Anyone searching for a Dickens-like portrait of early 21st-century Oakland need not look any further than Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, a love letter to the scrappy, distinctive community adjacent to his Berkeley home.
The central setting is Brokeland Records, a "church of vinyl" on the street that gives the novel its name. Co-owners Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, an often fractious pairing of black and white, find their used records business threatened by the impending construction of a "Dogpile Thang," an entertainment complex owned by Gibson Goode, a Magic Johnson-style ex-athlete and entrepreneur. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are partners in a midwifery business, while Nate and Aviva's son, Julius, develops an intense attraction to 14-year-old Titus, the son Archy learns he has fathered when the boy returns to California after his mother dies.
Chabon is most intrigued by the daily struggles of these characters to survive the challenges of love, work and family, and he knits their lives together in a dense web of incident and reflection. There's an undercurrent of racial tension manifest in everything from Gwen's confrontation with a white physician after a near-disastrous home birth to the relationship between Titus and Julius. The novel toys with a subplot involving a 1970s murder associated with Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, but that distant event serves more to give Chabon a chance to deliver some scenes reminiscent of Elmore Leonard than to add much narrative drama.
Chabon's high-wire prose style, on the other hand, couldn't be less Leonardesque; it's one of the novel's consistent pleasures. Those narrative pyrotechnics are displayed most vividly in the brief middle section entitled "A Bird of Wide Experience." In a single sentence that spans 12 pages, he offers a literal bird's-eye view of the principal characters as they experience the "heartaches and sorrows of Telegraph Avenue." Whether it's classic jazz and blues, the world of blaxploitation films of the 1970s or the intimate details of childbirth, Chabon demonstrates command of an impressive array of subjects that gives the novel the feel of real life. With creations like musician Cochise Jones and his talking parrot, or Archy's father, Luther Stallings, who dreams improbably of reviving his film career as a minor league version of Bruce Lee or Richard Roundtree, Chabon's characters are never less than memorable.
Complex, earnest and generous of spirit, Telegraph Avenue adds to Michael Chabon's stature as one of our most vital contemporary writers. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Michael Chabon's seventh novel illuminates the lives of a diverse group of colorful characters brought together around a used record shop in Oakland, Calif.