The Idle Book Club 3: Telegraph Avenue

[Jake]

For episode three of the Idle Book Club we read Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon.

On this episode: Chris and Sean dig into Michael Chabon's latest, Telegraph Avenue. While swept up by Chabon's prose, they can't quite get over some aspects of the plot.

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• Telegraph Avenue hardcover from Amazon
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[mikemariano]

[Sean]

Started it tonight!

[SuperHarman]

Got it. In the middle of another book right now but hopefully I can get through it in time, if not I'll read and enjoy the discussion later.

[DF7]

I'm a couple dozen pages in. I'm really appreciating my kindle's abilities to look up words; there are a few that I've never seen before. Its nice to have my vocabulary stretched.

[Sean]

I'm a couple dozen pages in. I'm really appreciating my kindle's abilities to look up words; there are a few that I've never seen before. Its nice to have my vocabulary stretched.

Chabon pulled out all the stops on Kavalier and Klay -- the vocab in that book is intense. It's funny, because of Kavalier I don't find myself scrambling for words (but I might just be ignoring ones I don't know too...)

[pabosher]

Is this as good as/in the same vein of goodness as Kavalier and Clay? I loved that book, and if it is then I'll be tempted to pick this up...

[filk]

Ouch, quite expensive. I'm 20 pages in an finding it quite out of my depth subject-wise, but the prose is lovely.

What is next month's book? If its another newer release, I'd like to place a hold at my library so that I can get it in time. Can't really afford new releases every month.

[Chris]

Is this as good as/in the same vein of goodness as Kavalier and Clay? I loved that book, and if it is then I'll be tempted to pick this up...

I'd be surprised if many people here have actually read it yet, since it's such a new release.

[Chris]

Ouch, quite expensive. I'm 20 pages in an finding it quite out of my depth subject-wise, but the prose is lovely.

What is next month's book? If its another newer release, I'd like to place a hold at my library so that I can get it in time. Can't really afford new releases every month.

Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins, released in 2003.

[gregbrown]

I'm only ~100 pages in so far, but I'm really disliking Chabon's choice of flowery prose covered in pop-culture references. There are some character viewpoints that aren't so bad about it, but man. (The last paragraph of the jacket copy is wince-inducing, but I can't blame that on Chabon at all.)

Also having this reaction to the book's project as a whole, though it's fading as I read more and forget about it:

[Xeneth]

JUST finished Cloud Atlas on the train and will be digging into the cast tonight... Clicking for Kindle Edition now, and as someone fairly new to owning a device like this, I also really appreciate the built-in dictionary action.

[Argobot]

I just passed the 100 page mark and am enjoying what I've read so far, minus one particular section: the at home birth. When the two main female protagonists are midwives, it shouldn't come as a surprise that there will be a birthing scene in the novel, but man, I was unprepared for how visceral my reaction to it would be. It's not even a particularly graphic scene, but it still created this very real, raw emotional response for me.

So far I wouldn't put the book in the same league as Kavalier and Clay, but I'm hoping that it will surprise me in the end. Chabon is a really interesting writer with a lot of interesting opinions (his collection of essays called "Maps and Legends" is really worth a read, if only for the essay where he argues against the ghettoizing of genre fiction).

[Thyroid]

Hey, I bought this book! I'll read it. I hope I manage to do it before November 2nd, though.

[filk]

I am incredibly uncomfortable with my reaction to this book. As a preface, I am born, raised, and living in southern Ontario. I grew up in a small, homogenous caucasian town and now live in a city that is composed primarily of college students, with an ethnic distribution leaning heavily towards caucasian and oriental people. To sum it up, I have never really been exposed to black culture or even black people.

Reading this book, I'm disappointed with myself in many ways. The most forgivable slight is that I don't pick up on any of the cultural references. But more than that, I immediately picture most characters as caucasian upon introduction despite the novel taking place in a largely black community. I still picture Gwen as kind of a caucasianized african-american, having taken a chapter or two to realize her background. Half the time I feel like the voices I give the characters are over-the-top ethnically inspired.

Basically I feel like a horribly ignorant white person.

That said, I am enjoying the book. I really like Julie's character (very possibly because I can identify most with a young caucasian male, damn) as well as Archy. I'm struggling enough with the style of reference-and-simile-ridden prose that I haven't been able to tease out much in terms of theme or even plot, but as a sequence of vignettes it's charming at least.

[gregbrown]

Half the time I feel like the voices I give the characters are over-the-top ethnically inspired.

I went to a Chabon reading earlier this month where he read from the scene after the home birth, and his voices were also pretty over-the-top. It's more to do with how he wrote the characters' dialogue than anything.

[Argobot]

I went to a Chabon reading earlier this month where he read from the scene after the home birth, and his voices were also pretty over-the-top. It's more to do with how he wrote the characters' dialogue than anything.

Yeah...that's kind of...awkward?

I remember from a while back in one of the podcasts where Sean and Jake were discussing the issue of race in the Walking Dead and how they felt uncomfortable as two white guys, to write a black character. I think there's a lot of the same concerns in Telegraph Avenue, but amplified, because this book is directly confronting racial issues. There are a lot of tongue in check references to stereotypical liberal white people who are overly concerned with appearing racial sensitive in Telegraph Avenue, but I can't help thinking that Chabon is making a lot of the same unfortunate mistakes that he's mocking other white people of doing.

[Argobot]

Wow, I just finished the Barack Obama portion of the book, and I'm at a complete loss for words. It almost makes me want to stop reading the book. I can't believe that Chabon really thought that scene was a good idea.

[DF7]

Wow, I just finished the Barack Obama portion of the book, and I'm at a complete loss for words. It almost makes me want to stop reading the book. I can't believe that Chabon really thought that scene was a good idea.

I just finished that too. It felt like a really awkward cameo scene. And maybe its just because I've only seen Obama speak in a political context, but imagining him referring to someone as "brother" just completely shatters my suspension of disbelief.

[Chris]

Wow, I just finished the Barack Obama portion of the book, and I'm at a complete loss for words. It almost makes me want to stop reading the book. I can't believe that Chabon really thought that scene was a good idea.

Yeah, it's a real low point. Not a good idea.

[Argobot]

Yeah, it's a real low point. Not a good idea.

Please tell me the book is worth finishing, because at this point, I've lost all my motivation to read it.

[Chris]

Please tell me the book is worth finishing, because at this point, I've lost all my motivation to read it.

I haven't finished it yet

[Hangdog]

I'm probably down to my last hour of reading. It has become a slog, though there is some tense actiony action in the final bit. But I've got the time now, and I may not later, so here are some of my thoughts:

I've been a fan of Chabon's work since I bought Wonder Boys when it first came out in hardcover. I loved that book and especially loved Kavalier and Clay. Chabon definitely has a showy prose style, but I typically find it thrilling. He'll sometimes launch a sentence the way a gymnast launches into a routine, and it's this incredible, twisting and seemingly impossible feat. And usually, the thwack on the mat at the end is utterly satisfying because he's said something rather brilliant in a rather showy but thrilling way. There's some of that in this book, but mostly I found myself getting impatient as hell with his language. Some incredible flights, but lots of "please shut up and get on with it" moments for me. He seems self-indulgent in this one, launching these flourishes when something bare-bones would be better, obscuring a scene rather than heightening it. It's like having a conversation with someone who spontaneously bursts out into dead serious tai chi every few minutes. Not appropriate. It never bothered me in Wonder Boys or Kavalier and Clay. Perhaps it was the material in those case, but more likely he did it in those books with discipline.

A good (non-spoilery) example: Later in the book, there is some escalating tension over Aviva and Gwen's practice, and the practice is in serious jeopardy. On page 319, we're back in Gwen's POV, and we know she's heading to a meeting that is one of the most dramatically important in her storyline. And yet...we endure 4 pages of her shopping for and picking out her outfit for the occasion as well as a scene of her with her hair dresser. These aren't completely worthless--we see her mental state in these scenes, there's a little bit of progression of her thinking, but not much, and there's certainly nothing interesting enough in those 4 pages to justify this agonizing setup (but the payoff scene is finally pretty good!) Good fiction is about the accrual of detail, and in the details the bigger themes are explored. But this feels like a house full of junk, and I can't even get from one room to the next without a massive effort.

And despite being bloated with language, characters, scenes, throughlines, and pop culture gravitas, it feels like a small, unambitious book to me. Yes, he is a white man taking on race, largely from a black point of view, but that feels like an artificial ambition, or perhaps I only think that because I don't believe the book does much interesting with the question of race. I hope the podcast doesn't spend too much time dwelling on this issue (though it of course deserves a decent chunk, given Sean and Jakes's history with this issue; I just don't think the book itself speaks to race as interestingly as it could).

Telegraph Ave feels more like Wonder Boys than Kavalier and Clay, if we're comparing against his previous work. But Wonder Boys felt charming and deliberately, enjoyably small (as opposed to confronting a Big Issue). Both books feature a lovable loser as the main protagonist (if you call Archy the main protoganist). They are both reluctant fathers, terrified of their responsibilities, man-boys, largely good-hearted but unable to act like the men they know they ought to be. We get glimpses of their partners' frustrations. In both books, you get a cast of quirky obsessive side characters, right down to the criminal characters who are both lovably goofy and yet sincerely dangerous. Both books too focus on niche-y pop cultures. The big difference here is that soul music, jazz music, vinyl, blacksploitation films, and midwifery all rank high on the relatively short list of things in the entire universe I don't care at all about. (Well, midwifery is kind of interesting..). Of course, this is my personal taste, and it's clear that Chabon put a lot of work into know these elements; I still just don't get any thrill out of an obscure rare print record reference, real or imagined. Perhaps those who do care about those topics (and I mean no offense if you do), can speak to how they enhanced the book for them. And the Little Local Shop versus the Big Soul-Sucking Chain Store, while a real life issue that I find worth following, sounds like a dreadfully trite conflict for a novel. At least Chabon gave us a situation with some level of complexity: that store probably would bring a lot of jobs and better real estate and it sounds like they do have good music taste--it's not a Walmart moving in).

Of course, that's all a bit of a MacGuffin. But if you take out that and the music and the race, the book only seems to be about a group of characters who seemingly, despite understanding the stakes and repercussions, cannot make the right choice. And while that too seems like a theme worth pursuing, I do not follow it in these characters. I never feel like I understand why Gwen goes all the way up to a moment knowing what she ought to do, and then does something different except that she's "built" that way. I never understand why Archy always thinks about how bad he is for doing or not doing something and never does it. I found it frustrating that the moral stakes are so well-articulated yet the characters act always counter to what they understand. I feel like such mistakes are usually made because the stakes aren't well-thought out, so it feels false to me. The characters seem known and clear in their ruminations and opaque at the moment of action, which I found frustrating. I actually wanted more Nat and more Aviva. They seemed more nuanced to me than most of the other characters. Oh well.

It might be worth noting, though I can't cite a source, I did read somewhere that this novel rose out of a TV show pilot or treatment that Chabon wrote, and which was never picked up. In that format, you need to open up a lot of lines to hand off to the writing staff. Maybe that's why there's too much going on here with so little focus. But I found little compelling in this. There were some great scenes and sequences and even some really great sentences. Sometimes he settled in and the drama carried the story, instead of the inflated language (most of the midwifery stuff was quite good, I thought, dramatically compelling), but I largely found the characters passively reacting to a situation thrust upon them, which rarely works in good fiction. I'm really disappointed, but I'm sure I'll pick up his next one too.

[filk]

About 75% through the book now, and I feel like my racial imagery issues are more or less settled. Now that the book isn't introducing too many characters on a regular basis, I've been able to stabilize my images and voices for everyone else.

I both loved and hated the chapter with Fifty-Four soaring over Oakland. Some poignant little moment in there, but I don't know that it gained anything from being one giant running sentence like that. It felt like experimentation for the sake of experimentation

[jeremywc]

I had a lot of free time today, so I knocked out the last half of the book. I'm still trying to process all my thoughts on it. I'm not surprised to learn that it was originally intended to be a TV series, my initial impression of the book before I learned that was that it would have worked well as a script for film. At some point (maybe 40-50% in), I could almost see where it began to transition from script to novel and I think that's where the pacing kind of gets off the rails.