What Book to Read?

Michael Chabon is one of my favourite authors. Looking back over my What Book To Read blog, I see that I’ve already reviewed three of his books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), The Final Solution (2004), The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007).* I thought the first of these was brilliant, had minor quibbles with the second, and found the language of the third daunting, but very worthwhile in the end. Telegraph Avenue (2012) resembles the third in this; it is a challenge to read, but richly rewards the effort.

It is 2004. Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe run a second hand record store called Brokeland Records, specialising in rock, funk and jazz,  located on Telegraph Avenue, where white hipster Berkley shades into the largely black working class town of Oakland. Telegraph Avenue is on a downward slide, and so is their vinyl record business. The fifth-richest black man in America has announced that he is building his latest Dogpile megastore just down the road, and it will include a second-hand record section. It may regenerate the district, but it will likely ruin Archie and Nat. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe are also friends and business partners: they run a midwifery service called the Berkley Birth Partners. Their problems arise from a home-birth that goes wrong. Furthermore, Gwen is thirty-six weeks pregnant and not currently interested in sex, but the same can’t be said for Archy. His estranged father, a former drug addict and briefly the star of a few ‘Blaxploitation’ films, is in trouble and asking for his help, and Titus, the teenage son he never acknowledged from a former relationship, has come looking for him. Titus has met Julius, the teenage son of Nat and Aviva, and Julius has developed a huge crush on him. And then are the neighbours, friends and local business people, at least one of whom is decidedly shady, with a Black Panther past. And there’s a talking parrot. Does Chabon have a thing about parrots? The novel opens on a day when everything goes wrong for Andy and Nat and Gwen and Aviva, and things keep going wrong. Can the friendships, the businesses, the marriages survive the disasters, some brought about by external forces, others the working out of long simmering tensions, and some the result of just plain bad temper? Can the characters find new directions and meanings in their lives?

Nothing else I’ve read by Chabon deals so directly with the pressures of contemporary America. Economic decline now seems to be a pervasive theme in American literature; here it is both a contributor to the sense of failure that permeates much of the book, and a catalyst for change which may provide redemption. Archy, for example, is tired of trying to run a failing business, ‘tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path  of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.’ But what can he do about it?

The issue of race is also central. Gwen and Archie are black, Nat and Aviva are white, and this conditions how they respond to the problems they face. Gwen, for example, has to fight ‘the urge to apologise, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to.’ ‘I’m sick of having no power in this game,’ she says. Nat finds it’s not always comfortable being ‘a white guy living along the edge of blackness all your life.’ But the black/white relationship is never simple. Archy sees the record shop ideally as a way of fusing racial differences through the creation of what he calls ‘Brokeland Creole’ – many styles of music melded together; ‘That means you stop drawing those lines.’ Nat comes to realise that the issues between the four main characters are not about race; they are about personal desires and drives. ‘For years [Nat’s] life had balanced like the world of legend on the backs of great elephants, which stood on the back of a giant turtle; the elephants were his partnership with Archy, and Aviva’s with Gwen, the turtle was his belief that real and ordinary friendship between black people and white people was possible … Now that foundational pileup of bonds and beliefs was tottering … Not because anybody was a racist. There was no tragic misunderstanding rooted in centuries of slavery and injustice … it just turned out that a tower of elephants and turtles was no way to hold up a world.’ But lest the reader think that Chabon is making light of the depths of racism in America, it is a brief intrusion into the story by Barak Obama, then a state Senator just beginning his political career, that gives birth to a way thinking about a more fulfilling future for all of them. ‘The lucky ones,’ Obama says, ‘are the people … who find work that means something to them.’ A trite enough point, but of great importance to Gwen and Aviva, Archy and Nat.

This is an extremely dense book, both in terms of the twists and interweaving of the story, and of the language – as is always true for Chabon, but perhaps with even greater intensity than ever. There are gems of expression on every page, many of them very funny. Just to take one at random, try this: ‘Whenever she asked Archy to bring her a Tampax, he always got this look on his face, somewhere between intimidation, as by an advanced concept of cosmic theory, and dread, as if mere contact with a tampon might cause him spontaneously to grow a vagina.’ Sometimes, indeed, the language is too dense for me, requiring maximum concentration just to understand what is being said. The book is divided into five sections, one of them only a few pages long – but written as a single sentence – a brilliant display of syntactical juggling, but not for the faint hearted. Which I am sometimes.

You can read more about Chabon here. I know nothing about the music that he is talking about, though his familiarity with it is obviously as great as his knowledge of comics in Kavalier and Clay. It’s probably just coincidence that the whole book brings to my mind a song by another group from another era – Telegraph Road, from Dire Straits. You can listen to why I think it’s relevant here.

*Actually I’ve reviewed four, but seem to have omitted to post the review of and Gentlemen of the Road (2007). I will remedy that soon.