Telegraph Avenue

Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, the owners of a popular neighborhood record store in North Oakland, find themselves beset by both personal and professional crises. A new corporate store financed by former NFL player Gibson Goode is threatening to move into the neighborhood and drive Brokeland Records out of business. The venture has the backing of powerful city councilman Chan Flowers, who will only change his stance if Archy can locate his estranged father, a former blaxpoitation star who knows Flowers’ dirty secrets. Meanwhile, Titus, Archy’s illegitimate son, walks into his life for the first time, becoming an object of attraction for Nat’s overachieving son Julius and further complicating Archy’s already shaky marriage with Gwen, a midwife who faces the potential loss of her hospital privileges following a botched birth.

Over the course of his 25-year career, Michael Chabon has shown a knack for keeping things interesting. There have been a few constants in his work (Jewish culture, LGBT themes, fractured father-son relationships), but otherwise, each novel has been a world unto its own. This is true of his latest offering as well, and unsurprisingly Chabon excels at capturing the diverse community dynamics and cultural nostalgia of his Telegraph Avenue setting. What is surprising, however, is just how incomplete and uneven the rest of the book feels.

To start, while the characters are certainly quirky, none of them are especially likeable or do much to drive the story. Chabon’s past protagonists were flawed as well, but they were driven by a sense of purpose (be it Grady Tripp’s quixotic quest to complete his manuscript or Meyer Landsman’s determination to solve the case). Archy, on the other hand, is a serial philanderer, absent husband, and ungrateful (though, perhaps, justifiably) son who doesn’t even seem like he wants to be in the music business half the time. Nat, on the other hand, really does want to save the business, but his role in the proceedings is almost comic relief: he’s prickly and neurotic to the nth degree.

More grievous, however, is the pacing. Chabon has long been a critic of “plotlessness” in literary fiction, and to his credit, a lot does happen here. But instead of alternating the plot threads in a way that builds tension, Chabon ziz-zags, digresses, riffs, and abruptly changes tone. There is a stream-of-consciousness section that stretches a single sentence over several pages, new background characters popping up seemingly every chapter (including a little old lady who claimed to have trained Bruce Lee), and a general lack of any cohesive identity. By the end, the fate of the record store seems less like a pivotal development and more like a “Oh, so that’s what happened” amid all the madness.

This is not to say that Telegraph Avenue is a total disappointment. Chabon’s prose remains lively if a bit too unconstrained, and when the novel stays put long enough to focus on something, the results are either very funny, very moving, or sometimes both. It’s just a shame that for a writer of Chabon’s caliber, these moments are so few and far between.

7.25/10