Brokeland Records, “the church of vinyl,” is threatened by a megastore to be built by the fifth-richest black man in America, an all-pro quarterback named Gibson “G Bad” Goode, who flies around the country in a silver dirigible.
As a sign of the author’s superpowers, HarperCollins is temporarily converting an Oakland bookstore into a model of Brokeland Records - all part of this novel’s astonishing $250,000 marketing campaign.īut in the fictional world of “Telegraph Avenue,” money is in short supply. The story revolves around efforts to save the Brokeland Records store in a gritty part of Oakland, Calif., a few miles from the home Chabon shares with his wife, Ayelet Waldman. The pages are stacked with albums from Miles Davis’s “ On the Corner” to Charles Kynard’s “Wa-Tu-Wa-Zui.” (The e-book offers music and related video clips.) Think Nick Hornby’s “ High Fidelity,” digitally remastered in rococo funk. “ Telegraph Avenue” is his tribute to vintage vinyl, those great used-record shops that have mostly spun out of existence. Whether you’ll be able to keep up with all those inexhaustible stylistic feats is another matter. Even without spells of Jewish mysticism and Marvel heroics, we’re racing through the world of Chabon, the Washington-born writer whose sentences are faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Instead of a cosmic battle against Nazis, the characters in his new book are working through the city council to fight gentrification.
And his genre-blending, Pulitzer Prize-winning magnum opus, “ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” still casts a superhero shadow over American literature.īut now, look, on the shelf - it’s not a bird! It’s not a plane! It’s a domestic novel about the demands of being a father and running a small business.
Before that, he was solving a murder mystery in the Jewish state of Alaska. Has Michael Chabon finally settled down, traded in his red cape for a pair of comfort-fit jeans? The last time we saw the celebrated hipster, he was chasing bandits around 10th-century Khazaria.
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