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, two 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 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.
An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we’ve been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon’s most dazzling book yet.
About Michael Chabon
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.
Exclusive First Read: ‘Telegraph Avenue’
NPR Book Review – August 22, 2012 (Excerpt)
Michael Chabon sets his sprawling new novel, Telegraph Avenue, in his adopted home of Berkeley, Calif., and its grittier southern neighbor, Oakland. With its multiracial, multigenerational cast of jazz musicians, former blaxploitation stars, midwives, gay teens and Black Panthers-turned-politicians, the book both celebrates and gently sends up the countercultural norms and complex racial politics of East Bay life. The plot nominally revolves around Archy Stallings’ and Nat Jaffe’s efforts to save their used-record store (located on the eponymous Telegraph Avenue), which is threatened when a black football legend and entrepreneur makes plans to locate a media megastore in the neighborhood. This exclusive excerpt finds Nat’s wife, Aviva — “the Alice Waters of midwives” — presiding over a home birth with her business partner, Archy’s wife, Gwen. The episode is part of a very long day for Gwen, who has just caught Archy with another woman. Telegraph Avenue will be published Sept. 11. [Read the full article...]
Battling Progress and Other Demons
The New York Times Book Review – September 3, 2012 (Excerpt)
The title of Michael Chabon’s pungent new novel, “Telegraph Avenue,” refers, of course, to the famous Telegraph Avenue that bridges Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., that frisky, clamorous thoroughfare so identified, since the 1960s, with the counterculture and community life.
The central plot of this novel is highly reminiscent of Nora Ephron’s 1998 movie “You’ve Got Mail”: a small, independent store, which has been a neighborhood institution, is threatened by the arrival of a megastore that offers all the temptations of modern life. In this case a vinyl record shop called Brokeland Records, owned by two squabbling partners named Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, plays the role of David to a Goliath, represented by a proposed mall that would have a 10-screen multiplex, a food court, gaming arcade and a three-story media store. The complex is the brainchild of a former football star turned mogul named Gibson Goode, known as G Bad.
Using this mise en scène as the spine of his plot, Mr. Chabon has constructed an amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story that addresses his perennial themes — about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and the consolations of art — while reaching outward to explore the relationship between time past and time present, the weight (or lightness, as the case may be) of history, and the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. [Read the full article...]
Lost Tracks - ‘Telegraph Avenue,’ by Michael Chabon
The New York Times Book Review – September 6, 2012 (Excerpt)
“Telegraph Avenue,” Michael Chabon’s rich, comic new novel, is a homage to an actual place: the boulevard in Northern California where Oakland — historically an African-American city — aligns with Berkeley, whose bourgeois white inhabitants are, as one character puts it, “liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken.” The novel is equally a tribute to the cinematic style of Quentin Tarantino, whose films its characters study and discuss, and whose preoccupations pepper its pages: kung fu, cinematic allusions and the blaxploitation films of the 1970s; and an interest in African-American characters and experience. Chabon and Tarantino make an unlikely duo; while the latter’s films tend toward gaudy eruptions of violence, Chabon bends Tarantino’s sensibility to a warmhearted novel about fatherhood in which the onstage violence consists of two graphic childbirth scenes and a 15-year-old boy whacking a chubby thug with a wooden sword. A self-help book in the style of Andrei Tarkovsky would be hardly more oxymoronic. [Read the full article...]
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BOILED PEANUTS A Novel by John Patrick Doyle
A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl
Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents. In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding. [Read more...]
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