Telegraph avenue
Ratings2
Average rating2.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating2.5
The new novel from Michael Chabon, his first in 5 years, is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic. 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. 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. An intimate epic set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all of its own, Telegraph Avenue is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.
Reviews with the most likes.
So, let's start off by being fair: 1) I would never had even looked twice at this book had it not been by Michael Chabon. 2) I had idly wondered, in my revery at [b:The Yiddish Policemen's Union 16703 The Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925449s/16703.jpg 95855] how people who weren't me and didn't share my passions reacted to the book. And now I have an answer.This book is ostensibly about lay midwives, jazz music and blaxploitation films. I can't quite figure out how to put how I feel about lay midwives into a sentence that is polite enough for social media and does not horribly side track this review, so let's let that suffice. I certainly don't hate music, but I'm just not one of those people who gets music, you know? Like, I wish I did and I respect people who are into music, but Chabon goes on and on about a piece, or whatever, and my eyes glaze and I skip several paragraphs and he's still going on and I have no idea what he's talking about, and if we're truly being honest here (because hey, why not?) I really don't know why anyone would buy a record in 2014 anyway so the fact that there are COMPETING record stores seems ridiculously anachronistic, but again, I don't get music, so what do I know? And finally, I've never had an opinion on blaxploitation films (although I strongly recommend going down the rabbit hole and wikipedia-ing blaxploitation, and that finding the legions of other subgenres ending in -ploitation.)So the idea that I would read and enjoy a book about lay midwives, jazz and blaxploitation was already on flimsy ground.And let me also say, that I certainly don't believe that there are certain topics that are verboten based on race or sex or religion. But then, let's pretend to ourselves for a second that we're Michael Chabon, and we're famous for writing books about bi-curious geeky Jewish boys and we start a book about a bi-curious geeky Jewish boy, who happens to be into Jazz and then we end up also writing about blaxploitation and then before you know it, there are a couple of Black characters and then all of a sudden you're knee-deep in racial tension. So there's a few of things you can do: you could back out until you're back on safe territory; you can do a lot of researching or you can decide to forge ahead, gunsblazing, and write about racial relations.Chabon clearly decided to do that latter, and while I will continue to sing his praises for writing uncomfortable truths and borderline offensively accurate portrayals of the Jewish community, as a Jewish woman reading a book by a Jewish author, I was pretty unsettled by him (attempting to) do the same with the African American community. And intersectionality was definitely problematic: in an entire book on Jewish-Back relations there were two female Black characters: An afro-touting, impossibly skinny, impossibly sexy, aged sex symbol/film star and a perpetually hungry, perpetually angry, perpetually pregnant woman. Not that the Black men were portrayed that much better: they inevitably abandoned their children and were to a one portrayed as violent, cheating and irresponsible.Also, his conclusion seemed to be that White people (of whom there are no non-Jews in the book) and Black people are too different and want things that are too different and any partnership, or indeed real friendship is doomed to fail. In conclusion, if this had just been a book about privileged, Jewish, Julius Jaffe, who writes Lovecraftian poetry, and his questionably unrequited love for Titus Joyner, obsessed with Blaxploitation and trying to come in to his own after a troubled childhood, and it was done respectfully, without stereotypes and the other 95% were jettisoned, I would have read the heck out of it. As was, an extremely poor showing by one of my favorite authors.
