As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and
Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends,
bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of
used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and
Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are
the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who
have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens
into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half
temple—stands Brokeland.
When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest
black man in America, announces plans to build his latest
Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue,
Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their
vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also
find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional
existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship.
Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already
tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner,
the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of
fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.
An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat
of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic,
pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the
great American novel we've been waiting for. Generous,
imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant,
it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.
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