Telegraph Avenue
One street, two families.
As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary nurse midwives. Archy and Gwen are expecting their first baby; Nat and Aviva have a teenaged son, Julius.
When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to go forward with the construction of his latest Dogpile megastore on Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the worst for their vulnerable little enterprise. But behind Goode’s announcement a nefarious story lurks. As their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a professional struggle that tests the limits of their friendship. And simultaneously, into their already tangled lives, comes Titus Joyner, the teenaged son Archy has never acknowledged, now the love of Julius Jaffe’s life.
An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon’s most dazzling book yet.
”'Telegraph Avenue is a wonderful novel … Wonderfully engaging, exuberantly written … the world constructed here is one to lose yourself in … This is a novel that I found myself slowing down while reading, out of sheer pleasure. I put it off, and rationed it out, and just didn’t want it to end.” - Philip Hensher, Spectator
”'Deeply wise and soulful … What you get is a big, serious, probing American novel, a page-turner that, like Chabon himself, seems to walk the line between high and low culture” - Attica Locke, Guardian
‘Telegraph Avenue’ achieves the blissed-out honey-coloured atmosphere of Cameron Crowe’s film ‘Almost Famous’ or Richard Linklater’s ‘Dazed and Confused’, but is deeper and more intelligent than either of those … It feels entirely relevant to the uncertainty of the present moment’ Sunday Times -
”'An amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story … Mr. Chabon can write about just about anything … with a real, lived-in sense of empathy and passion.” - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
”'Like a favourite old jazz LP, its richly pleasurable form beginning to end.” - Independent
”'Deliriously good and emotionally mature … The dust jacket describes 'Telegraph Avenue’ as a Californian Middlemarch: it is, in Virginia Woolf’s sense, that it is 'one of the few books written for grown-up people” - ’ Scotland on Sunday
”'A multi-generational, anatomy-of-a-community doorstopper with a plot like clockwork and sentences like toffee” - Sunday Telegraph
”'Much of the wit in 'Telegraph Avenue' inheres in Chabon’s astonishing prose. I don’t just mean the showy bits: a 12-page-long sentence that includes the observations of an escaped parrot, or the lovely, credible scene from Obama’s point of view. I mean the offhand brilliance that happens everywhere.” - Jennifer Egan, New York Times Sunday