Telegraph Avenue #5

Well, boys and girls, this is the end. This is our final Telegraph Avenue readalong post. This one will cover the final section, Brokeland. This readalong is sponsored by Emily of As The Crowe Flies and Reads and Harper Collins. If you would like to pre-order Telegraph Avenue, please visit Odyssey Bookstore. Interested in some other views on this novel? You can find the other read-along participants here.


I closed the cover of this book and I felt...unsatisfied. This has never happened to me while reading a Michael Chabon novel and I'm trying to put my finger on exactly what rubbed me the wrong way about this ending. I think, after spending almost 500 pages with the characters, I wanted more to happen. I'm not saying that everything had to end happily ever after, but I wanted things to change more than they did. I felt in some cases (Titus and Julie, for example) that things sort of went backwards. I expected to finally have a strong reaction to Archy, the character who is the center of this story, but I still felt mostly ambivalent towards him. I think the only character who really had a journey during this book was Gwen.


Somehow, I also felt like the major themes in this novel were introduced but then skirted around.Chabon set up these great explorations of race relations by giving us a white couple and a black couple whose lives are intertwined on so many levels. But I feel as if I've spent more time trying to figure out which characters are actually which races than thinking about the ways in which we perceive each other. He also set up a competition between a mega media mogul and a small town record store. There was an initial confrontation, but somehow the end is reached without really addressing the issue of mega stores and mom and pop stores. 


Michael Chabon is an incredibly talented author and I have enjoyed several of his books. This one didn't work for me as well as some of the others. There is still some very beautiful writing here and interesting relationships. If you are a Michael Chabon fan or someone who is really into music, you should definitely grab this book when it comes out in September.


I'm going to end my musings with two of my favorite quotes from this section:


"For years his 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, and the turtle was his belief that real and ordinary friendship between black people and white people was possible, at least here, on the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California. Here along the water margin, along the borderlands, along the vague and crooked frontier of Telegraph Avenue. Now that foundational pileup of bonds and beliefs was tottering, toppling like the tower of circus elephants in Dumbo. Not because anybody was a racist. There was no tragic misunderstanding, rooted in centuries of slavery and injustice. No one was lobbing vile epithets, reverting to atavistic tribalisms. The difference in class and education among the four of them canceled out without regard for stereotype or cultural expectations: Aviva and Archy both had been raised by blue-collar aunts who worked hard to send them to lower-tier colleges. The white guy was the high school dropout, the black woman upper-middle-class and expensively educated. It just turned out that a tower of elephants and turtles was no way to try to hold up a world."


"Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life - feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream - struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations." 

Emily asked us also to talk a bit about our experiences reading and discussing this book before publication. It's a really interesting experience to read a book before there is any buzz about the book. There are no other opinions that are stuck in your subconscious. I think it works really well to read it with a group, though. You come to your own conclusions, but then you have people to bounce ideas off of instead of waiting for someone to share your love of a particular character or passage. 


Thank you to Emily of As the Crowe Flies for hosting this readalong! 


Curious about what happened earlier in the novel? You can check out post #1, post #2, post #3, and post #4. 

Telegraph Avenue #4

This post covers Section 3, A Bird of Wide Experience, and Section 4, Return to Forever. This readalong is sponsored by Emily of As The Crowe Flies and Reads and Harper Collins. If you would like to pre-order Telegraph Avenue, please visit Odyssey Bookstore. Interested in some other views on this novel? You can find the other read-along participants here.


A Bird of Wide Experience is the shortest section of this book and it gives us a literal birds eye view of the characters living on Telegraph Avenue. Fifty Eight, the beloved parrot of Mr. Cochise Jones, flies overhead in his search for a good place to land. This section didn't do a lot for me, mostly because it was an eleven page sentence. I didn't feel like it added too much to the story and, for me, it seemed to break up the rhythm that Chabon has established throughout the rest of the book.

After reading section 3, I realized that Chabon writes some really long sentences. This is by far the longest, but he will often spend a whole paragraph with just one sentence. Most of the time, this works well. On occasion, I found myself getting lost in a sentence though and having to backtrack to figure out what we were originally talking about.

Section four, Return to Forever, is back to normal with a lot of plot for the reader to take in. At this point in the story, I don't want to reveal a lot of the story. It sort of takes away the impetus for you to read it if I tell you everything, doesn't it? This section centers around the funeral of Mr. Jones - the preparations for the service, the beginning of the grieving process, and the actual service.

I thought that this section built nicely upon the ideas of family and generations that were explored earlier. In the pages we read this week, I felt that Chabon was illustrating that family is a choice. We are seeing the bonds that characters have with the family that is theirs by blood and the bonds they have with family they choose. In each of these circumstances, they have to choose to maintain the relationship - to get to know the grandfather they never expected to find, to reconsider the philandering husband, to think about going down in flames with your best friend because it's the right things to do. I'm really struck by the ways so many of these characters are relating to each other in moments big and small that they are there for each other, despite all of the tough times they are going through.

The interplay of race continues to be a huge them throughout this book. In earlier sections, I think some of us felt that Chabon was taking the easy way out, making obvious choices. But as the book goes on, I am finding that our author is actually very careful in the way he portrays race and the way people of different races interact with each other. Some things seem obvious, even painfully so. But we have to remember that sometimes these things are so imprinted in our consciousness because they have some truth to them. Then Chabon turns around and pulls an unexpected punch, like having Julius acknowledge that he is awful because he is about to assume that the man in a turban is a taxi driver. As readers, we are so focused on black and white that we don't consider how they relate to people of other backgrounds!

Throughout the book, Chabon has bookended the sections with images of Julie and Titus. The travels of these two boys, one white and one black, are some of the most lyrical phrases in the whole book. Take this one, for example:

"A last morning flag of summer, blue banded with gold and peach, unfurled slowly over the streets as the two wanderers, denizens of the hidden world known to rogues, gamblers, and swordsmen as "the Water Margin," made their way along the Street of Blake toward the ancestral stronghold of the Jew-Tang Clan, its gables armored in cedar shakes faded to the color of dry August hills. Armed merely with subtle weapons of loneliness, they left behind them, like a trail of dead, the disappointment of their tenure at the School of the Turtle. They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wishes to cut away. And still boyhood operated on their minds, retaining all its former power to confound wishes with plans."

I think most of us have a guess about the way this book will end. We all expect a happy ending, don't we? I rather suspect, though, that this author will have a few tricks up his sleeve for us in the final section of this book. Make sure to check back next week to find my thoughts on the last section of this book!

Telegraph Avenue #3

This post covers section two, The Church of Vinyl. This readalong is sponsored by As The Crowe Flies (and Reads) and Harper Collins. If you would like to pre-order the book, please visit Odyssey Bookstore here.



People, I have started taking notes. Now I don't do this whilst reading. Instead, I stick random scraps of paper between pages with passages that I would like to revisit. But...I am trying to sound like an intelligent human being during this read-along and there is a lot of stuff going on and a lot of people to keep track of!


Part two seems to move faster than part one. While I still feel Chabon throws you into the narrative from page one, I think as readers we are used to the deep end by this point and it feels like progress is easier. We also have some idea of the characters now and their relations to each other (which is helped by a page of notes that probably look like chicken scratch to the rest of the world).


Although this novel is ostensibly about the way people of different races relate to each other, this section seemed to be heavily focusing on the idea of generations and legacy. In the beginning of this section, Archy spends time with Mr. Jones as he repairs his speaker. Mr. Jones is the closest thing that Archy has to a father figure and he tries to help him during a stressful time. "Mr. Jones sat there, confounded by grief, turning Archy's information this way and that, a paperweight, something small and heavy cut with a lot of facets. Wanting to say something to this fine and talented young man, something lasting and useful about sons, loss, and regrets." The theme of passing things down through family continues with Nat, who carefully makes the recipes his stepmother used to make in order to get Garnet Singletary, their landlord,  to support Nat's efforts to keep the new mega store out of their neighborhood. Nat recalls the way his stepmother cooked and worked around the kitchen as he acknowledges the powerful effect that food can have on people.


While this section has much to say about parents and children, there is also a lot in here about race relations. Nat and Archy are desperate to save their record store from being run off the street by the opening of Gibson Goode's mega record store, which will be a sign of the possibility of success for the poor black people who live on Telegraph Avenue. When Nat gathers people to protest the establishment of the Dogpile Thang (as the store will be called), they are a mostly ragtag group of white folks prepared to fight the opening of a store owned and operated by a successful black man. And...cue the racial tension. 


P.S. Did I misunderstand or did Mr. Chabon create a bit of revisionist history with our current president? 




So there is a lot happening in this section. I'm excited to see what happens in section three, A Bird of Wide Experience. Come back next Tuesday to find out what happens and make sure to visit the rest of the read-along participants here. 

Telegraph Avenue #2

This post covers the first 124 pages, or section 1, entitled Dream of Cream. This readalong is sponsored by As The Crowe Flies (and Reads) and Harper Collins. If you would like to pre-order the book, please visit Odyssey Bookstore here.



Now that I have completed the first section, I am reminded why I love Michael Chabon's novels so much. He immerses the reader so completely in the lives and thoughts of his characters. In the first few pages, you may feel like you are struggling to swim because Chabon likes to drop you right into the deep end of the pool. There are no idyllic chapters that set the scene before the action begins. Instead, you are immediately a part of the events going on in the lives of the characters.

Telegraph Avenue centers around two friends who own a record store in California - Archy and Nat. Archy is expecting his first child and Nat is the father of a teenage boy. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, are a renowned team of midwives. Archy and Nat are feeling the pressure of being small business owners as a media mogul is developing a mega-store down the street, threatening to put them out of business. To top things off, Nat's son Julius has started to date another boy who might turn out to have an important connection to Archy.

This novel is not one you can read while half paying attention, or just plow through in a day. It is a big book with a lot going on. Before we hit page 200, we have encountered a home birth, the first meeting of a young gay couple, the discovery of infidelity, and an attempted assassination. What I really appreciate about reading Chabon's novels is that he doesn't baby you. He assumes that you are an intelligent reader and can follow along without too much explanation. 


I am excited to see what happens in the next section.Check back next Tuesday for my thoughts on section two, The Church of Vinyl. 

Telegraph Avenue Post #1

So I promised a surprise yesterday during my "It's Monday" post. If you happen to be a gigantic Michael Chabon fan or are one of those people who obsessively check release dates, you may have noticed that my next book is not actually published yet. It will be released in September, but I am super excited to be participating in a pre-publication read along hosted by Emily of As the Crowe Flies (and Reads) and Harper Collins.

I sort of think Michael Chabon is a genius and could write brilliantly about any people in any situation. I reviewed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay here on the blog last December and I reviewed The Yiddish Policeman's Union on my column at the Atlantic Highlands Herald back in 2009. I also enjoyed Gentlemen of the Road, but I don't think I wrote a review for that one.

Suffice it to say that I am thrilled to be taking part in this read along. The book has four parts, so I will be posting on one section each Tuesday during the month of July. If you are excited for a new Michael Chabon book too, you can pre-order your copy here.

I was going to include some photos of me snuggling up with my brandy spanking new ARC, but my camera doesn't want to play. I will just tell you that Telegraph Avenue and I are going to be very happy together.