On top of that, Nat’s 14-year-old son, who has the feminine name of Julie (Jules), is exploring his sexuality and has a crush on another Black teenager named Titus, who is harbouring a secret of his own. Meanwhile, Archy’s pregnant wife, Gwen, and Nat’s wife, Aviva, are midwives who are in a pickle after a home birth they were attending doesn’t go quite as planned. The store is teetering on the brink of closure, no thanks in part to the plans of a wealthy Black man and former NFL player named Gibson Goode, who wants to open a massive record store just down the street in a huge commercial development that he hopes to build. It tells the tale of Archy Stallings, a Black man, and Nat Jaffe, who is White, who together own a record store on the book title’s titular street in the Berkeley-Oakland area. Telegraph Avenue is an intergenerational family story. Reading this book took me nearly a week on my Christmas and New Years’ break, and it proved to be quite tiresome at times. And it is a very long 465 pages to read, to boot. For one thing, this 465-page novel didn’t have to be quite that long. To that end, Telegraph Avenue is a very interesting book, but a failed one. It is also a book about the taut friendships between Blacks and Caucasians. It is a book that is concerned with both birth and death - the birth of children, the potential re-birth and vitalisation of a rundown neighbourhood, and the death of independent vinyl record stores (though we should know that not all of them did die).
Well, it looks like nostalgia was on Chabon’s mind as he was writing the book, too, albeit he was writing in much better times, for Telegraph Avenue is set in August 2004 in Chabon’s hometown of Berkeley, California. In a way, I did turn back the clock this past week by finally picking up my hardcover copy of Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, a book that I bought 10 years ago. In these pandemic times, one almost wishes that you could turn back the clock a few years - just to live in a time of relative certainty over what the future might hold, not more of these COVID-19 variants and such things that keep popping out of the woodwork at ill-advised times, such as Christmas.
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