Wednesday, September 12, 2012

‘Telegraph Avenue’: Michael Chabon on His Obsessive Novel of Fandom


The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist talks to Josh Dzieza about what drives him to create characters who bond over comics, records, or detective fiction—it has to do with his own geeky infatuations.

Michael Chabon is a poet of fandom. 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. 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 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. But a problem he encountered early on while writing Telegraph Avenue was that jazz wasn’t one of them.

“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. 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. “A church of vinyl,” one character calls it, while explaining why they’re hosting a former patron’s funeral there.
“They needed to be obsessive, and I just wasn’t feeling it,” Chabon said. Fortunately, while perusing a bookstore in North Carolina, he stumbled across a magazine called Wax Poetics. It was dedicated to soul jazz from the ‘60s and ‘70s. “It was a magazine for obsessives.”
“All I need is a world and I can get obsessed,” Chabon said. “All of a sudden I had my music for my guys.” His guys are Archy, an African-American bassist who returned from the Gulf, who meets Nat, a white aficionado of vinyl. The pair stay up until 5 a.m. smoking joints and listening to soul jazz. Years later, they’re selling it in their store and playing it in their band.
Read the full piece at The Daily Beast
Michael Chabon, "Telegraph Avenue"

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