Reading Telegraph Avenue on Telegraph Avenue

Sometimes it feels like I’m traveling just so I can learn the context for more stories, my own–I want to collect as many things to weave into the stories I’m going to tell as possible–and other people’s as well. 

I remember what a difference studying abroad in Ireland had on my understanding of The Dead and how the second time I read it–after having been there–felt like reading it for the first time because there were so many new layers that had been hidden to me before. I remember reading the line “The gentle rain was trying not to fall” in Murphy and being blown away by how exactly it described something I’d experienced there many times. If I’d read that turn of phrase before I went to Ireland it might have pleased me but I wouldn’t have understood it nearly as completely.

It’s for that very reason that I waited to read Michael Chabon’s latest book, Telegraph Avenue, until I was in Oakland.

I’d been prepared for my arrival in the Bay Area by Kerouac, who describes the place and his multiple journeys to and from it many times, over the course of On the Road.

[W]e began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.

Once I arrived however it was time to read a story truly of this place, and that’s where Telegraph Avenue came in. I enjoyed the book immensely. Chabon wields language with his customary virtuoso-like glee. And while each of his previous books has limited itself to one style throughout–Gentlemen of the Road was written like the verbose serialized tales of the past where authors were paid by the word, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay presented itself in a style reminiscent of the pulps written during the years it was set in–this novel jumped between styles from one page to the next. A scene ago you were reading the linguistic equivalent of a blaxploitation, turn the page and you find yourself reading about the real world as if it were high fantasy. There’s even the literary version of a pan in a film: one sentence that lasts twelve pages. I found this ridiculously enjoyable, though I can see how it would drive some readers insane.

While sometimes in Chabon’s work his characters suffer at the expense of his obsession with wowing the reader with tenuously complicated analogies, in this novel the characters are front and center in a way they haven’t been for a few books of his now. They are well-drawn and relateable. Does Julie Jaffe smack a little bit of Chabon’s other nerdy, insecure, gay character, Sam Clay? Maybe. But did I love him just as fiercely and even more quickly than I loved Sam Clay? Absolutely.

So, I enjoyed the book. And I enjoyed it even more because I was learning about its world first hand as I was reading it.

Mere days after I spent the afternoon in Peace Park, thinking it was People’s Park, and then walked past People’s Park and posted this entry, People’s Park popped up in Telegraph Avenue: “[T]he parrot, tired of flying, came down in a cedar tree in People’s Park, where it established a lookout over a small party of feral teenagers who carried on for quite awhile.” It was like the gentle rain all over again. I’d been there. I’d seen those feral teenagers.

I’ve gone lots of places that contain stories I care about. I meandered through Albuquerque finding the spots where Jesse Pinkman lived. I drove around Pittsburgh thinking about Art Bechstein. I rode a bus through the night to Maine and felt like a King of the Road. But everywhere else I’ve appreciated being there because I already knew the story. This is the first place where I’ve discovered the story and the place simultaneously.

I rode the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco twice–an experience just as invigorating as riding the Staten Island Ferry in New York, there’s something about boats, and bays, and windy days. The first time the woman I was riding it with talked about how she felt like she never saw the cargo lifters that live in the port of Oakland actually lifting any cargo. Of course, Chabon happened to have something to say on this subject too.

The container boxes of the port of Oakland, as seen from the Bay Bridge, were a lifelong source of fascination to Julie, monster piles of colored brick like stabs at some ambitious Lego project left unfinished…Julie could never seem to catch the cranes in motion, and the loose but tidy piles of containers never seemed to move, as if the business of the port were a magical one like that of the toys in Toy Story, a secret work that would be spoiled if he observed it.

(Chabon and I speak very similar dialects of nerd.)

I’ve finished Telegraph Avenue now–and yes, it’s ending may be slightly unsatisfactory, but it’s a book you read more for the experience than the resolution. It’s all about the journey, not the destination, right? I should know that as well as anyone. And I’m back to the next book on my list of travel narratives, Gulliver’s Travels, but I’m glad I took a break from the travel narratives to read about this place in this place.

There are so many stories that lie in my future that I’ll understand differently, better I dare say, for these travels, whether it’s because I’ve purchased a giant donut from a food truck in Austin and sat in a parking lot eating it, or because I’ve listened to streetcars whistle by in Toronto. There’s going to be some sentence in a novel, or shot in a film, that I understand more fully. And maybe, if I’m exceedingly lucky, I’ll get to discover a story and a place simultaneously again sometime.