Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Previously published in The Herald. 

Pulitzer prize winning writer Michael Chabon’s new book Telegraph Avenue sounds incredibly intriguing in theory: a well known pair of Berkeley midwives Gwen and Aviva suffer their first birthing disaster; their husbands Archy and Nat are bandmates and are trying to run an old-school record store; Archy’s father is an ex-Blaxploitation star, once involved with the Black Panthers and now caught in some strange mess of blackmail and there is a sudden entry of Titus, Archy’s son from a previous relationship who was ‘back and smacking up against the outside of their life like a moth banging against a lampshade’.   All this plus the pop culture and music references thrown in with abandon should make for a riveting narrative but somehow just doesn’t. 

Archy and Nat have been both friends and business partners for years, running their store Brokeland Records, which provides vinyl and ‘bullsh*t on tap’. There’s a lot of ‘bullsh*t on tap’ here, especially in the scenes featuring these two fairly useless men who seem quite content to let their wives be the only responsible adults around. Gwen and Aviva together run the successful Berkeley Birth Partners and while faced with their own difficulties, they must also watch their husband’s fight against the possible closure of the record store and so lose their only identity - as Nat says, when ‘the ice melts, where do you put the penguin?’ Lot’s of small subplots are put into action right away - Archy is caught sleeping with anther woman; an ex-NFL player and the ‘fifth richest black man in America’’s Dogpile Mall is sure to hurt local business a great deal; Nat and Aviva’s son Julie is flirting with homosexuality and appears to be madly in love with Titus; Gwen, who is ‘sorry only that she was not sorry at all’ has refused to be apologetic for a number of things, most importantly for being a black midwife; Archy and Nat’s organ player has just died and even Barak Obama has a cameo, chatting with Gwen as she watches her husband’s band perform at a fundraiser for the soon to be senator. There are a great many meanderings and subplots that are all crowded under one arc here, but what that arc is takes quite a lot of patience and time to figure out. 

That this is Chabon’s style will be familiar to those who have read any of his work before, but it can still be a little bit tedious (as it was in parts of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as well). There is plenty of pop culture awareness here, from Star Trek (when the very pregnant Gwen had, ‘like Spock battling the septenary mating madness of the pon farr, … resisted urges and surges of estrogen and progesterone’), to of course 70’s soul and jazz records, to films by the likes of Kubrick that Julie and Titus are watching in a class. None of this lightens the narrative though, which continues to be a bit of a chore to read. 

Ultimately, Telegraph Avenue would still be a successful novel if Chabon had pulled off so many varying voices - both African American and Jewish - without heading into caricature, but he hasn’t been able to do this. In fact, it’s not just the dialogue that feels cartoonish - some of the action seems set up to head in that direction as well. Archy and Nat’s organ player, for instance, dies when his Hammond falls on top of him - a cliche of a cartoon death caused by a piano falling on top of a man. It’s indulgences like these that stop Telegraph Avenue from reaching the heights it could have.