Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Telegraph Avenue. Chabon is the most shameless of verbal show-offs but one can't deny how much the density and texture of this writing lends to the overall effect. I'm not certain, however, what Chabon is reaching for, particularly when such an unconventional story and unique piece of writing ends in a such a conventional manner. That being said, you won't be disappointed with the ride down Telegraph Avenue.

A million characters with yet to diverge storylines made this hard to follow...especially at first. But the richness and the specificity of this funky little world sucked me in, and I wound up loving archy and nat and aviva and Gwen and Julie and Titus and the rest. I loved the blacks-and-jews angle and the working class hood meets Alice waters stuff and pretty much everything. I think this book will stay with me for a while.

I usually love this author,but this story seemed to just drag on. Part of it was the format- minimal chapters created a feeling of a never ending narration, and while I usually love Chabon's figurative language found it to be excessive this time around.

Wonderful characters and setting, same amazing descriptions and lots of humor, but not as great as Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. Chabon seems all about male friendships, which is neglected in our culture and important to celebrate.

I'm still reading this latest novel by Michael Chabon. Chabon is an amazing writer incorporating metaphor as an art form. The characters are real as is the setting of Oakland, California where I lived for five years.

The writer's ability to succintly describe nuances in the characters relationships to each other and their reactions to each others's thoughts and gestures is fantastic . However reading longwinded paragraphs full of asides became boring..
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Just finished. I have become reviewer instantly upon tapping the right margin of that last page. My fourth Chabon book. A great story of people loving, being friends, dealing with crap ancestry, honoring history and finally shaking hands with their futures. Thanks MC.

Not easy to get into - the setting and characters were of little interest to me. Chabon is a good writer, but tends to expand ad infinitem to the point where I often lost patience. Get back to the subject, already!

This was my first Michael Chabon book. I felt like it took about half the book to get me really hooked on the story. But by the end of the book I was in love with each and every character. This is kind of a small story that covers huge topics. It's perfectly written, capturing insights into the characters and really making me feel like I was inside each one of them. I love the decayed setting, full of jazz, blaxploitation and kungfu from another era, things and people still hanging around past their used-by date. Nostalgia, love and obsession. The way life pulls your out of your dreams. I wish I were still reading it.

My first attempt at reading Telegraph Avenue failed. I could only view the two main female characters as marrying well beneath their own levels of education and accomplishments. My second attempt (for a book group) was successful and I came to a better understanding of the story and the characters. While I had little sympathy for some of the characters, they seem gritty and real.

The language in Telegraph Avenue argues for a five - he writes tremendously well with a rich texture and coloring (yeah, it sounds like a cake. But it's delicious). I think I'm gonna go put on an old jazz album.

The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay is one of my favorite books ever. I went looking for a book about the history of berkeley that was also fun fiction, and quickly came to this Chabon book. I dove in, and made it about half way. I realized that I didn't care about the characters or the arcs, I put it down, and I never came back. bummer.

Chabon describes a West Coast world of soul and R 'n' B, property development and a small-time movie world and combines it with the intimacy of close friendships and marriage difficulties. As always his knowledge of his subjects and his meticulous prose resonate with images and beautifully chosen diction. The chapter of the escaping parrot, told in one Nile length sentence, is a real tour de force.

Easy read. Well put together. Wonderful descriptions. Juicy metaphors. But at end it just fell apart. Left you with feeling writer was bored and wanted to finish it. My first book with this author and I will need some persuading to go again.

In "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin, a community of musicians throws lifelines to Sonny, enabling him to venture into deprivation, loss, and sorrow without drowning. Jazz and community function similarly in Chabon's novel about people as planets that collide, then careen into obstacles sculpted by their own hands. Each one finds his orbit, his rhythm, with the help of community ties. Weaving together story lines and language like jazz riffs, Chabon creates a tightly structured quest from comfort to calamity and back again.

Very disappointed; couldn't get through this one. Chabon is an amazing talent but he lost me on this one. I had a very hard time keeping track of all the characters in the first several chapters. Maybe I need to set it down and try again in six months.

Every book that I have read by Michael Chabon has been a riff on a different popular genre: the comic book in KAVALIER AND CLAY, the police procedural in THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION, Conan Doyle in THE FINAL SOLUTION, and H. Rider Haggard in GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD. You could even wonder whether Chabon has a style of his own. But he certainly has a signature quality: so many levels above the genre he is imitating that the reader is left reeling in wonder. This is a man in love with words and the tricks that can be done with them. One entire twelve-page section of TELEGRAPH AVENUE, his latest, is a single run-on sentence, a parrot's eye view of the teeming life of Brokeland, that multi-ethnic community on the borders between Oakland and Berkeley, California, bisected by the avenue of the title. It may actually be his most successful passage, for at least you can thrill to the sheer audacity of his juggling all his plates in the air. When Chabon is putting all this juice into normal narrative prose (or as close as he ever comes to normal), it can be pretty challenging reading, at least at first.

None of Chabon's books have taken me anywhere where I felt especially at home, but this one is stranger than most. Its center is Brokeland Records, a second-hand record shop specializing in jazz, run by a Jewish man and an African-American, whose wives also happen to be partners in a midwifery practice. Not my music; not my world. There are passages here that, brilliant though they are, might as well be in a foreign language:

"The single played on, adding textures, stacking up layers. A moody wash of piano, a stab of ARP strings. The swirl and growl of a Hammond B-3 played through the whirling orrery of a Leslie cabinet. Scritch-scratch guitar, coming in on the 2, along with paired lines of space-funk Minimoog that sidled in, late arrivals, to carry the melody and bass line, that Minimoog sound popping the bubble of timelessness and returning the track, comfortably, to its home in the mid-1970s."

There is an interesting, even heart-warming story running through all this, partly about the threat of the "Dogpile Thang," a huge megastore being built in the neighborhood by a former black football star turned entrepreneur, and partly about personal tensions in both families. By the second half of the book, when either Chabon stops being clever or I was getting more used to it, the story kept me reading for its own sake. But the beginning was a challenge.

Although the races seem balanced on paper, the locus of the book is clearly black, and a largely unknown world to me. I felt a visitor, a voyeur even, but never a resident. And I began to wonder about Chabon also. At one point, he describes a phrase from a blaxploitation movie as "something cooked up by the screenwriter, some Jewish dude trying to think like an ass-kicking soul-sister." Describing himself, perhaps? When he drives down the Avenue from Berkeley, does he fit right in? Somehow, I doubt it. Much as when reading Tom Wolfe, I detected a whiff of patronage in the delight with which Chabon anatomizes a culture not his own.

But he does it so well!

I have read Chabon twice --- and loved him. I couldn't wait to get into this book --- the first about African American & Whites. My main complaint was the unnecessary use of profanity. It saddens me if this is the way our young adults now talk --- it got in my way of the story line and it's characters. The plot was a good one with all it's twist and turns --- but I found most of the characters less than desirable. I am 83 and I guess I am out of touch with the way our young adults have evolved. I was also disturbed by the graphic description of the two young boys and their sexual activity --- and again the language. I finished the book hoping it would redeem itself --- but somehow it came up short. Sorry.

The story is very intriguing. Once I actually got to the story it was pretty good. This book is my club's selection for the month. The last few emails indicate that I'm the only one who actually read it. Six other people gave up completely. I had three starts with this book. It took a tremendous amount of effort to finish it. I know Chabon can do better. There are times when prose must be set aside for the story. He is a master wordsmith, just not the best storyteller this time around.

This book is a departure from Chabon's other books but he is a master of his craft. Telegraph Avenue is depicted in all its seaminess as a believable place in a believable time. The two women are a little less believable, but then anything can happen on Telegraph Avenue.

I purchased this item, having already read several pages of the "dead tree" edition at the bookstore. In other words, I knew I wanted to buy it. Well, it turns out I should have gotten the free preview anyway. The book is only able to be displayed in a single typeface: On my Kindle Keyboard it looks like the default Caecilia font, and on the new Paperwhite I just bought, it is displaying a sans-serif font that looks like Helvetica. This was only a minor annoyance with my old Kindle, as Caecilia is something I can read for hours at a time with no eyestrain. Helvetica, on the other hand, is hard for me to read for hours at a time, so now it has become a problem with my new device. On both these devices, as well as the reading apps, the font stays the same no matter what I select.

So... If you're considering this book, download the sample, make sure the non-settable typeface is one your eyes can handle, and then enjoy! Michael Chabon's wonderful prose style is totally worth reading, and if I have to return this Kindle book and pick up a paper edition, I'm happy to do it.

Count me among those that found reading this book a chore. Chabon is obviously brilliant and talented but reading his work is a bit like being trapped in the corner at a party by a manic genius, who feeds you dozens of brilliant different ideas at once, but at such a speed and with so many different tangents along the way that's it difficult to take it all in. Here, to slow things down, you often have to read sentences a couple of times just to keep track of what the noun and verb were in between all the independent clauses and tangential metaphors. Thank God for e-books with their at your fingertips dictionaries, because you also have to look up at least a word or two per page.

Clearly plenty of readers enjoy having their minds expanded by such a prodigious talent, but I found much of the information show-offy. It's amazing how many varied metaphors Chabon can spin, but occasionally it would be great to have a few sentences you don't need a road map to get through. A character can't simply reach for a tube of superglue, instead he has to get "a tube of super glue, the crusted tip of its nozzle, forever pierced like some allegorical wound in a story of King Arthur, by its tiny red-capped pin."

If that talent were used more judiciously, the reading might not be such a heavy slog.

In the previews, I saw a lot of praise for Chabon capturing the current cultural zeitgeist but I guess I didn't get that. He has four main story lines - an African American, Archy, and his Jewish partner, Nat. have a record store in Oakland that's under threat when a former NFL star turned businessmen is thinking about opening a megastore in their neighborhood; their wives are also getting into similar trouble as midwives when they have to rush a mother to a hospital during a difficult delivery and an obstetrician accuses them of negligence; a son Archy didn't know he had shows up in Oakland trying to connect with his father, and Nat's son, who's the same age, has developed a crush on him; and finally, Archy's father, Luther a martial arts expert turned crack addict is trying to rekindle his earlier days as a star in blaxploitation films while also blackmailing an old friend who is now a powerful businessman and city councilman, but who in his younger days killed a local troublemaker as a favor to Huey Newton of the Black Panthers.

It sounds like a lot, but the storylines themselves didn't feel like enough to fill up 465 pages. If you took out all the authors' efforts to prove his encyclopedic knowledge of every subject from the history of jazz to superhero comic books, it felt like each story could have been told neater and faster.

There are some interesting historical details about the loss of mom & pop-type stores with the invasion of corporate chains. Mixed in with that is an examination of the promise of urban renewal that a Magic Johnson-like figure offers by investing in the inner city. There are also interesting details about the history of midwifery and the conflict that Archy's wife, Gwen, feels between the historical importance that midwives had in the black culture vs. what it is today - primarily an option of privileged white women. In one of my favorite passages, a night school instructor gives the 14-year-old boys and the other class participants a hysterically funny lecture on how Vincent Minelli's The Bandwagon influenced Quentin Tarantino. But this novel, for me, doesn't capture an era the way that Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities did (although admittedly Wolfe doesn't have anywhere near the writing chops Chabon does.)

Too often, though, the novel gets bogged down with evidence of how smart Chabon is thrown up on every page. There are other novelists I love, like Robert Cohen, whose genius and prolific imagination are evident in every sentence. But Cohen fills his novels with great insights into what it means to be human. I don't need to read several pages about how to reassemble an organ speaker, as Chabon does, with the writer proving he knows the exact name for every part.

With Chabon, he also often makes you feel stupid for not having a Ph.D in pop culture. Not of all his references are self-contained. Near the end of the novel when Archy's wife Gwen is giving birth, Nat's son, Julius, is helping her deal with the pain by recounting scenes from Star Trek. He writes about an episode in which the female companion to the evil Kirk uses a "Tantalus Field" to overcome her adversaries. When Gwen faces the prospect of having the doctor who charged her with negligence deliver her baby, she asks Julius to cast a Tantalus Field on the doctor. Now I vaguely remember seeing that episode, but I don't remember what the Tantalus Field was, and I'm not reeducated on exactly what it was by Chabon's description.

My final complaint is one I've had with previous Chabon novels. He often writes gay lovemaking scenes in very specific detail, and while I don't have any problem with that, I wish he would give hetero lovemaking equal time. The two sex scenes in this novel are not for the squeamish because they involve sexual experimentation between the two 14-year-old boys and an episode when the philandering Archy sodomizes, consensually, his wife's transgendered assistant.

I don't regret finishing this one, although it took me a long while to get through it because I wasn't always motivated to pick it up. His writing reminds me of Zadie Smith. It may sound oxymoronic but there's just too much sheer brilliance on every page and in every sentence. Call me insecure, and maybe even a philistine, but I prefer to read novelists whose own writing style is less obvious so that I can get into the characters and be moved by the circumstances they find themselves in. I find Chabon's style, which constantly reminds me there's a much more brilliant mind than mine stringing these sentences together, keeps me too disconnected from the characters. And what is the infamous 11-page sentence, other than a break in the characters' story to show another explicit example of what a virtuoso Chabon is?

I didn't always feel this way about Chabon. I haven't read all of his books, but I did like Mysteries of Pittsburgh and the marvelous The Wonder Boys. But the Pulitzer-prize winning Kavalier and Clay left me feeling the same way this one did. After this experience, he may be off my must-read author list.

I'm sure this book will be on many "Best of the Year" lists, but it seems to me book critics and judges are mesmerized by the kind of writing that often turns me off.

Chabon writes about odd characters, and I really like his portrayals of our quirky humanity. I really felt the anguish and friendship of the people in this novel, their hopes and dreams, their failings and successes.

Another great book by Michael Chabon. I've been a fan for years. This one is closer to Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys than his last few books, which is great. His descriptions are outstanding and I'd recommend this and any of his other novels without hesitation.

Chabon is, hands down, my favorite author. But Michael, where is the audacious courage behind writing Kavalier and Clay? How about the Yiddish Policeman's Union? How about the national pastime treasure of Summerland? Those were all beautiful and daring stories. I could not find the same in Telegraph Avenue. Perhaps it is an homage to his adopted home town but I hope the next one ranges back out into the wider worlds and beyond.

Chabon is too much enamoured of his own writing for me to enjoy it much, even though I wanted to love this book. He describes who the characters are and what they're like rather than developing the characters enough that they show you themselves. The plot is plodding and rather convoluted and lost in extraneous showing off. Worst of all, this book reminds me very much of "High Fidelity." And "High Fidelity" is a better book.

Great portrait of contemporary Oakland-Berkeley environment, with convincing descriptions of believable people and situations, great dialog, hilarious situations. However the everything turns out just right ending is a little too pat and unconvincing.

Typical Chabon fashion, but could have used more thread to hold it together. While the story was endearing, I felt it lacked cohesiveness and was a bit disjointed; almost like a stream of consciousness