Telegraph Avenue

So, let's start off by being fair:
1) I would never had even looked twice at this book had it not been by Michael Chabon.
2) I had idly wondered, in my revery at [b:The Yiddish Policemen's Union|16703|The Yiddish Policemen's Union|Michael Chabon|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925449s/16703.jpg|95855] how people who weren't me and didn't share my passions reacted to the book. And now I have an answer.
This book is ostensibly about lay midwives, jazz music and blaxploitation films.
I can't quite figure out how to put how I feel about lay midwives into a sentence that is polite enough for social media and does not horribly side track this review, so let's let that suffice.
I certainly don't hate music, but I'm just not one of those people who gets music, you know? Like, I wish I did and I respect people who are into music, but Chabon goes on and on about a piece, or whatever, and my eyes glaze and I skip several paragraphs and he's still going on and I have no idea what he's talking about, and if we're truly being honest here (because hey, why not?) I really don't know why anyone would buy a record in 2014 anyway so the fact that there are COMPETING record stores seems ridiculously anachronistic, but again, I don't get music, so what do I know?
And finally, I've never had an opinion on blaxploitation films (although I strongly recommend going down the rabbit hole and wikipedia-ing blaxploitation, and that finding the legions of other subgenres ending in -ploitation.)
So the idea that I would read and enjoy a book about lay midwives, jazz and blaxploitation was already on flimsy ground.
And let me also say, that I certainly don't believe that there are certain topics that are verboten based on race or sex or religion. But then, let's pretend to ourselves for a second that we're Michael Chabon, and we're famous for writing books about bi-curious geeky Jewish boys and we start a book about a bi-curious geeky Jewish boy, who happens to be into Jazz and then we end up also writing about blaxploitation and then before you know it, there are a couple of Black characters and then all of a sudden you're knee-deep in racial tension. So there's a few of things you can do: you could back out until you're back on safe territory; you can do a lot of researching or you can decide to forge ahead, gunsblazing, and write about racial relations.
Chabon clearly decided to do that latter, and while I will continue to sing his praises for writing uncomfortable truths and borderline offensively accurate portrayals of the Jewish community, as a Jewish woman reading a book by a Jewish author, I was pretty unsettled by him (attempting to) do the same with the African American community. And intersectionality was definitely problematic: in an entire book on Jewish-Back relations there were two female Black characters: An afro-touting, impossibly skinny, impossibly sexy, aged sex symbol/film star and a perpetually hungry, perpetually angry, perpetually pregnant woman. Not that the Black men were portrayed that much better: they inevitably abandoned their children and were to a one portrayed as violent, cheating and irresponsible.
Also, his conclusion seemed to be that White people (of whom there are no non-Jews in the book) and Black people are too different and want things that are too different and any partnership, or indeed real friendship is doomed to fail.

In conclusion, if this had just been a book about privileged, Jewish, Julius Jaffe, who writes Lovecraftian poetry, and his questionably unrequited love for Titus Joyner, obsessed with Blaxploitation and trying to come in to his own after a troubled childhood, and it was done respectfully, without stereotypes and the other 95% were jettisoned, I would have read the heck out of it. As was, an extremely poor showing by one of my favorite authors.

I received an advance reader’s copy of this novel from Goodreads back in the fall. Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a slow reader, and I like to read more than one book at a time. That is why I just finished the book now. This is the first time I’ve read a novel by Michael Chabon, so I’m not able to compare the style and content of Telegraph Avenue to his other work.

Overall, I found Telegraph Avenue to be an alternately frustrating and unsatisfying read. I would often be confronted with instances where I thought Chabon was caught up in his own brilliant, flourishing prose while not advancing the story at all. And the style of the prose often wouldn’t match up with characters. For example, characters like Luther Stallings and Valletta Moore would be given voices in a scene that carried a casual vernacular that “sounded” natural. But then the third-person narration around that scene would be embellished in a way that distanced the reader from the story. I’m not sure how to put it. But it’s like Chabon wrote realistic characters that he couldn’t relate to. It’s like Chabon got advice on how to make Archy Stallings sound real, but he himself doesn’t actually know anyone like Archy in a way that would allow more empathy in his writing. The exception to that rule would be scenes involving the Jaffe family. In those family scenes, the narration gives off a sense of familiarity.

The characters were another weakness for me. Many characters are introduced, which wouldn’t be so bad if more of them were fully developed. Why are Archy and Nat such good friends, when the only thing they appear to have in common is music? Why are Archy and Gwen married, when they don’t even seem to like each other for just about all of the book? Why would Gwen stay with Archy when he cheats on her all of the time? What is the point of Titus’ existence outside of convenient plot devices? For some reason, Titus is the only character whose inner thoughts aren’t presented. As I read about more characters’ stories, I was often wondering why their stories had to be told.

I read an article a while ago that said Chabon’s original idea behind Telegraph Avenue was a television show, which would explain a lot. The novel offers more of a setting than an actual plot. It's not a bad book. But I don't think my time was well-spent in reading it.