Greens, Biscuit and Telegraph Avenue

Posted on bookcooker: 26 Jan 2014 

I am a big Michael Chabon fan.  The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay is one of my top 10 favorite books.  I was excited about when Telegraph Avenue came out - Chabon always creates characters that are quirky and unique but who I emotionally connect to (even though they are almost always male).  Alas, Telegraph Avenue didn't do it for me in the way Chabon's previous work has.  It took me over a month to get through it, which is a departure for someone who usually reads books in a week or two.   In the end I made it through and am glad that I did, but I am not sure I would recommend the book to others.  Telegraph Avenue is a street in Oakland that is traditionally African American but runs from Oakland into Berkley so serves as a symbol in the book of the particular Northern Californian mix - hippie, African American, affluent liberal whites.  The novel is about race, gentrification, growing up, love, marriage, family, fatherhood, sexual identity and friendship.  To me the book felt overstuffed - with ideas, with themes, with obscure movie and music references, and with long descriptive sentences.  It was hard for me to connect with the characters because of all of this other stuff.  While I didn't love the book, it did present good food inspiration.  As soon as I read the words "yeasted biscuits" I was intrigued.  I have made regular buttermilk biscuits often and lamented that they did not rise as high as the ones I would get in hipster Southern restaurants.  I hoped yeast would get that sky high look I had yearned for.  In the book, one of the main characters, Nat, makes these biscuits, along with greens and fried chicken, in an attempt to win over some people in his neighborhood to support the used record store he owns with his best friend Archie in an epic battle with a hip hop superstore looking to move into the neighborhood.  I decided to focus on the greens and biscuits - together a great warming winter supper. 

Telegraph Avenue has a lot going on. The central characters of the novel are Archie Stalling and Nat Jaffe  - friends, black and white respectively, who own a used record store  called "Brokeland Records" on Telegraph Avenue.   Archie and Nat's wives  (Gwen and Aviva) work together as midwives.  Nat and Aviva have a teenage son Julius, who becomes friends (and secret lovers) with Archie's previously unknown teenage son Titus.   Gwen is pregnant with her first child and before she finds out about Titus, she discovers Archie cheating on her. Archie has a wayward father, Lester Stallings, who was a star in kung-fu blaxpoitation movies in the 70's but now is a former junkie.  Is that enough plot for you?  Chabon throws in some more - Archie and Nat's store, Brokeland, is is trouble because a hip hop superstore, Dogpile, owned by a former star athlete, is about to move in next store.  The community is divided as to whether this new store is good or bad for the neighborhood - Nat is vehemently against it and Archie is a bit more ambivalent  - causing a crisis in their friendship.  
Add into this is the reappearance of Archie's deadbeat father, a former kung fu movie star who has gotten himself in trouble with the owner of Dogpile and a local alderman.  All of this would be a lot to communicate in a novel, but Chabon adds on to this a large serving of obscure cultural references - music (the rare records Brokeland sells), blaxpoitation movies, kung-fu movies, Quentin Tarantino movies, and general political and societal commentary.  Each character has a rich inner life, but the inner dialogue that Chabon creates is so convoluted it is not believable in all cases.  
Moreover, this bloated prose made me give up sometimes on a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a character.    Waiting beneath all the words is a really compelling story about friendship and race and society but most overwhelmingly about fatherhood (Archie's broken relationship with his father, his abandonment of his own son, his nervousness about how he would treat his unborn child) - this is the what I think Chabon really wanted to write about, but tried instead to say something profound and cool about a whole lot of things instead of just one or two.  There is a book inside of Telegraph Avenue that I would have really liked and I hope that Chabon pares it down next time around.
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