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Telegraph Avenue

3.39 of 5 stars 3.39 · rating details · 6,377 ratings · 1,604 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, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than...more

Hardcover, 465 pages

Published September 11th 2012 by HarperCollins (first published January 1st 2012)

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Oct 14, 2012 John Luiz rated it 3 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 betwee...more 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. (less)

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Sep 30, 2012 Nathan Chadwick rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book drove me a little nuts. It's plot is overstuffed making the whole thing much too long. That wouldn't be such a bad thing if the language didn't irritate me so much. Chabon tries to be both hip and smart, while dealing with characters who seem to be lacking in both. I felt too often that I was reading an Elmore Leonard book written towards the Ivy League set. Elmore Leonard at least knows how to plot. The plot lacks punch and swiftness and I felt myself caring less and less as the book...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Gary McTiernan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Telegraph Avenue is a major commercial thoroughfare in a minor California city. It is also the setting of Michael Chabon's brilliant slice in the life of Archie, the half-owner of a used record store, struggling with impending fatherhood, and Gwen, his wife, a fast-talking, hormonally-challenged midwife, who is determined to have her baby with him, or without him, and to salvage her career after an unfortunate encounter with a smug physician. Two of the many people who complicate their struggle...more

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Sep 09, 2012 Shannon (Giraffe Days) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: review-copy, fiction, 2012

Telegraph Avenue, a strip of mostly hanging-in-there shops and a funeral parlour in Oakland, California, is home to Brokeland Records, a rare and secondhand vinyl record shop run by old friends, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe. It's August 2004, Archy's wife Gwen, a midwife, is thirty-six weeks' pregnant, Nat's only child, Julius, is having a sexual relationship with his new friend, Titus, and the record shop is barely scraping by, partly dependent on the records bought by their long-standing cust...more

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Dec 16, 2012 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, african-american, music, medicine, california

What a delight to be treated to this life affirming story after sustaining a series of books by Chabon that did not live up to the pleasures of “The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay.” He clearly loves all his characters in this tale, and I was quite satisfied how their challenges in his narrative led them to evolve toward their visions in some cases or successfully stumble past their misfortunes in others.

The story concerns the struggles of a black couple, Archy Stallings and Gwen Shanks,...more

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Feb 09, 2013 Colin Barrett rated it 5 of 5 stars

A good novel digs a hole in you and fills it with its own loam, an invasive kudzu strangling some delicate, native species of scrub. A great novel works the other way around—its beautiful, beaming stamen bursts forth, normally only growing on the impossible cliffs of some tropical island and yet somehow here it is anyway, cutting through your mind's backyard bougainvillea to illuminate, elucidate, aspirate.

Telegraph Ave is, naturally, in the latter category. Its drama is of a familiar, familial...more

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Sep 18, 2012 Jesse rated it 3 of 5 stars

Sentence to sentence, just great. There's some wonderful writing about babies, and about commerce and old stores and those parts of Telegraph where Berkeley and Oakland kind of wander into each other (lived not far from there for about 2 years in early 90s, at at about 61st just off Claremont). Not to mention birthing and midwifery and lotsa nerd-boy stuff. Which is the problem. As early as Werewolves in Their Youth, Chabon started working the whole SF/fanboy/former nerd angle into his fiction,...more Sentence to sentence, just great. There's some wonderful writing about babies, and about commerce and old stores and those parts of Telegraph where Berkeley and Oakland kind of wander into each other (lived not far from there for about 2 years in early 90s, at at about 61st just off Claremont). Not to mention birthing and midwifery and lotsa nerd-boy stuff. Which is the problem. As early as Werewolves in Their Youth, Chabon started working the whole SF/fanboy/former nerd angle into his fiction, and there are a bunch of essays in his last collection about that as well. And of course Kavalier and Clay is maybe the ultimate meta-fanboy novel. I mean that in a good way. But here that whole worldview seems to have congealed into a key to all mysteries, such that each of the characters (OK, except for the wife of one of the guys who owns the used-vinyl store, but then we don't really get more than 5 pages of her character in a 460-page opus) not only indulges in some variety of archival inside-dopery (old r&b, comic books, blaxploitation) but seems to conceive of it in much the same way. Which makes them all too obviously offshoots of one writer's mind, and I don't really buy that. It's as if the essential aridity of these (male) preoccupations is meant to be counterposed to the fraught reality and bloodiness of organic birthing--with, OK, some irony, since Chabon has one of his characters note the obvious fact that only wealthy white Berkeleyans can afford to go back to the land there, so to speak--but in a way that secretly suggests that maybe we're all secret archaeolgists of some kind of mass-made crap or another. Which I also don't buy.

Shouldn't there be some sort of statute of limitations on mining your sense of yourself as a fat nerdy adolescent when you are now as rich, successful, and good-looking as Michael Chabon manifestly is? (And in fact has been since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, to judge by cover photos?) I'd love to see him deal with his life as it is now in some way instead of continuing to pretend he's still that kid. I mean, he even turned writer's block into Wonder Boys. So why not go back to that sense of honest self-appraisal and write something reflecting who he is now?(less)

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Dec 17, 2012 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

About halfway through the novel, in the midst of a 12-page-long sentence which comprises the whole of Section III of V, Chabon uses the phrase "short story long," which pretty much sums it up. Let it be known that I am most definitely not a fan of Chabon (after reading Kavalier & Clay and then Maps and Legends), and only read this because I felt like I had to, as I live a block off of Telegraph. I gave it an honest chance, but ended up speeding through it pretty quick, because it bugged me r...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, first-reads

This review is based on an advance reading copy provided by HarperCollins/Goodreads. Thank you.

Very early in the book Chabon writes:

"Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars."

For me, the spindle of the book spun around those words as much as it did around an old turntable playing jazz funk from the 70s.

The story, set...more This review is based on an advance reading copy provided by HarperCollins/Goodreads. Thank you.

Very early in the book Chabon writes:

"Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars."

For me, the spindle of the book spun around those words as much as it did around an old turntable playing jazz funk from the 70s.

The story, set in the summer of 2004, is about Nat Jaffe and Archy Stallings, two old friends who run Brokeland Records, a used vinyl record store which is located in the area of Berkeley and Oakland, California. Their wives, Aviva and Gwen, are midwives who work together as a team. Aviva and Nat have an adolescent son, Julian, and Archy and Gwen are expecting their first child together.

A mega-store, which would include a fancy used-vinyl section, would like to open close to Brokeland Records, effectively driving Archy and Nat out of business and changing the character of the neighborhood. There is much wheeling and dealing on this issue and questions of what is to become of the old store if the mega-store breaks ground.

Archy’s father Luther, a former star of some ‘70s Blaxploitation films, and Titus, a teenaged son Archy did not know he had suddenly show up, adding all kinds of familial turmoil to the mix. Archy had been abandoned by Luther, and had effectively abandoned his own child, Titus, by being unaware of his existence for 14 years. Gwen is really mad when she finds out about poor Titus, and boots Archy’s butt out. She will get along without him in spite of her advanced pregnancy, and another child coming into the world with potential father issues. At the same time, Nat and his wife are slowly coming to terms with the fact that their own young son, Julie, is gay, and loving him and worrying about him all at once.

I really loved this book. Chabon writes wonderful, witty dialogue, and he made me giggle and laugh a lot—I think I peed my pants a couple of times. I know. TMI. But there it is. :) Read this book, have fun, and love your family, however flawed they may be, as much as you can.

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Sep 13, 2012 Nancy Oakes rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I'm giving this novel 3.75 stars. I have this incredibly conflicted reaction to this book -- while I really loved the characters and could identify with many of the themes that the author explores (and because I actively collect old soul and R&B music), the overactive prose and writing style sometimes frustrated me. It can get windy (with a long i) and overly wordy, suffering sometimes from overactive and overstated prose. At the same time, that very writing is what created the amazing chara...more

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Dec 14, 2012 Schmacko rated it 4 of 5 stars

Chabon has a gift for taking things that are mass market, pulp, and pop culture and spinning them into credible literary gold. I love him for this.

In Telegraph Avenue, he tackles old R&B and jazz vinyl, blacksploitation films, and Kung Fu thrillers. He also captures a corner of Berkley that Chabon and his wife have lived in for years. It’s all in the service of a story about fathers and son – how father succeed, how they fail, and how sons carve their own paths because of or in spite of the...more Chabon has a gift for taking things that are mass market, pulp, and pop culture and spinning them into credible literary gold. I love him for this.

In Telegraph Avenue, he tackles old R&B and jazz vinyl, blacksploitation films, and Kung Fu thrillers. He also captures a corner of Berkley that Chabon and his wife have lived in for years. It’s all in the service of a story about fathers and son – how father succeed, how they fail, and how sons carve their own paths because of or in spite of their own fathers.

That’s the part that makes Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue endearing. Unfortunately, it also robs it of a bit of the whimsy and creativity Chabon’s other works possess in spades. Telegraph Avenue is still an engaging, heartfelt book; it’s just not as fantastic. It’s still a totally worthy read, and I can understand why others have it on their Top 2012 Books lists.

That being said, Telegraph Avenue does get off to a slow, confusing start. There’s a 70s-famous Kung Fu actor – a black father with a criminal record, drug issues, and abandonment problems – he’s trying to restart his career. Then there’s his son – the main protagonist – who, with his best friend, is trying to keep their record store afloat as a famous football player makes a move to cut their business out from under them. The partner, the men’s wives – both midwives, the men’s two boys (one who’s realizing he’s gay), the football player, local jazz musicians, and even Obama make appearances.

It all comes together eventually. When Archy – the record store owner – takes over the story and becomes its center, we see a flawed man on the verge of ruining his marriage. He has a son from a long-ago affair he’s all but forgotten about. His wife is also expecting a baby. Archy, though, still wants to be young, sow his wild oats, feel sexy, get in touch with the jazz music he loves so well – in short, be anything but a staid and stable husband and father.

There has been no little discussion about Chabon, a Caucasian, creating and speaking through Archy, a black protagonist. Most of the somewhat-tense conversation has centered around the hip, jazz-infused language that Chabon has Archy and a lot of his friends use. Most of the time, it worked for me, though there were a few moments when Chabon’s creation got comically awkward; I felt Chabon might be trying to hard and using too many adjectives. Perhaps, though, this was Chabon’s risk in this book – creating a semi-ridiculous, “hip” black language. However, next to the wild risks of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or even The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Telegraph Avenue does seem less thrilling and almost silly.

Smaller feats - like the chapter that is all one sentence - are still awesome. The struggle that the wives go through as midwives, the politics, and the red tape, are also fun to read. The kids are well drawn, too.

Telegraph Avenue's crux – the updating of the 1950s view of fatherhood - is also cool and vital. Chabon knows to balance the shifting image of “dad” against the changing times. Vinyl and jazz are from bygone eras; so is the Kung Fu movie that Archy’s Lothario-leech dad was famous for. Archy’s partner’s son is coming out of the closet; that’s a newer experience for modern fathers. Archy’s own son both needs his dad and wants to assert his independence.

In the end, Telegraph Avenue is still a beautiful and often funny novel, even when it misses those flights of fancy or literary experimentation that Chabon has practiced in other novels. At its heart, we can sense that Chabon himself has been on a soul searching about his own role as a father. Also ingrained is a sense of how to entertain readers. Finally, we also sense Chabon’s love of vinyl music and the community of Berkley that he captures. It adds certain warmth to Telegraph Avenue that replaces some of the previous whimsy and risk-taking I love in Chabon.
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Nov 05, 2012 Valeri Drach rated it 5 of 5 stars

Michael Chabon's central theme of all time is male relationships. He's often a good sport and throws in some strong females, probably to sooth his mother, wife and eventually daughters, but his heart is with fathers, sons, and brothers. Telegraph Avenue takes us to Oakland and the relationships between their intertwined black and white neighborhoods. Nat Jaffe, a white man partially raised by a black step mother, he reveals in the fried chicken of his childhood, and Archy Stallings, a black man...more

Michael Chabon's central theme of all time is male relationships. He's often a good sport and throws in some strong females, probably to sooth his mother, wife and eventually daughters, but his heart is with fathers, sons, and brothers. Telegraph Avenue takes us to Oakland and the relationships between their intertwined black and white neighborhoods. Nat Jaffe, a white man partially raised by a black step mother, he reveals in the fried chicken of his childhood, and Archy Stallings, a black man who must face his own fatherhood. The two own a vinyl record store about to be menaced by a former football player turned into a monster entrepreneur who threatens to swallow them up with a mega store. Their wives, White Aviva and Black Gwen are also in partnership as midwives, delivering the babies of white, Berkeley women, who dream of delivering in bathtubs with soft music and incense burning rather than white, sterile hospitals. One of Gwen's many problems is that she she wants deliver the babies of poor black women also. And so begins the many complications of Chabon's diverse hometown novel. What people like about this Pulitzer Prize winning author is that they know they are are in competent hands when he is spinning one of his long tour de forces of a place or era. This era is 2004 and its interesting to note that in a short time, less than a decade, the Internet has become the place of commerce. Brokeland Records, located on an almost sacred black site, a barbershop where the community communed, is fighting for survival. A place when Chan Flowers, a regular who buys records and is a councilman capable of saving them from Gibson Goode, the bad ex NFL player trying to swallow them like a black Moby Dick. In fact, he travels in a zeppelin that turns their sky black, a foreboding of their demise., The novel honors a few of Chabons fascinations, black exploitation films and Jazz music. But most of all it is a book that honors the father son relationship. Archy is the son of Luther Stallings, a recovering drup addict who used to be a star in black exploitation films, who wants a comeback. So Archy is a son who was never fathered, who is the father to a fourteen year old boy, Titus, who he never even met and is about to become a father to a brand new son, the one Gwen, his wife is pregnant with. Can he man up, father his two sons, become a husband to his wife rather than a philanderer that he's been so far, and can he hold up his end of his partnership with Nat? There's a funny sub theme running through novel that links a slew of minor and major characters trying to survive and outrun old vendettas and inter racial complications. We also have young boys involved in a gay complication, the sons of Nat and Archy. The ending fizzles, closer to a sitcom finale than a Michael Chabon spectacular. But this author's near misses are worth reading and are certainly more satisfying than the best works of most of his contemporaries. As with all his others, always a fine literary event!(less)

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Jan 22, 2013 Chuck rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: abandoned

Hey, check out my razzle-dazzle, dictionary-demanding, neverending prose that rolls off the page like marbles falling from a flatbed truck, grabbing you like a gardener's glove in a Venus flytrap, moaning like Robert Johnson on a late-night radio blues show, carousing like a Common Ornery Cokeheaded Ho Intransigently Seeking Excitement (that's C.O.C.H.I.S.E -- get it?), continuing on and on and on and on like my man Joyce's Molly Bloom without ever switching sentences 'cause I'm producing a Ulys...more

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Dec 27, 2012 Rose rated it 4 of 5 stars

There's something about Michael Chabon's brilliance that could be called reliable. Either that, or we've come to take for granted the fact that he just keeps getting better. In this novel, he explores the world of vinyl records on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland through a mix of black characters and white hipsters engaged in alternative lifestyles while still living firmly in the thralldom of late capitalism and the ideology of the family. Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffee know that ultimately they hav...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Phil James rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: american

I thoroughly enjoyed this book; perhaps the first of Chabon's that I've enjoyed unreservedly. I think it helps that I am already often preoccupied with obscure music and films. the references to Tarantino were obvious before they became explicit.
But don't worry there's very little gore here and that is in a childbirth related storyline. And unlike Tarantino films the substance wins out over the style: friendship beyond dividing lines of race, gender or blood.

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Nov 05, 2012 Lisa rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: unfinished

I was looking forward to revisiting my old town through Chabon's words, but not enough to finish the book. The first 12 pages weren't bad, but then more characters are introduced and I lost interest. The plot meanders. Skimming some of the reviews here only clinches it: For a 465-page book, I would rather read something else.

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Feb 14, 2013 Douglas rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, literature

I love Michael Chabon. And I'm a little bit disappointed here.

Chabon always writes beautifully, and on a sentence level there are some real gems in Telegraph Avenue. But Chabon's also pretty reliable as a storyteller, and it's in the plotting department that this book falls short. Too many shots fail to go off. Too many conflicts sputter out. Scenes with dramatic potential (view spoiler)...more

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Sep 11, 2012 Shellie (Layers of Thought) rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Chabon fans

Shelves: genre-general-fiction-literature, blog-reviewed-by-john, country-us-california-bay-area, element-music, read-by-jd-in-2012

This review by John is originally published at Layers of Thought.

A mini family epic set against the backdrop of the California Bay Area, jazz and soul music, and changes in local society. The story even manages to embrace kung fu, Blaxploitation movies and the Black Panther movement!

About: Brokeland Records is a store on Telegraph Avenue on the border of Berkeley and Oakland, specializing in used vinyl and focused on jazz and soul music. Run by two long-time buddies, Nat (who is white) and Archy...more This review by John is originally published at Layers of Thought.

A mini family epic set against the backdrop of the California Bay Area, jazz and soul music, and changes in local society. The story even manages to embrace kung fu, Blaxploitation movies and the Black Panther movement!

About: Brokeland Records is a store on Telegraph Avenue on the border of Berkeley and Oakland, specializing in used vinyl and focused on jazz and soul music. Run by two long-time buddies, Nat (who is white) and Archy (who is black), the store is so much more than a record shop – it’s a multi-cultural center of gravity for many locals who gather there, chew the fat, and generally hang out. While it always totters on the edge financially, it is very much a labor of love for the music-loving Nat and Archy.

They are also bound together outside of Brokeland, as their wives are both midwives and are partners in Berkeley Birth Partners, which over the years has helped many hundreds of local women to give birth in their own homes – much to the chagrin of some local doctors who want to see all births take place within hospitals.

Now their bumpy, somewhat chaotic but somewhat steady lives are rocked on several fronts. An ex-NFL star, who is the fifth richest black man in the US, is planning on opening a megastore on Telegraph Avenue which would almost certainly mean doom for Brokeland Records; Berkeley Birth Partners is faced with legal action and professional ruin; Nat’s fragile teenage son falls in love with an itinerant black boy who turns out to be Archy’s long-lost (and never acknowledged) son; and an eccentric man, who is the closest thing to a real father that Archy ever had, unexpectedly dies. Can’t get any worse? Then Archy’s real father turns up – he’s a total deadbeat who used to be a kung fu expert and starred in third-rate Blaxploitation movies, and he’s after something.

John’s thoughts: This is a heck of a book – an interesting story, a complex many-threaded plot, many dashes of wry humor, and some well-constructed and complicated characters. The main characters are by no means perfect – they have all too many human flaws, but you can’t help liking them (mostly) and you do want things to end up well for them.

Chabon is clearly someone who knows the Berkeley/Oakland area well and has a deep affinity for it. He includes lots of local detail and color, and clearly has fears and hopes about how the area is developing. Likewise he must be a huge fan of the music that Brokeland Records sells, and the book has a multitude of musical references. Actually, I did find that sometimes the deep attachment to the location and the music got in the way a bit – as some of the references and colloquialisms were a bit lost on me.

I like the way that Chabon brings in lots of different plot elements, including local politics, cultural tensions, family/generational tensions and (even!) the Black Panther movement. These are all intertwined with the main storylines, and it gives the book an almost epic feel.

A word on the writing style – at times I found the wording and syntax tough, and had to re-read many of the sentences. This got easier as I progressed through the book, but it did slow me down and didn’t help with the pacing. Nonetheless, I’d rate this four stars and recommend it to anyone who likes to read meaty novels about complex family and social tensions, especially those with a musical and multi-cultural backdrop. (less)

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Dec 03, 2012 Chaitra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012, michael-chabon, set-in-california, literary-fiction, ensemble, contemporary-fiction, humor, music, lyrical-fiction, nytimes-notable-books

"Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars."
Thinks Archy Stallings, pondering the massive change in his lifestyle he'd have to make when his little one is born. This insight is on page 10 of the 465 pages book, and I spent the rest of the 455 pages looking for something to match up to this. Needless to say, nothing else...more "Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars."
Thinks Archy Stallings, pondering the massive change in his lifestyle he'd have to make when his little one is born. This insight is on page 10 of the 465 pages book, and I spent the rest of the 455 pages looking for something to match up to this. Needless to say, nothing else hit me the way this quote did, even though, at the end, I can say I quite liked this book.

Archy is the protagonist out of all the rest of the protagonists, the abandoned son of a loser father, a former Blaxploitation movie star called Luther Stallings. He is fat, approaching middle age, expecting a baby (not) and cheating on his wife with a Queen of Sheba waitress. He co-owns a record store that sells used vinyl records and bullshit on tap to a wide variety of connoisseurs of said bullshit. His partner is a white Jew by name Nat Jaffe, firmly opposed to any change, which is now practically at their door, in the form of a massive chain store called the Dogpile Thang, owned by former Steelers quarterback Gibson Goode, which will also sell used vinyl records. Archy's other half Gwen works with Nat's other half Aviva, as midwives who do house pregnancies. They tangle with a hospital doctor when one of their pregnancies run into issues. Also complicating matters is a boy named Titus Joyner, who happens to be Archy's unacknowledged son by an offscreen ex-flame, who has moved into the neighborhood and into Nat and Aviva's son's bed.

Chabon follows all of these characters at one point or another. There are some other minor characters that get their time in the sun as well. Some of these perspectives work, some of the time. They're all mostly sympathetic, my favorite being the actual child in the middle of all the adults trying to hold off growing up - Julie Jaffe. Isolated as he is, he seems to everything with much better clarity than the older people. The book sounds like heavy drama, but it's rather funny to read. It's even laugh out loud in portions. The geek fantasy part of it totally lost me - I enjoy Quentin Tarantino, but I wouldn't analyze him to even a mild concussion. Let's not even talk about music. But yes, via Chabon, I could understand that our characters care a lot about the music they talk about, about the movies.

My main problem with it is that it's wildly uneven. It's very slow going in parts, denser than it needs to be for the story it tries to tell. The language is beautiful from a line to line basis, but the whole thing suffers from the proverbial forest and trees syndrome. The line is beautiful, but how does it matter when it comes to the broader picture? Chabon can tell a great story, but why hide it under so many layers of adjectives and similes? It just makes the story that many pages longer without adding anything new. The ending seems pat. Archy is now responsible, Nat has changed. Some of threads are not resolved (What happened to Luther, for example? Or Valletta?), some are left in points with no explanation as to how they got there (Julie and Titus seem perfectly cozy before this last chapter when Titus has moved on).

It's still a well conceived book, that makes me care about characters that I would in other novels hate on, that would probably be made greater if some pages were pared off. 4 stars.(less)

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Sep 10, 2012 Lizzy Boden rated it 2 of 5 stars

I wanted to like it. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one of my favorite books of all time, and I went into this one with excitement and enthusiasm. Unfortunately, that only lasted about fifty pages. I shouldered through because I wanted to give Chabon the benefit of the doubt.

In the end, I think the novel could have been saved with some judicious editing. It should have been about a third shorter. Chabon lets his thoughts run away from him and while his many asides are beautifull...more

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Dec 04, 2012 Jessica added it

Shelves: fiction

I'm a little ashamed to admit how little I enjoyed this book. I don't want to be all "Books are hard," but there are too many plot threads and characters that I can't keep straight and Chabon's never-ending sentences seems less like a demonstration of his control of the English language than a demonstration of his inability to control his rambling thoughts. I am a smart person, dammit! I have a Master's degree in English and everything! Why do I feel like such an asshole for not getting on board...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Rachel Perla rated it 5 of 5 stars

The God of writing came down from Mount Olympus and handed Michael Chabon a pen. This is the third book I have read by Chabon and he never dissapoints. Telegraph Avenue is the story of two men who are in business together as owners of a record shop in Oakland, CA. Their wives also happen to be in business together as midwives who serve the Berkeley community. This is a great read for those of you who came of age in the 1970s. Interwoven in the story is a musical backdrop from that era. The men a...more

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Oct 19, 2012 patty added it

Shelves: public-library, abandoned

Picked up from the library today. After reading 4 books on iPad, It's gonna be weird to hold up a largish book again!

Update one week later: I have started this book twice, and it's just not grabbing me. Now, if I had an intimate knowledge of Berkeley/Oakland environs it might make a difference. Yeah, I dig the album references with the catalog numbers (though I've seen this before), but overall I'm having a hard time caring about these characters to want to know more of their story. Maybe it's...more

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Sep 28, 2012 Marty rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

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. Tel...more

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Dec 27, 2012 Jana rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club, audible, abandoned

Unofficial Booktopia January 2013
12/14/12: I've started this book 3 times. But this time I got a bit farther and I think I'll be able to keep going. Thanks Michelle for the encouragement!

12/26/12: Gave up! So sorry, Michael Chabon. I will see what happens at our UnBooktopia get-together next month when we will discuss this book, among others. This rating is based on just under half-read, which isn't entirely fair.

Don't let me discourage anyone else from reading this! I hope someone else can give...more

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Mar 23, 2013 Brunhilde rated it 5 of 5 stars

Michael Chabon writes like an angel – one of Kerouac’s stoned desolation angels maybe, or better still, like Nicola Barker – writers with the same unerring ear for the vernacular, the same sheer obsession with language which leads to mad riffs, exhilarating, exuberant verbal flights, Flaubertian-triple-adjectives. And Telegraph Avenue reads like music, with which it is obsessed – Chabon can describe a record and make you swear you hear every sound - oh and it’s pretty focused on race relations t...more Michael Chabon writes like an angel – one of Kerouac’s stoned desolation angels maybe, or better still, like Nicola Barker – writers with the same unerring ear for the vernacular, the same sheer obsession with language which leads to mad riffs, exhilarating, exuberant verbal flights, Flaubertian-triple-adjectives. And Telegraph Avenue reads like music, with which it is obsessed – Chabon can describe a record and make you swear you hear every sound - oh and it’s pretty focused on race relations too. Telegraph Avenue, never much of a contender, is going down – or possibly up, if the black and Jewish owners of Brokeland secondhand vinyl store can be persuaded to abandon the fight and accept the imminent arrival of a Dogpile store, owned by an All-pro quarterback made very good (Gibson Goode, in fact - lot of Dickensian apt names here!). So battle commences, with subplots deeply concerned with fatherhood – a favourite Chabon subject – midwifery (and a pregnancy approaching the shelling-out point so vividly and accurately described I think Chabon has had female help here!), the San Francisco wild parrot colony, blaxploitation, the meaning and possibilities of friendship. And the prose flies. It soars like Cochise Jones’s parrot, like the zeppelin that menaces the Californian skies. Section 3 is a bravura one sentence eleven page resume of where everyone’s at courtesy of the trajectory of a bird’s flight. Chabon deploys similes and metaphors better than any poet – ‘Along the food table ran a sawtooth of fried-chicken mountains. Wreathed in clouds. Air tanks and Sherpas were required to reach its peaks’ – ‘the elusive Titus, a cat burglar rappelling down the sheer wall of Julie’s life’ – I could go on and on with phrases and sentences that made me stop and reread with sheer pleasure. But the key to the whole book, I think, lies in Archy’s funeral oration for his lost father-figure, a wonderful speech which could be summed up, I think, by the song ‘the world is just a great big melting pot’ – but Chabon/Archy puts it so much more lyrically. On the way Bruce Lee, Tarentino, Terry Pratchett, Charlie Brown, some unexpected minor cultural figures and an enormous number of musical giants all get referenced. A great book. ( )
(less)

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May 19, 2013 Will Lock rated it 5 of 5 stars

It’s always a pleasure to find a book that first, and most important, is high-caliber fiction, and is also about a subject that is particularly important to me. Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon, is one of those books. The novel is not about jazz and the music business; it’s about people and the way they navigate relationships, culture and the world around them. But jazz and the music business create one of the key frameworks in Telegraph Avenue, and Chabon handles them with respect and insigh...more

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May 18, 2013 Knitme23 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I love Michael Chabon's writing, and Telegraph Avenue merely fueled my opinion. Clarke Peters's top-notch delivery probably helped, but I frequently wished I had a paper copy of the text handy so I could share a particularly gorgeous excerpt with a friend, a student, or simply save it to reread and marvel over. The story is a daring and original amalgam of coming of age/revery/adventure/American classic/marriage hand book. . . Wow. The chapters told from the point of view of the 14 year old boys...more

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May 06, 2013 Calvin rated it 5 of 5 stars

In a world where a book like "The Help" is satirically renamed "White People Solve Racism - You're Welcome", I couldn't keep myself from thinking a lot about the meta-story of "the fact of" Michael Chabon writing his latest novel "Telegraph Avenue". Although not so distinctly about racial problems as "The Help", this comic novel was about race: in particular, it dealt with racial dynamic in its exploration of a pair of men, one Black, one White, who ran a record store in the Berkeley/Oakland are...more

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May 04, 2013 Carolyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. My first experience of Berkeley was a dream, a stolen week or so when, on one hand, I was trying to convince myself I could make it work with this person I loved, while simultaneously breaking apart inside under the emotional strain of pretending to be the person I believed she (and my family and society and the world) wanted me to be. Unable to come clean, to admit to myself or to her or to anyone else in my life what I was feeling, I instead let things fall apart in a way that was spectacularl...more My first experience of Berkeley was a dream, a stolen week or so when, on one hand, I was trying to convince myself I could make it work with this person I loved, while simultaneously breaking apart inside under the emotional strain of pretending to be the person I believed she (and my family and society and the world) wanted me to be. Unable to come clean, to admit to myself or to her or to anyone else in my life what I was feeling, I instead let things fall apart in a way that was spectacularly painful for numerous people. But for snatches here and there during that week, those moments when I deluded myself into thinking that things might work, my life felt magical, and everything was wondrous and strange; not least of all Berkeley itself, the bustle of life along Telegraph Avenue fascinating to me, visiting, as I was, from the strip-mall-plastered cultural barrens of the San Fernando Valley.

Now, today, I live in Berkeley. I’m far more satisfied here than I ever was in Reseda or Van Nuys, but exposure has made the neighborhood, for all its beauty that I am grateful for each time I go for a stroll, mundane.

Michael Chabon is a novelist whose works, for me, have veered between the mundane and the transcendent. I doubt that if I were to first read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh today, it would resonate with me much at all, but it was the perfect book for that frightening first year out of college; the sense that Art Bechstein’s life is full of magical possibilities seeped out of the pages and into my own existence. And The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of the most shimmering, revelatory works I’ve ever read. Meanwhile, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, despite its alternate-history setting and its unlikely mixture of cultural influences and literary styles, was intellectually engaging to me but never got my emotions off the ground. As I ventured into his latest novel, Telegraph Avenue, I wondered if the landscape of its pages would more closely resemble the real one I lived in day in and day out, or the magical one in my painful, dreamlike memories.

Telegraph Avenue is the story of two deeply intertwined families. Gwen Shanks and Archy Stallings make up one of those families. Stallings is a wonderfully fitting last name for Archy, who has a habit of postponing every major decision life demands he make. (There are echoes here of Grady Tripp, the writer and professor at the center of Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys. Both men are reluctant to confront the realities of their lives, which put increasing pressure on them to become more reliable and responsible.) Gwen is a midwife, one half of the Berkeley Birth Partners, and is also pregnant, which is just one of the many factors encouraging Archy to re-evaluate his personal behavior and his professional situation. That situation involves running Brokeland Records, a beloved but not especially profitable independent record store. Gwen’s fellow Berkeley Birth Partner is Aviva Roth-Jaffe, while Archy runs Brokeland with Gwen’s husband, Nat Jaffe. Both of these longstanding partnerships are shaken up in the summer of 2004, as Brokeland is threatened by plans to build a chain megamall in the area, and Gwen has a heated confrontation with a racist doctor who then takes actions which could result in the Berkeley Birth Partners losing their license to practice.

Complicating matters between the families even further, Archy’s teenage son Titus, with whom he’s had no contact, arrives in their lives, and Julius “Julie” Jaffe, Aviva and Nat’s teenage son, becomes smitten with him.

For the novel’s first 400 pages or so, I felt that the East Bay in its pages was the one right outside my window, that one I set foot in every day. I grew to love its characters and admired how Chabon explored issues of race and privilege between them in ways that was always compassionate and humanizing for all involved. At one point, Gwen vents,
“I’m sick of having no power in this game, Aviva…Of always fighting against feeling useless. Of how sad it makes me feel that sisters won’t go to a midwife. Also, frankly, I’m sick of overprivileged, neurotic, crazy-ass (white ladies) with their white-lady latex allergies, and their white-lady OCD birth plans, and that bullshit white-lady machismo competition thing they all get into.”

By the time Gwen goes on this tear, we’ve spent enough time with her to not be taken aback or alienated by her anger, but to understand that of course she would feel this way. We also understand why Aviva is hurt by Gwen’s words.

But in its final stretch, Telegraph Avenue becomes tinged with transcendence. Like the zeppelin that represents the Dogpile corporation which seeks to build that megamall that threatens Brokeland’s existence taking flight, Telegraph Avenue finally found some emotional lift. It is a novel that understands that things don’t always work out the way we want them to, but that we usually find a way to carry on and to take our pain with us. In its closing passages, my heart was pierced by the evolving relationship of Julie and Titus, a complex and in many ways unsatisfactory love that endures in a way that is both tremendously limited and tremendously liberating. As I finished the novel, I realized that the dreamlike East Bay of that stolen week and the East Bay of my day-to-day life are, of course, one and the same.(less)

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About Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon (b. 1963) is an acclaimed and bestselling author whose works include the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Chabon achieved literary fame at age twenty-four with his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which was a major critical and commercial success. He then published Wonder Boys (1995), another bestseller, which was mad...more

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Quotes from Telegraph Avenue

“Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use.” — 5 people liked it

“Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.” — 4 people liked it

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