Cadix
Résumé:
As
the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat
Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band
mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used
vinyl located in the sketchy yet freewheeling borderlands of
Berkeley and Oakland, on the quintessential East Bay avenue
that gives the book its title. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and
Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of
semi-legendary nurse midwives who have welcomed, between
them, more than a thousand new-minted little citizens into
the dented utopia at whose heart, half tavern, half temple,
stands Brokeland Records. Archy and Gwen are expecting their
first baby; Nat and Aviva have a teenaged son, Julius.
Cranky, flawed, and loving each other with all the fierceness
we've come to expect of Chabon characters, they have worked
to construct lives and livelihoods that have a groove,
looking to connect across barriers of race and class, and
clinging to a sense of order and security through their
stubbornly old-school ways.
When
ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fourth-richest black man
in America, announces plans to go forward with the
construction of his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby
neglected stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it
means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise.
What they don t know is that Goode's announcement marks the
climax of a decades-old secret history, encompassing a
forgotten crime of the Black Panther era, the tragedy of
Archy's own deadbeat father--a long-faded Blaxploitation star
named Luther Stallings--and the perpetual shining failure of
American optimism about race. As their husbands struggle to
mount a defense, at Berkeley Birth Partners Aviva and Gwen
also find themselves caught up in a battle for their
professional existence, one that tests the limits of their
friendship. Adding another layer of complication to their
already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus
Joyner, the teenaged son Archy has never acknowledged, and
the love of Julius Jaffe's life.
An
intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of
classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic,
pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the
great American novel we've been waiting for. Generous,
imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it
is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.