Sometimes, You Just Connect With an Author

Telegraph Avenue came out today. I downloaded the Kindle version this morning.

I read the first paragraph:

"A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike. Dark August morning, deep in the Flatlands. Hiss of tires. Granular unraveling of skateboard wheels against asphalt. Summertime Berkeley giving off her old-lady smell, nine different styles of jasmine and a squirt of he-cat."

I just had to stop. I re-read it four times. Bathed in it, wallowed in it. The first paragraph of the first Michael Chabon novel since The Yiddish Policemen's Union four years ago. I felt the need to savor it, to hold on to each moment with Chabon's prose. I put my Kindle away, thinking that it might be best to wait until I have the Frankenstein script fully in my head, so I can give these words the attention I want to give them. The attention they deserve.

Yet, I'm DYING to read it. To see the wonders that Mr. Chabon has in store, the gifts that I always receive from his works, but especially his novels. I love that his writing adapts and changes with each genre and style he approaches, and that he embraces genre and style so fully. It's a conversation I've been dying to have with him...someday.

Perhaps I'll go get my hardcover copy this afternoon.

My Favorite Author RETURNS!!!

September 11th, 2012. Michael Chabon. Telegraph Avenue.

Oh my lord, I am so excited. No modern author has been able to so succinctly and consistently touch me, be it by pure emotion, or by tapping into the same pop culture touchstones that most resonate with me.

I had been pretty firm in my "favorite novel, ever" for more than a decade (Fahrenheit 451, for the record), when, on a lark because I had a gift card, I bought The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Mainly, I was curious about a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about early comic book creators.

I was stunned, blown away. It's now unchallenged as my favorite novel, ever. I can't imagine anything replacing it.

I also cannot imagine Chabon falling from his place as my favorite writer. With each book he publishes, he embraces a different style, from the Robert E. Howard-esque Gentlemen of the Road to the Chandler homage of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I love Chabon because he's a "serious" writer how unabashedly embraces pulp as a valid form of literature.

I cannot wait.

Here's the publisher's synopsis:

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.

When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, 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 the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old 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.