Chabon’s colorful endeavors in writing the novel are explored in several of his personal essays (one of which is now published in the P.S. section at the end of Mysteries): in an attic no bigger than a crawlspace in his mother’s house, Chabon balanced on a dangerously feeble chair under the dim glow of a single dangling light bulb and pounded away on a primitive word processor, all of 64 kb of memory at his fingertips, the words scrolling along a screen just five inches wide, with barely enough room to extend his arms. That the novel, a bildungsroman of a recent college grad and his motley crew of friends and acquaintances (bikers, homosexuals, old rich white men, a beautiful but detached young girl named Phlox), has a back-story almost as interesting as the novel itself is the stuff of literary stardom.
It’s this stardom that Chabon has been rebelling against for 25 years.
Together, these two novels marked the beginning of the Brat Pack, and collegiate would-be novelists who sought instant success consequently unleashed a deluge of derivative transgressive slop. (Chabon pokes slightly bitter fun at the mess that was ‘80s workshops in his second novel, Wonder Boys.) (...)
It must have been tempting for critics to lump Chabon in with the Brat Pack. He was young, a workshop survivor, his fiction steeped in sexual yearning and adolescent experimentation. But Chabon had different aspirations. His writing, sometimes dazzling and sometimes flowery, was (and is) voice-dominant. Every page offered sentence after sentence of wonderfully overwrought descriptions of young lust, ambitions outweighed by apathy, youth enveloped by the sultry allure of lazy afternoons spent drinking, smoking, fucking. And his prose exhibited wit, whereas the Brat Pack preferred gloomy brashness. He wrote with empathy, with earnest reflection and self-consciousness, pervaded by sepia-daubed nostalgia. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a lens through which we can view his career, his rise to stardom and his aversion to that stardom, his similar origins to the Brat Pack and all the ways in which he differs from them—in his prose, his life, his fame, his ongoing legacy.
Along with Ellis and Mclerney and, a few years later, Donna Tartt (whose debut, The Secret History, is unquestionably the most ambitious and gorgeously-written of all the writers associated with the Brat Pack), Chabon was held up as the future of American literature; and only Chabon has grown as a writer, has earned a Pulitzer, had one of his novels included in Time’s 100 Novels of the Century. Ellis may have the most notorious Twitter account in America, but only Chabon is still debated and discussed in journals and magazines, his literary worth fought over by esteemed scholars and casual readers. Only Chabon has a reputation to uphold. (...)
Chabon wouldn’t ditch the first-person narrative until 2001, with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize. (Not to discredit him, but the competition wasn’t very stiff that year.) More ambitious in scope and subject than his previous efforts, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tells a sprawling, decades-spanning tale of two Jewish New Yorker boys, one an escapee of Hitler’s Germany, who collaborate on comics during World War Two. It strives for deep-seeded cultural issues, an attempt to capture the fears and anxieties and proclivities and lusts of a time and place, a dissection of Jewishness and sexual identity and nationalism, of art as escapism and as life support.
In Chabon’s hands, comics, “low art”, become more profound than eight square panels on a page. Like his friend and contemporary Jonathan Lethem, Chabon uses pop-culture as a vessel to explore gentrification and racial and generational schisms, with New York acting as a microcosm. His prose is at its most succinct in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay though still long and verbiage-heavy, each and every sentence has a task, illustrates a theme or develops a character or details the time and place. It’s a long but lean novel, moving quickly and captivatingly. Though in comparison to the preceding 500 pages, the ending feels a little—discounted? unearned? light? This was the novel that established Chabon as a “Great” American Author, not just a wordsmith. (Brett Easton Ellis called it one of the two or three best novels of his generation, whatever that means.) (...)
Transcending Nostalgia
Then came 2012. The world hasn’t yet ended, but Chabon’s reputation began teetering dangerously close to post-Pulitzer self-destruction, like F. Murray Abraham or Adrian Brody or Halle Berry or Cuba Gooding, Jr. after their Oscar wins. He penned the script for the über-expensive mega-flop John Carter, an almost-$300 million disaster, directed by Pixar guru Andrew Stanton in his live-action debut. Though it boasts some impressive visual effects, John Carter earned overwhelmingly mediocre reviews, with particular antipathy directed towards its failure to transcend or improve upon the countless sci-fi serials and epics Burroughs’ work inspired (chief among them Star Wars, and how odd for a film adapted from a seminal work to feel derivative of the other works it inspired) and, in the world of pulp art, mediocrity fares far worse than horridness. (...)
So Telegraph Avenue arrives in the wake of a very bad year for Chabon. Will it redeem him, boost him back to the ranks of the Letter Elite? Or will it convince those on the fence that his best years are indeed behind him?
It would take the entire length of this essay to describe the novel’s plot with any coherent thoroughness, as it’s as contrived and labyrinthine and purposefully dense as the title track on Bitches Brew. Characters flow in and out of the story, which is as non-linear and inconsequential as a Tarantino flick (QT and Miles both act as motif and metaphor here, with numerous references to their albums/ films coming from all sides), with little-to-no back story offered. There’s Archy Stallings (who is black) and Nat Jaffe (who is white), the co-owners of Brokeland Records, a small independent used record store. Archy and Nat struggle to keep Brokeland afloat as vinyl aficionados seem an endangered species, and those who survived the advent of digitalization and P2P piracy, the Great Vinyl Genocide as initiated by Napster and its spawn, now flock to larger, cheaper outlets.
Thence the conflict of the story: the fifth-richest black man in the country, Gibson Goode, former NFL star, is preparing to build one of his string of large, black-oriented malls, called Dogpile Thang, a few blocks from Brokeland, which doesn’t have a prayer of competing with Goode’s immense selection of jazz and funk and soul, his selection deeper, his copies more bountiful, his prices four or five dollars less per disc.
Goode has some sort of history with Archy’s father, Luther, a washed-up would-be icon of ‘70s blaxploitation kung fu films, sometimes drug-user, and full-time disappointment of a father. Chan Flowers, a one-time partner of Luther during Chan’s days of rolling with the Black Panthers (he botches a murder in our first encounter with him, a shotgun and a target no more than five or ten feet away and he somehow misses every vital body part, blowing the guy’s hand off, instead), also has some kind of beef with Luther. Flowers is now a congressman and turncoat to Brokeland as he suddenly switches his position against Dogpile and becomes a proponent of Goode’s monster.
Then there’s Gwen (Archy’s pregnant wife) and Aviva (Nat’s wife and mother of his son), midwives facing the swelling monsoon of a lawsuit that may unravel their friendship. Gwen, four weeks from her due date, is reeling from a brief affair Archy had with the girl who makes Gwen’s smoothies. And Archy’s illegitimate 12-year-old child, the smart-ass and aspiring filmmaker Titus, pops up unexpectedly, his mother dead, nowhere to go. And Nat’s son develops a crush on Titus, who may or may not reciprocate the feelings (he doesn’t say much).
Almost all of this is revealed on the book flap, perhaps in an attempt to clarify readers’ confusion: it’s up to the reader to figure out how someone is related to someone else and what everyone’s motivation is, and it’s often an ordeal. Characters are sketched slowly, and there’s not a whole lot of exposition. No one says, “I hate so and so because of this and that”; Chabon will give us a scene of the characters interacting and we have to decipher what’s going on. It doesn’t sound very complex or earth-shatteringly revelatory, but this is the most subtle Chabon has ever been.
Though it’s concerned with nostalgia (true to form), the prose is written with an of-the-moment intimacy. As loudly as he writes (his comparison of a bald man’s head to a “porn star’s testicle” is one of his less-audacious analogies, and he even reuses that “cup of foaming regret” metaphor, possibly as self-deprecating meta-humor), Chabon whispers about character details and themes more than he bellows. His subtlety is subtly lurking beneath the sheen of five-syllable words and fragmented sentences.
Nothing and no one is above or below Chabon’s prodigious prose. He describes all with equal opportunity opulence. Here, he colors a supporting character who you may or may not forget several pages later: “Rob Abreu was a weary-shouldered, pudding-cheeked lawyer, at one time the attorney for the electrical worker’s union, younger and sharper than he looked, better educated than he sounded, scented with bay rum and endowed advantageously with large, moist mournful eyes the color of watery coffee that were set into his face in a pair of bruised hollows, prints inked in the malefactor thumbs of life.” (...)
This makes the novel a difficult read for the first two-hundred pages or so, as you have to keep flipping back to remind yourself of minute characters who are often referred to by several names and monikers (Who the hell is Gary? Oh, Mr. Singletary, aka the King of Bling, aka Brokeland’s landlord, aka friend of Archy and Nat, aka Aisha’s father). This really gets disconcerting where race is concerned: ethnicity and racial heritage weave through the novel, a serpentine theme coiled around every character and every page, slithering through every conversation, not overtly manifested like nostalgia in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay but intangible, ethereal; imperceptible and eternal to nostalgia’s ephemeral avowal; race as a culture and ethnicity as persona, music and movies and lexicon and fashion and sexual tendencies all rooted in one’s genetic make-up, the countries from whence one’s lineage stems.
Chabon doesn’t reveal the race of his characters to us, and only sometimes mentions it in passing (Gwen calls a doctor racist, says something like “my black ass,” etc.). It’s a little uncomfortable trying to decipher a character’s ethnicity, the average reader not wanting to concede to stereotyping, but this is all part of Chabon’s brilliance: he doesn’t bring direct attention to race (though it eventually feels like the main thread connecting the events and characters). He treats it naturally, almost casually. It’s frustrating for a long while, but when you start to get it, the novel falls into place brilliantly. (...)
Chabon doesn’t reveal the race of his characters to us, and only sometimes mentions it in passing (Gwen calls a doctor racist, says something like “my black ass,” etc.). It’s a little uncomfortable trying to decipher a character’s ethnicity, the average reader not wanting to concede to stereotyping, but this is all part of Chabon’s brilliance: he doesn’t bring direct attention to race (though it eventually feels like the main thread connecting the events and characters). He treats it naturally, almost casually. It’s frustrating for a long while, but when you start to get it, the novel falls into place brilliantly. (...)
The long sentences, ramblings, and seemingly irrelevant details aren’t Chabon unhinged or the author’s mind spraying like a fire hose but the consciousness of an avenue and its inhabitants. When you finally penetrate its glitzy façade, Telegraph Avenue is, ultimately and essentially, Chabon’s Chaboniest novel.
by Greg Cwik, Pop Matters | Read more:
Image: Telegraph Avenue via
[ed. Just finished reading Hernan Diaz's Trust today (excellent) and picked up Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which I've been meaning to get to for a while. Then wondered if I should re-read Telegraph Avenue, since it's been so long. A lot of people don't get it for reasons well articulated here, but I thought it was great. Also great: Kavalier and Clay.]
