“Telegraph Avenue,” Michael Chabon’s rich, comic new novel, is a homage to an actual place: the boulevard in Northern California where Oakland — historically an African-American city — aligns with Berkeley, whose bourgeois white inhabitants are, as one character puts it, “liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken.”
As the summer
of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still
hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of
Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of
Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe,
are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who
have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented
utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.
When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson
Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build
his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue,
Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little
enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a
battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of
their friendship.
Michael Chabon's web page
Michael Chabon's web page
interview with Michael Chabon , the Guardian
interview with Michael Chabon, KQED Radio
