TLC Book Tour - Book Review - Telegraph Avenue - Michael Chabon

Title:    Telegraph Avenue

Author:  Michael Chabon

Review: I thought I should start with my bias first, so you can understand where I am coming from.

 A great novel should not be a chore to read.  

The first 30% of this book crawled along introducing many characters with too little action.  So I had the double problem of both trying to be engaged in the limited plot and trying to figure out who was who and why they were even present.  The story did finally get moving as you got (way) into it, but it was work, not enjoyment.  And then he hits you with part 3, an 11 page sentence.  I have read elsewhere that this demonstrates a masterful command of the English language, but it struck me as tedious and extremely hard to follow.

Is there value to getting to the end of this book; most definitely, but you have to really want it.  It reminds me of a gourmet food that initially tastes terrible, but the connoisseur will say it is an acquired taste.  If you keep working through it you will end up loving it.  I think Chabon is asking a little too much of his readers to work through it.  It seemed he was trying too hard to write an ultrahip book, to show off his unique writing devices, and anything else he could think of rather than just write a straight forward tale.  Of course it could just be that I wasn't quite smart enough to get it, and I will leave that to other readers to decide

In the end I was disappointed especially after loving his previous works so much.  Specifically I can highly recommend Kavalier and Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Summerland.

Publisher:  Published September 11th 2012 by Harper Collins

  Copyright: 2012

  Pages:  480

  ISBN:    9780061493348

  Quick Review: 3 Stars out of 5. 

  Where Did I Get the Book:  Sent by the publisher for review.

Synopsis:  "An immensely gifted writer and magical prose stylist."

--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

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.

Author Biography:  Michael Chabon (b. 1963) is an acclaimed and bestselling author whose works include the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Chabon achieved literary fame at age twenty-four with his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which was a major critical and commercial success. He then published Wonder Boys (1995), another bestseller, which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas. One of America’s most distinctive voices, Chabon has been called “a magical prose stylist” by the New York Times Book Review, and is known for his lively writing, nostalgia for bygone modes of storytelling, and deep empathy for the human predicament.

Other Reviews:  LA Times, NY Times, NPR