Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon's new novel is a breezy High Fidelity-esque family comedy set amongst the jazz shops of Oakland, California. It dissects the lives and loves of jazz shop owners Archie and Nat and their wives, both couples with their lives so intertwined, yet with so little passed between them. Chabon has always displayed an exuberance of prose, a confident effervescent ability to switch between fizzing dialogue and almost-over-the-top prose. He is a joy to read. This, though on occasion outstays its welcome, is still a powerful lesson in fiction and storytelling.

The strands are multiple: Nat and Archie face gentrification in the face of a corporate jazz shop up the road, bankrolled by a baseball player with deep pockets; their wives, partners in a private birthing practice, fight the good fight of racial and gender equality; Nat's son begins a dalliance with another boy, who is linked to Archie; Archie's deadbeat dad, a former Blaxploitation actor with links to the Black Panthers, is back on the scene, with a new scheme.

The two families bounce around these separate strands until Chabon's masterful narration starts to bring them all together. What we're left with is a fun, breezy, artful, if sometimes too long, book about fighting the good fight against the Man.