Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - awed, hypnotized, overwhelmed. When I read one of his novels, I feel a little like I do when I turn a corner in the Met and see the gorgeous sprawl and splatter of Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, when I crank up the volume on Sgt. If you imagine him raising a sunlit saber and leading the charge, his cavalry has grown mighty, among them Justin Cronin ( The Passage) and Colson Whitehead ( Zone One).Ĭhabon writes big. Chabon has become the principal cheerleader for the Avengerization of literature - effectively making genre cool again in literary circles. I bought it the day it was released and happily lost a week of my life to it, enchanted by its comic books, Nazis, golems, Antarctic battles. This is the 11th book by Chabon, who won the Pulitzer in 2001 for his epic novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a wonder of escapism that held nothing back. Their lives are settled into a comfortable groove until Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, decides to construct a Dogpile megastore down the block and effectively sends the needle skipping off the record. It is a sentence that reveals the novel's strength and weakness: Chabon is a supremely talented show-off.Īrchy and Nat are longtime pals, bandmates, and co-owners of Brokeland Records, a used-vinyl shop in a decaying neighborhood. This sweeping passage is a gymnastic example of style replicating content, as we follow a parrot orbiting houses, skittering atop windowsills, visiting all the novel's characters, who - like the NorCal, East Bay avenue where the story is set - find themselves in a state of rough transition. It's a dazzling feat of language, a blurred-finger riff that no doubt made his computer smoke like a Gibson guitar fingered too long, too hard. There is a sentence in Michael Chabon's new novel, Telegraph Avenue (Harper, $28), that stretches for 12 pages.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon