It’s clear Chabon intended to write a big, sprawling novel so I’m not going to ding the structure of Telegraph Avenue for being a bit of a mess.īut I will ding the novel for lacking a vision that might unify its multitude of elements.
I also expect a well constructed story, and on this quality Chabon is only middlingly – but I think deliberately – successful. I expect strong, well-drawn, complicated, but largely sympathetic characters from Michael Chabon, and he delivers these in Telegraph Avenue. In the mix are Archy’s father, Luther Stallings, a feckless former blaxploitation star looking to finance a new movie, and restart his career, using dubious means the teenage sons of Archy and Nat, who are both friends and having sex and an assortment of uniformly colorful secondary characters who round out the mise en scene. Gwen and Archy’s marriage is also in danger because Gwen, who is nine-months pregnant, no longer can tolerate Archy’s serial infidelity. Both businesses are under threat, the record business from a proposed entertainment superstore, and the midwifery practice as a result of a complication that Gwen is perceived to have mishandled. The men are the proprietors of Brokeland Records, a used vinyl record store specializing in jazz and funk, while the women are mid-wives and the owners of Berkeley Birth Partners. Telegraph Avenue is principally concerned with two couples, one African-American (Archy Stallings and Gwen Shanks) and one white (Nat Jaffe and Aviva Roth-Jaffe), and the two businesses they own in Oakland, California. If you want a pretty good novel, read on and see if Chabon’s latest matches your taste. If you want greatness, you won’t find it in Telegraph Avenue. In fact, with care and a little luck, you could spend your entire life reading pretty good novels. Pretty good novels are less common than merely mediocre novels, or frankly bad novels, but they aren’t that uncommon either. It takes real talent and hard work to write a pretty good novel. This is both praise and criticism, but not blame. I’ve read a large number of pretty good novels by pretty good authors, and now I’ve read one more: Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon.
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