Telegraph Avenue [Hardcover]

I like Michael Chabon. I think he has a wonderful turn of phrase, and his writing as a rule is very evocative.

Unfortunately, I found it very hard to engage with this book. It's difficult to put my finger on any one thing, and I think it was a combination of factors.

* Too many characters that played too small a part - The book is a confusion of characters, many of which are introduced simply to give colour to a single scene. Of course when that happens it's not clear at first and you have to wait a while to realise they're not making a reappearance. The CHOCHISE meeting about 3/4 of the way through the book is a prime example of this.

* Unclear characterisation forced me to re-evaluate the characters too often - As a reader I draw certain conclusions from the actions of characters. When these conclusions are contradicted later on it becomes confusing. Why did they act the way they did if that's the sort of person they are?

* Unclear character descriptions - This was a minor one, but it happened a couple of times, and it pulled me right out of the story. I'd built a picture of a character in my head, then some new piece of information (eg. hair colour, in the case of Cochise) is introduced relatively late in the book, forcing me to revise my mental image, and throwing the whole plot into confusion as I now have 2 character images for the same character - one of which has performed the actions in the first half of the book, and one which will hold from now on.

* Not enough story - At some point beautiful prose just isn't enough, and at the end of the day I didn't feel there was enough actual story to warrant a book of this length.

* Too many references - To everything! From Star Trek to Jazz. I doubt anybody got all the references in the book. It's OK that a book assumes specific knowledge on the part of the reader (eg. Hornby's High Fidelity), but when you spread the subjects about which specialist knowledge is required this thin, you're left with a very small percentage of the population that will "get" everything. It just left me feeling like an outsider, rather than feeling involved in the story and the characters (and I got a reasonably high proportion of the references, I think. I wonder how folks that understood fewer felt?)

To sum up: not a bad book, just not his best work, and - for me - too much like hard work to read. I will put the time and effort in to read difficult books (eg. Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is well worth the effort - one of my favourite books!) but for this one it was too much work for too little reward. Sorry Mr. Chabon. I hope to see a return to form next time!

Anybody who has read The Yiddish Policemen's Union or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay will know that Michael Chabon is one of, if not the most, dazzling of writers. With a dense writing style all his own, you will need to concentrate, but you will be rewarded.

Archy (black) and Nat (Jewish) run a vintage vinyl shop in Oakland. The name of the shop is Brokeland , a name that sums up Chabon's lexical humour as well as the financial state of Archy and Nat's business. The shop is more than just a retail outlet; it's a hub where the local characters hang out, talk jazz and try to work out a plan to save the shop from imminent ruin. Gibson Goode is the fifth-richest black man in the US and he is planning to extend his empire by building his latest Dogpile megastore on nearby Telegraph Avenue. Archy and Nat's little enterprise, wobbly at best, is heading the way of so many individual, quirky, one-off shops - closure.

Meanwhile, Archy's wife Gwen and Nat's wife Aviva are highly experienced midwives who run their own birthing business. (Only in America!) When one of the births that they are attending gets complicated, Gwen runs foul of the hospital authorities and one doctor in particular. These two main plot-lines give Chabon the opportunity to explore the beleaguered battle-lines between big business and the establishment versus enterprise and individuality. Add into the mix two teenage boys. One is Nat's son Julie (Julius) and the other is Titus, the son that Archy has never acknowledged. The boys become best friends - and more. Add further to the mayhem with Archy's alienated father, Luther Stallings, the faded Blaxploitation movie star who has fallen on hard times, Chan Flowers, a manipulative funeral parlour magnate who is being blackmailed by him and the death of Cochise Jones, Archy's father-figure and a legendary jazz musician, and you have a combustible tangle of plot and a cast of fully three-dimensional, memorable characters who speak in a way that only Chabon could make them. Oh, and did I forget to say that Archy's wife Gwen is pregnant. Very pregnant.

There are plenty more characters - all with great names - along the way but I didn't want to confuse you! Even Barack Obama has a walk-on part!

Without giving any more of the plot away, suffice to say that there are any number of tremendous scenes and two set-pieces which are particularly outstanding: one where Gwen and Aviva attend a complicated birth with its ensuing consequences and the other, the funeral service of Cochise Jones, poignantly held in Brokeland Records. The book has no chapters but is divided into five parts, one of which is just one sentence - but it's eleven pages long! This is virtuoso writing.

Only a couple of negative points: the number of characters and their various names and nicknames are confusing to begin with. It would have been helpful if Michael Chabon had provided the reader with a cast of characters to kick off with. But I do urge you to stay with it and all will become clear. The other is the title; Brokeland would just have been so much better, IMHO. I am sure Chabon must have considered it and discarded it for some reason. Perhaps because it might convey a miserable book about the economic downturn - which it so isn't! (It's set in 2004.) It is a joyous, dazzling, touching, memorable, laugh-out-loud achievement with dialogue to die for. And now I'm going to read it all over again. Only slower so I can savour every single word from this master of verbal pyrotechnics.

Always read Chabon's books, always enjoyed them. Kavalier and Clay was my favourite - until I read this wonderful wonderful book. This is filled with the kind of writing that makes you gasp or laugh with nervous astonishment. You read a sentence and stare off into space shaking your head in wonder. Honestly - it's bloody fantastic. Every page has a wow. And there's so much variety in the story. Loads of masteful episodes. It's had the same effect on me as The Corrections when I first read that. So exciting, I'm thinking of writing Mike a fan letter (just like I did to Jon).