Telegraph Avenue
As an East Coast person with West Coast ambitions, I’ve spent a ton of time contemplating what my California dream looks like. AKA – I’ve read a lot of Joan Didion during San Francisco business trips, wishing that my between-meeting glimpses of the city still bore some resemblance to her washed-out, wavering, wrenching descriptions.
Over the course of many Bay Area trips (during which I never once crossed the Oakland-Bay bridge), I somehow came to the idea that Oakland would be the place for me. I had ideas about the city, a sort of mental pastiche of lush foliage, sun-bleached Mediterranean tile, Raiders gear, Childish Gambino, low-riders, illegal artist lofts, and caftan-wearing activists. I once heard someone say, with a straight face, that Oakland is to San Francisco as Brooklyn is to New York. That was all the encouragement I needed.
This summer, I picked up a client in Oakland and I finally got to see the city for myself. I brought Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue with me, hauling its hardcover mass all along the street for which it was named. I read it while leaning against Berkeley’s Sather Gate, on a stool between racks at Amoeba Records, at Burma Superstar (where I spilled Samusa Soup on it), and at Moe’s Books, where I had to use the soup stain to prove that the book was mine and not stolen merchandise.
Telegraph Avenue is set at that indistinct point between Oakland and Berkeley, where different identities and ways of being come into clashingly close proximity – black and white, straight and gay, poor and privileged, book smart and street smart. It’s also set at the indistinct point in a friendship between two men who run a record store, as they grapple with what happens when the world changes but you stay the same.
It’s 2004, which is crucial – the specter of gentrification looms, digital music threatens to kill the physical, Barack Obama is still a state senator (he makes a fictional cameo so good that I was practically fist-pumping as I read it). Just five years later would have been too late, with Oakland becoming increasingly San-Fran-like, iPods taking over, and Obama ascending.
Telegraph Avenue’s style is deeply tied to time and place. It’s kind of loose and loping, giving an extremely relaxed tour of its characters’ lives. Archy’s world is on fire – cheating! babies! illegitimate children! professional ruin! blackmail! death threats! – and yet he lumbers through it numbly, eating whole cakes, driving aimlessly, and failing to rise to one occasion after another. Nat, meanwhile, is the ultimate modernity-ruing misanthrope, bitching from behind the counter of his ruined record store. Dread creeps, and these guys sleep.
I like Chabon’s writing – yes, it’s pretentious, but it’s also bursting with ideas, references, and great turns of phrase. This book is no exception. Take, for example, this particularly great passage:
“The cakes and cookies at Neldam’s were not first-rate, but they had an old-fashioned sincerity, a humble brand of fabulousness, that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesized in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collective of blind ex-Carmelite Wiccans.”
Ultimately, Telegraph Avenue isn’t perfect, but it’s everything I want a travel book to be – highly specific, transporting, and full of feeling. But did it make me want to move to Oakland? Not exactly.