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Loading... Telegraph Avenue (2012)by Michael Chabon
   No current Talk conversations about this book. Chabon was my 'can do no wrong' author until now. I couldn't get past the first few pages - I felt like the book was trying too hard to be hip and it was really offputting. I'd read some of Chabon's New York Review of Books essays while waiting for this to be published, and I couldn't finish them either. And this from my favorite author! It seems like he's trying too hard to live up to the critical praise he gets for being clever and erudite, rather than writing from the heart.  badube | Mar 6, 2019 |  Please read review by John Lulz below - he said everything I would have - and said it better than I could have. (  ) Rdra1962 | Aug 1, 2018 | It had its moment but was ultimately bogged down with verbiage and extraneous detail. Too bad. (  ) amuskopf | Jun 7, 2018 | I really want to watch Season 3 of the cable TV show this should have been. I mean this sincerely. I think it would have been fantastic. I love Chabon's writing, his warm, humane characterizations, his robust, organic settings... if only the plotting were a bit more focused for this one. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book. If a contemporary saga of black and white culture mingle in Berkley/Oakland, with dusty vinyl stores and has-been Blaxploitation movie stars, and kooky old musicians, and infidelity, and babies, and secrets, etc., sounds good to you? Read it! I just had very high expectations stemming from Chabon's glorious Kavalier & Clay. And when I read that Telegraph Avenue was reworked from a TV series pilot script, it made so much sense. You can see how the multi-threaded storyline and bumper-car character interaction would have worked beautifully over several TV seasons. As a novel, it suffers a bit from being really neither a tightly plotted drama, nor quite an epic, portrait-of-a-whole-town type of thing. It was good, but I can't help thinking it would have been a stellar TV show. ( ) Chamblyman | May 20, 2018 | I really want to watch Season 3 of the cable TV show this should have been. I mean this sincerely. I think it would have been fantastic. I love Chabon's writing, his warm, humane characterizations, his robust, organic settings... if only the plotting were a bit more focused for this one. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book. If a contemporary saga of black and white culture mingle in Berkley/Oakland, with dusty vinyl stores and has-been Blaxploitation movie stars, and kooky old musicians, and infidelity, and babies, and secrets, etc., sounds good to you? Read it! I just had very high expectations stemming from Chabon's glorious Kavalier & Clay. And when I read that Telegraph Avenue was reworked from a TV series pilot script, it made so much sense. You can see how the multi-threaded storyline and bumper-car character interaction would have worked beautifully over several TV seasons. As a novel, it suffers a bit from being really neither a tightly plotted drama, nor quite an epic, portrait-of-a-whole-town type of thing. It was good, but I can't help thinking it would have been a stellar TV show. ( ) Chamblyman | May 19, 2018 |
 “Telegraph Avenue,” Michael Chabon’s rich, comic new novel, is a homage to an actual place: the boulevard in Northern California where Oakland — historically an African-American city — aligns with Berkeley, whose bourgeois white inhabitants are, as one character puts it, “liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken.” The novel is equally a tribute to the cinematic style of Quentin Tarantino, whose films its characters study and discuss, and whose preoccupations pepper its pages: kung fu, cinematic allusions and the blaxploitation films of the 1970s; and an interest in African-American characters and experience. Chabon and Tarantino make an unlikely duo; while the latter’s films tend toward gaudy eruptions of violence, Chabon bends Tarantino’s sensibility to a warmhearted novel about fatherhood in which the onstage violence consists of two graphic childbirth scenes and a 15-year-old boy whacking a chubby thug with a wooden sword. A self-help book in the style of Andrei Tarkovsky would be hardly more oxymoronic.  Mr. Chabon has constructed an amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story that addresses his perennial themes — about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and the consolations of art — while reaching outward to explore the relationship between time past and time present, the weight (or lightness, as the case may be) of history, and the possibility of redemption and forgiveness.
No descriptions found. In this novel the author takes us to Telegraph Avenue. It is a story that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. Here he creates a world grounded in pop culture: Kung Fu, 1970s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music, and an epic of friendship, race, and secret histories. Longtime band mates Archy and Nat preside over Brokeland Records, a used-record emporium. All is well until a former NFL quarterback, one of the country's richest African Americans, decides to build his latest Dogpile megastore on nearby Telegraph Avenue. Not only could this spell doom for the little shop and its cross-race, cross-class dream, but it opens up past history regarding Archy's untethered dad and a Black Panther-era crime.… (more) |
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