Telegraph Avenue By Michael Chabon Harper, 480 pp., $31.99
Telegraph Avenue is so exuberant, it's as if Michael Chabon has pulled joy from the air and squeezed it into the shape of words. A vibrant affection for a place, time and culture - 1970s Oakland-Berkeley, blaxploitation films and funky jazz - feeds that energy, but there's more. His sentences spring and bounce, even when dwelling on mundane details: A palm tree "hikes its green slattern skirts"; a street cut off by a freeway "had a dazed feel, a man who had taken a blow to the head staggering hatless down from Telegraph, faceplanting at the overpass."
Telegraph Avenue, the dividing line between hippie-progressive Berkeley and historically black Oakland, home of the Black Panthers, is where Brokeland Records is located.
The novel turns around the store's owners - "moonfaced, mountainous, moderately stoned" Archy Stallings, who is black, and high-strung musician Nat Jaffe, who is white - and their families. Much to Archy's displeasure, his father, Luther Stallings, has just resurfaced; he was briefly a blaxploitation star before drugs got the better of him.
The store, which specializes in jazz from John Coltrane to Charles Kynard and those less well known, is a neighbourhood place where an aging keyboard player, an undertaker-slashcity councilman and a dorky white lawyer regularly stop to shoot the breeze. But it's in trouble. Since the story is set in 2004, it's not online downloads that threaten Brokeland's future, but the coming of a new entertainment complex developed by Gibson Goode, an ex-NFL star turned music mogul businessman (think Magic Johnson plus Dr. Dre).
Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that borrowed from the real history of early comics. Telegraph Avenue is grounded in a very different but equally specific artistic moment - the music and films of black America in the 1970s - which Chabon approaches with allembracing fandom.
Like Archy and Nat, wives Gwen and Aviva work together as a top Bay Area midwife team. Gwen comes from a long line of high-achieving African American women, and Aviva is "the Alice Waters of midwives" (praise not to be taken lightly in Berkeley). Early on, a home birth goes off the rails and Gwen lashes out at the hospital establishment that fails to give them enough respect. Her outburst puts their practice in jeopardy.
Chabon comes at the plot obliquely, jumping into a moment of action before explaining who or how or why. The book opens with two teenage boys flying down the street, one on a bicycle, black, and the other, white, behind him on a skateboard. It's beautiful, poetic and serves as a prelude while also foreshadowing the partnership between Archy and Nat. Later we realize those weren't just any boys, they were part of the story all along.
The boy on the skateboard, Julius, is Nat and Aviva's artistic, eclectic son; he goes by Julie. He's enamored with Titus Joyner, the boy on the bike, who makes a late appearance. Titus is handsome, close-mouthed and sometimes aggressive, and turns out to be Archy's long-neglected son.
The novel often pairs hard and soft: Gwen is fiery, Archy is a sweetheart; Aviva is strong, Nat is neurotic. The relationships are nuanced, with trade-offs, cruelties and sudden acts of forgiveness. It is full of real emotion, fractured tempers, canyons of regret and big-hearted men breaking into tears.
All the way along, Chabon plays with words. His characters' surnames are playfully packed with information: Archy Stallings is a 36-year-old who can't grow up. Walter Bankwell has made some money. Gibson Goode is ironically named - he's so bad he soars a wildly expensive custom black zeppelin over Oakland like Darth Vader.
There are clear parallels between the predicament faced by Brokeland Records and the challenges that confront independent bookstores. How does a store that everyone says is outdated survive? How do the choices we make affect the communities in which we live?
Fans have been waiting five years since Chabon's bestselling novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternative-history detective story set in a Jewish community that settled in Alaska after the Second World War. That book's world was so distant from our own that it won major science fiction prizes, the Hugo and the Nebula. Telegraph Avenue is fantastic but in a different way: It returns to the realism of his earliest novels with dizzying language, a delight in process and paragraph after paragraph of worddrunk riffs.
