“Telegraph Avenue” is unquestionably a Great American Novel, but at first glance you might not recognize it as such. Michael Chabon braids plot twists, extraneous details, and references to such low-culture manifestations as comic books and kung fu movies into his stories with an almost adolescent abandon. In America a new Chabon book is a major event, but outside the English-speaking world, his verbal extravagance and fond embrace of popular culture have tended to undermine his credibility. Compared to contemporaries like Jonathan Franzen, he doesn’t always look as important as he is.
The central character in “Telegraph Avenue” is described, on his first appearance, thus:
Moonfaced, mountainous, moderately stoned, Archy Stallings manned the front counter of Brokeland Records, holding a random baby, wearing a tan corduroy suit over a pumpkin-bright turtleneck that reinforced his noted but not disadvantageous resemblance to Gamera, the giant mutant flying tortoise of Japanese cinema. He had the kid tucked up under his left arm as, with his free right hand, he worked through the eighth of fifteen crates from the Benezra estate, the records in crate number 8 favoring, like Archy, the belly meat of jazz, salty and well marbled with funk.
Archy is one of Chabon’s typical men, well-meaning but indecisive and ill-prepared for life. He might seem like a cousin to Rob Fleming in “High Fidelity” if it weren’t for the orange turtleneck and the baby, which he has borrowed in an attempt to prepare for his own approaching fatherhood. (And by the way, he’s black.) Chabon’s adjectival tsunami places Archy in the midst of his life and at the same time shows how hard it is, in the contemporary flood of images and choices, for him to hold his own.
To Chabon, being passionate about jazz or Japanese cinema is just another way of being serious. “Telegraph Avenue” takes place on the continent’s geographic fringe, but it deals with themes at the heart of American culture: the legacy of the social changes of the 1970s, the possibility and fragility of black-white friendships, the importance of meaningful work, the modern and eternal question of fatherhood. On the famous street in Berkeley, California, with its countercultural past and its multicultural present, he’s searching for signs of America’s future.
The large cast of “Telegraph Avenue” includes Archy’s best friend and the other owner of Brokeland Records, white, Jewish, crabby Nat Jaffe, with his “relentless, nettlesome, ecstatic, inspiring” passion for music. There’s Nat’s fourteen-year-old son Julie, plunging recklessly into the adult world of heartbreak by falling in love with his new best friend, Titus Joyner. There’s Nat’s wife Aviva and Archy’s wife Gwen, two veteran midwives fighting the medical establishment for the right to go on doing home births. There’s Archy’s father, the down-and-out former blaxploitation star Luther Stallings. And there’s Gibson Goode, “the fifth richest black man in America,” whose Dogpile media merchandising empire is about to put Brokeland out of business.
Chabon inhabits all these characters, black and white, convincingly and sympathetically. At the center is Archy, struggling not only with the prospect of the new baby—and with the appearance of Titus, his earlier, unacknowledged son—but with the legacy of his own no-good progenitor. Fathers, in his experience, are useless; how can he, Archy, be any different? Fatherhood is a favorite theme for Chabon—of all his literary contemporaries he’s the most committed family man—but he’s never explored it as deeply as here.
Meanwhile, Archy’s wife Gwen is 36 weeks pregnant and going through her own series of crises. First she catches Archy with another woman; then she nearly loses a patient; then she entirely loses her most valuable possession, her self-control. She’s so sick of forgiving Archy for all his lapses of fidelity that her sigh of marital disappointment goes off like a jihadi bomb, packed with “shards of irony, nails of bitterness, jagged chips of bleak wonder.”
Apology and forgiveness are among the book’s themes, not only the daily offerings of remorse that hold marriages together, but the deeper contrition and exoneration that will be needed if America is ever to come to terms with its history of racial and economic injustice. Gwen in particular refuses to apologize, instead cherishing her anger, “feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream.” Yet when it comes right down to it, she balks at the thought of passing her rage on to the next generation.
Music isn’t the answer, but it offers a ground where the characters can come together, at least for a while. Archy thinks of Brokeland Records as an oasis where traders and tribes of all races mix, where they sit around telling stories, listening to each other’s sound, “spreading the collective wisdom back and forth.” The Internet, Chabon suggests, may form a new oasis, with Nat and Archy selling their records online to Japanese collectors while Titus and Julie reshuffle race and gender in the disembodied world of games.
Chabon isn’t for everyone: the rolls and twists of his prose give some readers motion sickness, and his tics and gimmicks (the cute Tarantino references, the single sentence that goes on for 12 pages) can be too much. But beneath the show-offishness lie a rare openness and compassion, and you can track Chabon’s crooked prose a long way into the wilderness of the human heart.
The Eccentricity Plot
Is the American ideal of self-realization a false promise? Along with other American writers just turning fifty—Jonathan Franzen (1959) in “Freedom,” Jennifer Egan (1962) in “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Jeffrey Eugenides (1960) in “The Marriage Plot”—Michael Chabon (1963) takes as one of his central themes the risks and limits of Americans’ cherished individuality. Though “Telegraph Avenue” is an optimistic, even cheerful book, Chabon shares the view that to become fully oneself is no guarantee of happiness.
Like Egan and Franzen, Chabon writes in “Telegraph Avenue” about the moment in midlife when unsuspecting pursuers of happiness lose their way in a dark forest, or at any rate a nasty patch of weeds. For Franzen, the problem lies in too many options and too few limits. His characters free themselves from partners, family, friendships, place of origin, only to discover they can’t construct an identity out of nothing.
Novelists who were young in the early 1980s still seem to be sorting out that confusing time. Eugenides’s three students leave college in 1982 barely knowing themselves—in sharp contrast to the contemporary students in Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding.” (Harbach’s kids have their sexual orientation and their career goals all figured out. They suffer from fear of failure, but not from not knowing what they want.) Egan’s characters look for identity in music until even that is co-opted by “the music industry.”
Chabon is an optimist, though not a naïve one. “Telegraph Avenue,” which is set in 2004, features a cameo appearance by Barack Obama. After watching Nat and Archy’s band play jazz covers at a political fundraiser, the future president (think “hope”) remarks that the important thing is to have work you love, even if it looks useless to someone else.
“Telegraph Avenue” calls his statement into question. Single-minded dedication to the work they love is part of what brings the book’s characters into conflict with each other: Gwen with Aviva, Archy with Nat, Nat with the world. Still, Chabon is more reluctant than Franzen to criticize the dream of individuality, and more wary of drawing conclusions about society as a whole. To Franzen, too much individuality makes people difficult, unhappy, and out of touch with reality. To Chabon there’s no going back. Individuals, in all our “useless” eccentricity, is who we are.
Trouw, Sept. 15, 2012. Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue (New York: Harper 2012; Amsterdam: Anthos, 2012).