The church of vinyl

After the winning Wonder Boys and the extravagant sprawl of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, most readers were willing to follow Michael Chabon’s freelance imagination pretty much wherever it chose to go, into overdrive or elsewhere. With his latest, Telegraph Avenue, it chooses to stay pretty much in the old neighborhood.

That neighborhood is somewhere at the “borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland,” a California crossroads of hippies, hipsters and community life. There we discover Brokeland Records, one of the few remaining outposts of used vinyl in an increasingly corporate download world. Manning it are two soldiers of soul, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, one African-American and one Jewish, both committed to buying up stacks of wax from estate sellers and providing them to collectors and just about anyone who wanders in for a whiff of musical history.

Such people exist, of course. I remember living in places like Decatur, Georgia, where a store partly owned by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck dispensed musical trivia along with your used copy of “Bitches Brew,” on the house. And the used vinyl palaces of Boston’s Fenway and Mass. Avenue, Cambridge have particularly strong nostalgic appeal.

So you’d think Telegraph Avenue would be a joyous thing: musical references galore (even chapters with titles like “Return to Forever”), and a couple of groovy cats who know the difference between Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Captain Kirk, but can appreciate both.

But it’s not as smooth as a Smokey Robinson falsetto, not by a long shot. First off, Archy’s in hot water with his wife Gwen, who’s seven months pregnant and half of a well-known midwife team called the Berkeley Birth Partners, along with Nat’s wife, Aviva.

To add to the symmetry, Nat and Aviva’s bi-curious son Julius is new best friends with Titus Joyner, a complicated black youth who is the forgotten son of Archy from a brief relationship 14 years back.

This all seems a little too neat, the overlapping of friends, wives and offspring, but then again Telegraph Avenue is a fairly small neighborhood.

The main crisis in Telegraph Avenue is the looming arrival of a mega-music store chain called Dogpile Thang — symbolized by an actual Dogpile zeppelin that hovers above the small burb, manned by the “fifth richest black man in American,” former NFL quarterback Gibson Goode.

This may sound a bit reminiscent of You’ve Got Mail (itself a remake of the 1940 movie, The Shop Around the Corner), with Archy and Nat as Meg Ryan and Gibson Goode as Tom Hanks, though somewhat less charming (if just as prone to Godfather references). It is reminiscent of that setup, so Chabon has to really dig in his Birkenstocks and make this fictional neighborhood come alive.

At times, he does. I was willing to enjoy the rambling, shaggy storytelling approach, though I prefer the more focused Wonder Boys and Kavalier and Clay. What Telegraph Avenue reminded me of, a little, was Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, another fictional immersion into the “neighborhood” (in Lethem’s case, Upper east Side Manhattan) where quirky characters, marijuana smoke and surreal whimsy mask a somewhat shapeless, shaggy-dog plot.

But you can forgive a lot in Lethem, and Chabon as well. So I enjoyed the ride as it took its characters from dusty old vinyl stores to the insides of a Hammond B-3 organ, and even up in a zeppelin dubbed the Minnie Riperton (because, as Goode’s associate puts it, “She’s black, she’s beautiful, and she goes really high”).

Telegraph Avenue is a strange concoction, focusing also on a ‘70s kung fu movie couple, Luther Stallings and Valetta Moore (think Fred Williamson and Pam Grier), who sparred with Bruce Lee in his Oakland/Berkeley martial arts studio in his prime, tossing in countless Quentin Tarantino references, and even throwing in a certain Illinois Senator Barack Obama a few years before his presidential run, making a cameo at a local fundraiser. This kind of gooey, eclectic stew might only appeal to those with serious munchies. But some of it sticks to the roof of your mouth.

Chabon digs down deep into a community he clearly feels invested in: a place of hip-hoppers, old soul brothers, hippie couples who give birth at home amid patchouli and midwifery, rather than cold hospital rooms; there’s an aged Chinese martial arts instructor with the unlikely name of Mrs. Jew; there’s a white attorney named Mike Oberstein who talks in ebonics; there’s a parrot named Fifty-Eight who swears like a sailor. This may be an accurate reflection of the gumbo melting pot that is the actual Telegraph Avenue, but it seems a little outlandish, almost cartoonish at times.

Still, you’ve got to stick around for a novel that deconstructs a funk-soul organ solo based around Carole King’s It’s Too Late; one that picks up on Manzel’s 1978 Midnight Theme as the source of a thousand and one sampled hip-hop break beats; one that drops geek references like breadcrumbs out of Hansel and Gretel’s sack. Chabon scopes the intersection of kung fu movies, RZA, Tarantino, Bruce Lee and ‘70s soul, just as Berkeley and Oakland meet up at the corner, exploring what one character calls “the turntablism of chance.”

No great revelations in Telegraph Avenue; just an appraisal of life in the Benighted States, street level, circa 2004, a time when vinyl had already become an indulgence. An addiction, if you will. People like Archy and Nat are weird relics, dudes who believe amassing a pile of used LPs is a way to combat the “infinite free downloadable libraries that fit in your hip pocket,” as Archy puts it: a way to combat everything that is wrong about the world, or at least a way of preserving what they think is right.

The perverse thing is, Gibson Goode doesn’t want to crush Brokeland Records with his digital megastore or some such newfangled angle; he wants to beat Nat and Archy at their own game. So the game turns into “divide and conquer,” with Archy being invited aboard the Minnie Riperton and offered a staggeringly tempting offer: running the new Dogpile megastore’s vinyl division.

“You’re offering me a job,” Archy said.

“You could look at it that way. Or you could look at it, I am offering you a mission,” Goode said, warming up. “I am building a monastery, if you like, for the practice of vinyl kung fu. And I am asking you to come be my abbot.”

Before he can think about jumping ship to Dogpile, though, Archy has to get himself out of the doghouse with Gwen, who has a sixth sense for her hubby’s cheating ways, and mend fences with monosyllabic son Titus, as well as his disgruntled store partner Nat. In short, just the sort of domestic confluence of disasters that Grady Tripp faced in Wonder Boys. Though, to be honest, not quite as fresh or compelling. Still, Chabon’s writing at times simmers and percolates like a Jimmy Smith organ vamp, and once you settle in, Telegraph Avenue can be just as comforting.