A Review of Michael Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue”
Nostalgia
In these pandemic times, one almost wishes that you could turn back the clock a few years — just to live in a time of relative certainty over what the future might hold, not more of these COVID-19 variants and such things that keep popping out of the woodwork at ill-advised times, such as Christmas. In a way, I did turn back the clock this past week by finally picking up my hardcover copy of Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, a book that I bought 10 years ago. Well, it looks like nostalgia was on Chabon’s mind as he was writing the book, too, albeit he was writing in much better times, for Telegraph Avenue is set in August 2004 in Chabon’s hometown of Berkeley, California. It is a book that is concerned with both birth and death — the birth of children, the potential re-birth and vitalisation of a rundown neighbourhood, and the death of independent vinyl record stores (though we should know that not all of them did die). It is also a book about the taut friendships between Blacks and Caucasians. To that end, Telegraph Avenue is a very interesting book, but a failed one. For one thing, this 465-page novel didn’t have to be quite that long. And it is a very long 465 pages to read, to boot. Reading this book took me nearly a week on my Christmas and New Years’ break, and it proved to be quite tiresome at times. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Telegraph Avenue is an intergenerational family story. It tells the tale of Archy Stallings, a Black man, and Nat Jaffe, who is White, who together own a record store on the book title’s titular street in the Berkeley-Oakland area. The store is teetering on the brink of closure, no thanks in part to the plans of a wealthy Black man and former NFL player named Gibson Goode, who wants to open a massive record store just down the street in a huge commercial development that he hopes to build. Meanwhile, Archy’s pregnant wife, Gwen, and Nat’s wife, Aviva, are midwives who are in a pickle after a home birth they were attending doesn’t go quite as planned. On top of that, Nat’s 14-year-old son, who has the feminine name of Julie (Jules), is exploring his sexuality and has a crush on another Black teenager named Titus, who is harbouring a secret of his own. Meanwhile, Archy’s former dope addict of a father, Luther — to whom Archy is estranged from — is in hot water of his own, wanting to raise funds to make a modern-day Blaxploitation film so he can reach the glory days of his past as a kung-fu film star of the 1970s. The problem, however, is that Luther has ticked off the wrong people, which has ripple effects back to Archy. Into these storylines are weaved many other subplots, which forms a bit of an obvious problem.
To be charitable, though, I can say first of all that Chabon is a gifted writer and he tries some experimental bits of writing here — including a 12-page section that is one long run-on sentence narrated from the viewpoint of a very smart parrot. He also weaves real-life figures into the text to make the narrative seem more of a documentary than fiction. It can be said that one former U.S. President makes a cameo in this read (I’ll keep which one to myself so as not to play spoiler, which Entertainment Weekly did when they published their review 10 years ago — I remember these things). The problem, though, is that Telegraph Avenue is filled with too many minor characters who disappear for large portions of the text, only to reappear later — making it hard to sometimes make heads or tails out of what’s actually going on in the plot. The other thing is that Chabon is a master of a stylistic type of writing. However, substance trumps style any day of the week, and that means that you have whole paragraphs, if not pages, that go on about something that’s not immediately germane to the plot. It can also be said that certain plot lines are more interesting than others, and parts of the book are very dry — to say the least! Overall, I was particularly disappointed with this novel and found it wasn’t up to the same usual standards as some of Chabon’s other works, including The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
To me, Chabon is a writer who is either hot or cold, and while I’d say that Telegraph Avenue is a matter of Chabon being cold, the truth is that it is probably more of a lukewarm read. Some segments are fascinating, but sometimes things really get bogged down in detail. For instance, when Gwen is set to face a hospital disciplinary hearing of sorts, Chabon goes on for a few pages of where she has gone shopping and where she has had her hair done in the three hours leading up to the hearing. This is the sort of thing that would have worked best in a short paragraph — tell me what she’s wearing when she shows up at the door of the hospital. There’s very little need to get so descriptive of something that has very little to do with the plot. It could be said, then, that Chabon sometimes gets more than a bit carried away. Unfortunately, the whole book is like this. Something exciting happens, then we get a lot of exposition about something else — which drags the whole pace of the novel down to that of a snail’s. It’s a shame because there was an interesting story about Black-White relationships and neighbourhood gentrification to be told here. At the end of the day, Telegraph Avenue is, at best, a less than mediocre read with not a whole lot to say that could have been said in half the length. If tedium is your friend, then Telegraph Avenue is certainly a book you should read. Me? I won’t look back too fondly on my reading of this, I don’t think.
Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue was published by HarperCollins on September 11, 2012.
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You may also be interested in the following review: Michael Chabon’s Pops.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
