Later we learn that these two kids belong to the four adults around whom much of Telegraph Ave revolves – Nat Jaffe and Archy Stallings, a pair of guys who own a floundering vinyl exchange called Brokeland Records, and their wives, Aviva Roth-Jaffe and Gwen Shanks, who also run a business, albeit of a different kind, as midwives – but their appearance at the very beginning of the book strikes an interesting note of similarity with Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude and it’s a note that goes on being struck throughout the novel. Here's Chabon discussing the 10-year process of conceiving and writing the book.The first characters we meet in Michael Chabon’s latest book slip by temporarily unnamed, a white boy riding a skateboard and a black boy pedalling a brakeless bike amid a ‘iss of tyres’ and a ‘[ranular unravelling of skateboard wheels against asphalt’. New York Times Book Review (by fellow Pulitzer fiction winner Jennifer Egan).

Hit the forward arrow button on the tool bar to keep reading. You can read whole chunks of the novel on Google Books. There is much here to recommend, but then, there is much here, period, including but not limited to: blackmail, infidelity, first love, kung fu, midwifery, a Barack Obama cameo and an enormously phallic black zeppelin, all presented in a manner as loose and tension-free as a stoner's wee-hours disquisition on why his favorite album totally rules, man. Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue is an agreeable if ultimately frustrating shaggy-dog tale of a novel that slips its leash and lopes its discursive and distinctly unhurried way through the unkempt backyards of its characters' lives.

Telegraph Avenue, which he discussed on KQED Public Radio's Forum show ( archive here later), is set 'in a neighborhood that straddles Berkeley and Oakland,' as Glen Weldon's NPR review notes. Berkeley novelist Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, has a new book out today.

Michael chabon telegraph avenue review