Telegraph Avenue

Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, "There is no there there." Michael Chabon, in his novel Telegraph Avenue, seems to disagree, as it is an exuberant panorama of a neighborhood on the brink of change. Just what the change should be is at issue.

The central locations is Brokeland Records, a vinyl record store on the title thoroughfare. The store sells mostly used jazz records, but is more of a meeting place for local hipsters and oddballs--it's former location was a barber shop, which used to serve as a gathering place for gossiping men in the old days.

The store is owned and run by partners--Nat Jaffe, a Jewish white man, and Archy Stallings, a black man. Their wives are also partners in a midwife business. Aviva is Nat's wife, and Gwen is the extremely pregnant wife of Archy.

The central concern of the book is when a former NFL quarterback, Gibson Goode (the "fifth richest black man in America") is set to open a large shopping plaza nearby, which will include a music megastore, certain to put Brokeland out of business. Goode has the most prominent local businessman, a funeral director named Chan Flowers, in his pocket.

While this is going on Archy discovers he has a teenage son, Titus, that he didn't know he had. Titus befriends Nat's son, a timid gay boy named Julie--they meet at a class on Quentin Tarantino films. Flowers is being shaken down by Archy's father, the forgotten star of '70s blaxploitation pictures.

Telegraph Avenue is rife with nostalgia. It's set in 2004, but it almost has the feeling of a period piece. It wouldn't be good business by anyone to open a big music store today--a store selling vinyl records is actually a better option now. This line, from an early section set at a flea market, sets the tone: "Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value. They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you. Their value was indexed only to the sense of personal completeness, perfection of the soul, that would flood you when, at last, you filled the last gap on your checklist."

It was interesting to read this book while also reading Elmore Leonard; the writers are yin and yang in their approach to prose. Leonard wrote of rewriting something that felt like writing, while Chabon's prose is on steroids. His vocabulary is sesquipedelean, and his sentences complex. One sentence, a Faulkerian monster, must be over 3,000 words, and starts with a parrot flying out of a window and ends up in studio where Bruce Lee learned kung fu.

Chabon also can't help but pepper pop culture references throughout. A sliding metal door is called "Blofeldian," a man's head was "shaved clean as a porn star's testicle," and the comic strip Foxtrot is name checked. This is both fun and indulgent, as Chabon seems inordinately fond of his own writing. But that's okay--a writer should write to please himself, and hope that others enjoy it, too.

The best thing about the book is that it gives a view of a place in a time: a used-record shop in western Oakland in the first decade of the twenty-first century. "So many of the of the other used-record kings of the East Bay had already gone under, hung it up, or turned themselves into Internet-only operations, closing their doors, letting the taps of bullshit go dry. Brokeland Records was nearly the last of its kind, Ishi, Chingachgook, Martha the passenger pigeon."

Though Chabon loves the area, he filters criticisms through his characters: "She had never liked the Bay Area, with its irresolute and timid weather, the tendency of its skies in any season to bleed gray, the way it had arranged its hills and vistas like a diva setting up chairs around her to ensure the admiration of visitors. The people around here were fetishists and cultists, prone to schism and mania, liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken."

Chabon may break almost all of Elmore Leonard's rules, but there's space enough in life for both men.