Synopses & Reviews
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. Adding another layer of complications to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.
Review
“An amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story….[Chabon's] people become so real to us, their problems so palpably netted in the authors buoyant, expressionistic prose, that the novel gradually becomes a genuinely immersive experience something increasingly rare in our ADD age.” Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Review
“Chabon is an extraordinarily generous writer. He is generous to his characters, to his landscapes, to syntax, to words, to his readers there is a real joy in his work.…Both ambitious and lighthearted, the novel is a touching, gentle, comic meditation.” Cathleen Schine, New York Review of Books
Review
“Astounding...steamrolls the barrier that has kept the Great American Novel at odds with the country its supposed to reflect....[A] huge-hearted, funny, improbably hip book.” Boston Globe
Review
“Forget Joycean or Bellovian or any other authorial allusion. Telegraph Avenue might best be described as Chabonesque. Exuberantly written, generously peopled, its sentences go off like a summer fireworks show, in strings of bursting metaphor.” Jess Walter, San Francisco Chronicle
Review
“Chabon has made a career of routing big, ambitious projects through popular genres, with superlative results.…The scale of Telegraph Avenue is no less ambitious.…Much of the wit...inheres in Chabon's astonishing prose. I don't just mean the showy bits… I mean the offhand brilliance that happens everywhere.” Jennifer Egan, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
Review
“Witty and compassionate and full of more linguistic derring-do than any other writer in American could carry off.” Ron Charles, Washington Post
Review
“This is a novel rich in story and character, rich in its dialogue and descriptions, rich in spirit and invention — and full of sharp, funny writing.…The spirit of Telegraph Avenue is one of union and reconciliation, a welcome, exuberant voice in our fractious times.” Cleveland Plain Dealer
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“An end-of-an era epic....A Joyce-an remix with a hipper rhythm track.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
“A magnificently crafted, exuberantly alive, emotionally lustrous, and socially intricate saga....Bubbling with lovingly curated knowledge about everything from jazz to pregnancy…Chabon's rhapsodically detailed, buoyantly plotted, warmly intimate cross-cultural tale of metamorphoses is electric with suspense, humor, and bebop dialogue.…An embracing, radiant masterpiece.” Booklist , starred review
Review
“If any novelist can pack the entire American zeitgeist into 500 pages, its Chabon....Ambitious, densely written, sometimes very funny, and fabulously over the top, here's a rare book that really could be the great American novel.” Library Journal (starred review)
Review
“Virtuosity is the word most commonly associated with Chabon, and if Telegraph Avenue, the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, is at first glance less conceptual than its predecessors, the sentences are no less remarkable.” Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland (a novel for children), The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and Gentlemen of the Road, as well as the short story collections A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth and the essay collections Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs. He is the chairman of the board of the MacDowell Colony. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.