Telegraph Avenue: A Novel - Couverture souple

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the sketchy yet freewheeling borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland, on the quintessential East Bay avenue that gives the book its title. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary nurse midwives who have welcomed, between them, more than a thousand new-minted little citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart, half tavern, half temple, stands Brokeland Records. Archy and Gwen are expecting their first baby; Nat and Aviva have a teenaged son, Julius. Cranky, flawed, and loving each other with all the fierceness we've come to expect of Chabon characters, they have worked to construct lives and livelihoods that have a groove, looking to connect across barriers of race and class, and clinging to a sense of order and security through their stubbornly old-school ways.

When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth richest black man in America, announces plans to go forward with the construction of his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby neglected stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. What they don't know is that Goode's announcement marks the climax of a decades-old secret history, encompassing a forgotten crime of the Black Panther era, the tragedy of Archy's own deadbeat father a long-faded Blaxploitation star named Luther Stallings and the perpetual shining failure of American optimism about race. As their husbands struggle to mount a defense, at Berkeley Birth Partners 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 their already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenaged son Archy has never acknowledged, and the love of 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.

An amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story....[Chabon's] people become so real to us, their problems so palpably netted in the author's buoyant, expressionistic prose, that the novel gradually becomes a genuinely immersive experience something increasingly rare in our ADD age. --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Chabon is an extraordinarily generous writer. He is generous to his characters, to his landscapes, to syntax, to words, to his readers there is a real joy in his work....Both ambitious and lighthearted, the novel is a touching, gentle, comic meditation. --Cathleen Schine, New York Review of Books

Over the years, Michael Chabon has been something of a shape-shifter....With his astounding new novel, Telegraph Avenue, however, he has taken that artistic restlessness and applied its energy toward imagining the Greaet American Novel with a multiracial cast.....[Telegraph Avenue] steamrolls the barrier that has kept the Great American Novel at odds with the country it s supposed to reflect. Creole, Archy says, in explaining Brokeland Records musical aesthetic. That means you stop drawing those lines. It means African and Europe cooked up in the same skillet. Chopin, hymns, Irish music, polyrhythms, talking drums. And people. With this huge-hearted, funny, improbably hip book, Michael Chabon has proven it is possible in fiction, too. --John Freeman, Boston Globe