Their wives, Gwen and Aviva run Berkeley Birth Partners, mid wives performing home and hospital births according to their clients’ wishes and needs. Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are co-owners of Brokeland Records, a used/collectible record shop barely hanging on by its fingernails financially. Set in what the author refers to as the freewheeling borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland California circa 2004, with a couple of sojourns into the 1970s, in an ethnically diverse but still predominately African American neighbourhood, Telegraph Avenue details the lives of two families who have intertwined professionally and personally. However, Chabon not only navigates them safely, he does so with such aplomb it’s only after you’ve finished and enjoyed his story you realize the keenness of his observations regarding modern urban life. There aren’t many artists today both talented and brave enough to enter into these types of dangerous waters without seriously floundering or running ashore on some shoal or another. The notion of community and its subtext of race plays a major role in Michael Chabon’s most recent release, Telegraph Avenue, first published by Harper Collins Canada in 2012 in hardcover and scheduled for release as a trade paperback in October 2013. Also which community are they talking about? Is it everybody within the geographic area, or just the people who are the same colour, sexual persuasion or religion as the person making the announcement? How many times have you hear a business man or professional athlete talk about giving back to the community? How opening a chain of fast food restaurants or other business is anything but a grab for a neighbourhood’s disposable income is beyond me, but it’s amazing how often businesses openings are called gifts to a community as if they’re supposed to be grateful for more minimum wage service industry jobs. Of course there are those who are always willing cynically make use of the word community in order to further their own ends. So instead of communities being made up of the people living together in a geographic area, a geographic area is made up of various segregated communities The problem is further exasperated by the tendency to refer to distinct groups as communities. Of course it’s not just race at issue, it’s gender, religion and anything else that marks one group of people as different from another. While there are no laws left on the books discriminating against people of colour, nothing we legislate is going to prevent the way people think or feel. The issue of race in North America, specifically the relationship between people of African descent and those of European ancestry (white people) is something most of us don’t want to talk about.

Chabon telegraph avenue