=""> Michael Bourne, < i=""> The Millions <> <>
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“An achingly poignant vibe of sweet and soulful idealism makes itself heard throughout Telegraph Avenue….Its a dream worth imagining, and Chabon does so with skill, charm, and no small amount of virtuosic writing.” < b=""> Diane Cole, < i=""> Jewish Week <> <>
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“Chabon is an extraordinarily generous writer. He is generous to his characters, to his landscapes, to syntax, to words, to his readersthere is a real joy in his work….Both ambitious and lighthearted, the novel is a touching, gentle, comic meditation.” < b=""> Cathleen Schine, < i=""> New York Review of Books <> <>
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“[Telegraph Avenue] has a Great American Novel heft to itprobably because, all caps aside, it is a great American novel.” < b=""> Kathryn Schulz, < i=""> New York magazine <> <>
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“Chabon not only knows how [his characters] feel, but how they talk. His dialogue is a thing to behold, the plot unrelenting. And I cant imagine any writer, male or female, ever delivering a more breathtaking description of a woman giving birth. Some midwife, this Chabon.” < b=""> Dan Cryer, < i=""> Newsday <> <>
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“Displays both his sense of ordinary peoples inner lives and his rich, freewheeling prose….A dense, flavorful book about race, class, politics, culture and sexuality, as expansive and ambitious as anything Chabon has published to date….An essential, unforgettable read.” < b=""> Ben Pfeiffer, < i=""> Kansas City Star <> <>
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“His most mature, accessible fiction to date…An engrossing, well-crafted drama of family and friendship….Chabons storytelling gifts seem to know no bounds, and the dexterity with which he crafts his beautiful prose is often breathtaking.” < b=""> Jer emy Garber, < i=""> The Oregonian <> <>
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“A dazzling star turn of a novel that showcases Chabons writing talents like a digital TV screen above Times Square….Chabon does love popular culture, but he loves humanity more, and that love is the power behind this sweeping novel.” < b=""> Bob Hoover, < i=""> Minneapolis Star Tribune <> <>
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“Chabons inventiveness requires language dazzling and deft enough to put it across, and like most of his later work, Telegraph Avenue reads easy - I downed 300 pages flying back from Denmark, stopping only to eat and nap.” < b=""> Robert Christgau, < i=""> barnesandnoble.com <> <>
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“A dazzling display of sheer writing ability from the prodigiously talented Chabon.” < b=""> < i=""> Philadelphia Inquirer <> <>
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“Michael Chabon is the Michael Jordan of American novelists….Telegraph Avenue could serve as a master class on how to write a novel.” < b=""> John Broening, < i=""> Denver Post <> <>
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“As ever, Chabon is a performing magician. He can take any topic and stage it so the crowd smiles and even oohs its amazement….Chabon makes a grab for the entire world in a single bighearted book.” < b=""> Darin Strauss, < i=""> New York Times Book Review <> <>
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“Spectacular.” < b=""> Mike Fischer, < i=""> Milwaukee Journal Sentinel <> <>
Synopsis
“An immensely gifted writer and magical prose stylist.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times 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 Policemens 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.
About the Author
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland (a novel for children), The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and Gentlemen of the Road, as well as the short story collections A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth and the essay collections Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs. He is the chairman of the board of the MacDowell Colony. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.