Some novels gaze and report and argue: others just sing. There are some writers who love and respect the visual arts, and want to bring them into prose — Henry James is one. A work freezes into an act of contemplation and description, as in the Bronzino set piece in The Wings of the Dove. And there are novelists who have a fascination with music, whose prose moves dynamically in response to musical form and sound.
These writers can have set pieces, too, like the performance of Beethoven’s Fifth in Howards End, but can also pattern their work in imitation of another art form that moves through time, has climaxes and a crescendo. Joyce, a knowledgeable musician and competent tenor, wrote a very detailed fugue as a chapter in Ulysses, and another good tenor, Vikram Seth, wrote a lovely book around a string quintet in An Equal Music.
Telegraph Avenue is a wonderful novel of song and sound, in love with its art form, but also with many qualities of evanescence and improvisation, of cadenza and response. It is like a performance of which one says, ‘Oh, you should have been there’; and happily, there it is.
Michael Chabon is an American writer of immense charm and warmth, but also of really extraordinary powers of invention and wit. His major novels — The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union — construct worlds with exemplary solidity and bravura, and embark on journeys where you never quite know what will come next. When a drag queen called Miss Sloviak and her tuba impinge on the narrator’s stoned life in Wonder Boys, it is only the opening gambit — ‘The tuba? Keep it. It suits you.’
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a pitch-perfect Chandleresque thriller, set in an alternate world where the Jewish national home was granted to them for 60 years in Alaska, climaxes with a thrilling scene in which the hero, chained to an iron bed, is chased through the snow by Hasidic gangsters. Kavalier and Clay is a masterly history of America, told through the specifically American art of the comic-book, used to investigate the Holocaust from afar. They are extraordinarily ingenious works, but marry their rich wit and frequent ventures into absurdity to a keen awareness of human beings. They are absurd in the way that people you love and know intimately can be absurd, in detailed, idiosyncratic, painful ways.
Telegraph Avenue is a story of city life, where cultures and races mix in cheerful confusion, and the main threat comes from corporate planning. It centres on a record shop in Oakland, California, run by Archy Stallings, a mountainous black entrepreneur, in partnership with Nat Jaffe, a Jewish lover of music. Archy is the son of Luther, a onetime star of Blaxploitation movies, including the Strutter trilogy — ‘Strutter, Strutter at Large and Strutter Kicks It Old-School… a minor but necessary bit of imposture, since, as far as Archy knew — and he knew far, too far — there was no such movie as Strutter Kicks It Old-School.’ Luther Stallings appears in the company of a back-in-the-day sex-bomb, Valletta, trying to raise the money to make the last part of the trilogy — or, more likely, spend it on crack.
Archy’s and Nat’s wives, Gwen and Aviva, are also in partnership, as midwives. They are first seen in a furious row with a hospital that regards their holistic at-home practices as having contributed to a dangerously haemorrhaging mother — ‘Please tell me that I did not just hear you employ the term “voodoo” in reference to my licensed and certified practice of midwifery… you baldheaded, Pee-Wee Herman-looking, C-sectioning, PPO hatchet man.’
And then there is Nat’s dreamy son, Julius — ‘Julie was semi-bicurious, or maybe even gay, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes to gay o’clock. But the confession felt like too much work.’ Julius is concealing a beautiful boy under his bed, whom he met at a deeply abstruse film class, explaining the size-15 Air Jordans suddenly lying around the place as ‘It’s that art project’. Julius’s art project is really called Titus, and is actually a bye-blow of Archy’s libidinous behaviour from 15 years earlier. He has shown up in Julius’s life, he explains, ‘to dismember your pink
bicycle-riding, plastic shoe-wearing, Jethro-Tull-singing, faggoty Mr Spock ass’.
The action of this wonderfully engaging, exuberantly written, joyously inconsequential novel circles around the attempts of an ex-footballer, Gibson Goode, to open a branch of his chain record store just down the road from Archy and Nat’s, and effectively close them down. ‘I believe I read in Black Enterprise that he is currently the fifth most richest African-American,’ one of the guys down the record store remarks.
There’s an irony at work here, as Gibson occasionally descends in magnificent splendour, rising above the action in his sumptuously ostentatious airship, named after Minnie Riperton; the reader is aware that the threat of the internet and online sales is going to hit Gibson in the end as hard — and maybe much harder — than Archy and Nat’s expertise.
The fights between the small guy and the large corporation, and between the weak little guys who live within those huge corporations, are the themes of the book, whether in Gibson’s empire, or when the bullying doctor who threatens the midwives is turned on by Gwen at a disciplinary hearing, and gets his comeuppance in a wham-bam set piece.
The novel has a political purpose, although the journey is so entertaining and warm that you might overlook anything resembling a message. It reaches a memorable, fervent climax with a personal appearance and a few lines of dialogue from a senator at a fund-raising party. It’s Obama, before his election.
Chabon has always been a novelist of glorious specificity, and the world constructed here is one to lose yourself in. From the moment when Archy enters ‘holding a random baby, wearing a tan corduroy suit over a pumpkin-bright turtleneck that reinforced his noted yet not disadvantageous resemblance to Gamera, the giant mutant flying tortoise of Japanese cinema’, we know we are in for a treat.
The dialogue is baroque and full of energy; the world, which contributes so much to the rich humanity of the dozen or so central characters, is one that you feel you can walk through. The music is always present, sometimes drifting into view, and once or twice coalescing into a grand set piece. There is a magnificent paragraph describing the dead Cochise Jones’s six-minute cover of ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ from Jesus Christ Superstar that is so specific and evocative that you can’t believe it’s of an imagined record.
This is a novel that I found myself slowing down while reading, out of sheer pleasure. I put it off, and rationed it out, and just didn’t want it to end. If what you like in a book is for it to zip along, and be over as quickly as possible, then this may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you value invention and playfulness and love of humanity, then you should definitely clear a week or two for Telegraph Avenue.
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