![]() ![]() The tension between his fundamental sweetness and this sharper edge give Telegraph Avenue a tone more intriguing than its predictable plot would suggest. He may be at his best when he momentarily abandons the effort to be nice and fair, and looks with a more jaundiced eye at a place where “fearsome-looking, old, ex-nun-style, Communist, lesbian retired piano teachers” take courses in the films of Quentin Tarantino at the local senior center, and the typical doctor’s office is a combination of “a secondhand furniture showroom, a real estate title company, and the Ministry of Truth from 1984.” ![]() Sometimes, the novel seems like a long exercise in nostalgia for leisure suits and obscure record albums (all of which are described in detail in the text with release years and producers, in case the reader wants to track them down).Ĭhabon can craft breathtaking, multi-page sentences, and his little world is fully inhabited by a range of strange, likable characters. He doesn’t have much new to say about the necessity of forgiveness or the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. ![]() But apart from the sprawl, Chabon still manages to find the novelistic. Apparently, it started out as a TV pilot for TNT, and the abundance of characters and the proliferance of character actions definitely provide enough fodder to fill a whole TV season. The characters are run through paces that seem less of their own making than of Chabon’s. Yes, Telegraph Avenue, at 468 pages, is a huge, messy sprawl of a novel. ![]()
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