![]() ![]() “They needed to be obsessive, and I just wasn’t feeling it,” Chabon said. “A church of vinyl,” one character calls it, while explaining why they’re hosting a former patron’s funeral there. This was a particularly troubling problem because the novel’s quirky cast of midwives, musicians, and whale-rights lawyers all orbit around the used-jazz-record store. “I love jazz, but it never lit that obsessive fannish fire under me,” Chabon said over the phone from his house in Maine, where he spends the summer with his family. But a problem he encountered early on while writing Telegraph Avenue was that jazz wasn’t one of them. His exuberant new novel, Telegraph Avenue, has at its center one of those temples of geeky obsession and eternal bullshitting: a vintage-record store, in this case one specializing in jazz and set in a neighborhood the characters call Brokeland, "the ragged fault line where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted." Superheroes, magic, cartography, baseball, sci-fi, detective fiction-Chabon’s enthusiasms are many. Other times Chabon’s own love for a genre animates his work The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is in part an ode to Raymond Chandler. ![]() ![]() ![]() His characters worship at culture’s niches, such as the comic-books-obsessed duo Joe and Sam who star in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. ![]()
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