I suspect my moratorium on book shopping will be ending soon. I haven't purchased anything since I bought Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue (2012) from Too Tall Tales, a quaint little local book store in Toco Hills (here in Atlanta) earlier this summer. I finally finished Chabon's lengthy novel about two families in the Telegraph Avenue neighborhood between Oakland and Berkeley, which is on the brink of gentrification. The two men Nat Jaffe and Archie Stallings own a used vinyl record store called Brokeland. The men's spouses are midwives who are underfire for a delivery that didn't go well.. It's a book about families, jazz, action movies and to some degree race. Nat is white: Archie is black and they live in neighborhood that has every ethnic group imaginable, “cooked up in the same skillet.”
It took me a shamefully long time to read this book (lots of note taking as shown above.) Along with my recent obsession with maps (see all the July postings). Part of the blame goes to Chabon's descriptive prose, which always deserves slow, appreciative reading whether it be an account of Nat's cooking a big Southern meal to bribe a community leader (“those hard-ass little red beans, rushed into their fatback bathwater, had manage to relax enough to jump on over into a casserole with the rice”) or a roll call of citizens at a community gathering (“...the male Juddhist slurping with a vehement mindfulness from the rubber teat of a water bottle while the female [Juddhist] rummaged with melancholy chopsticks through the strips of flesh-gray tofu skin interleaved into her bento box as if ruing the slaughter of innocent soy plants that her appetite had ordained;”).
This is the fourth Chabon book that I have read, which is unusual for me, because usually after two books by the same author, the desire to read a third wanes. I thought Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) was great, but I thought The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007) was even better – a wonderful imaginative effort along with his stellar prose and a whodunit plot. As a switch. I read Chabon's book of essays Maps and Legends and I still remember the essay “Diving into the Wreck” where he describes the “bathyspheric” pressure of writing a second book, especially if the first one had some success. Telegraph Avenue is a fine book, but it reminds me more of Zadie Smith's White Teeth more any other of Chabon's previous works.
Shopping at A Cappella
This Thursday, August 14th, A Cappella Books is hosting a Rare Book Showcase of “rare books documents, ephemera, and other antiquarian items,” which features the wares of several rare book dealers. I am not a collector of anything in particular, but I am a sucker for something that triggers something of my past (like a map).
Chabon captures that feeling in a passage in Telegraph Avenue, when he describes the mindset of Mr. Nostalgia who deals in sports cards, movies and comics.
Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value. They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that you might come to believe, they would restore to you. Their value was indexed only to the sense of personal completeness, perfection of the soul, that would flood you when, at last, you filled the last gap on your checklist.
I am not sure if I will find anything that will “restore” me, but I am willing to go take a look.
