Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  What really set Columbia apart was the idealism guiding every phase of its development. Before breaking ground in 1964, Rouse convened a panel of experts to weigh in on the development process. Their job wasn’t simply a matter of figuring out where to put the roads and sewers. Their focus was on people and the prospect for human growth within this new community. Mort Hoppenfeld, the lead architect tasked with designing the city from the ground up, saw this commitment to the planning process as revolutionary: “No one has ever set about to plan a community or even a project with a complete statement of non-physical objectives to guide in programming and design. The social objectives are usually implied. It will be our first job to make them explicit” (Olsen 151). The Work Group, as this advisory body was called, consisted of noted academics from a variety of disciplines that discussed everything from health and education to transportation. Social policy was at the forefront of the discussion, particularly given Rouse’s insistence that his new city be both racially and economically integrated, mixing incomes and ethnicities. This was in stark contrast to the prevailing trend, where suburbia was synonymous with white flight. Indeed, though civil rights were on the march and Jim Crow laws had been recently overturned, informal segregation persisted in the South and elsewhere, enforced through zoning ordinances, covenants, and practices such as “redlining.” Columbia was intended by its founder Rouse to resist such intolerance by serving as a beacon of racial harmony in dissonant times. The Work Group, suggests Nicholas Dagen Bloom, “encouraged Rouse and his planners to experiment on interfaith projects, health care, new theories of education, subsidized housing, cultural patronage, new governmental forms, and mass transit. [It] also lent academic prestige to the Columbia project and helped to attract a number of idealistic residents over time” (130–31).

  Among the idealists who bought into Rouse’s vision were the Chabon family, who moved to Columbia in 1969, with their six-year-old son Michael. For the young Chabon, “my parents’ decision to move us into the midst of that unfinished, ongoing act of imagination set the course of my life” (“Maps and Legends,” in Maps and Legends 28). The years spent in Columbia taught Chabon how to be an artist, inspired by the seemingly magical materialization of a city out of the mud of Howard County. Columbia at this point was under construction, with some neighborhoods—or villages, as they were called in a nod to Rouse’s call for a more intimate scale of development—complete and others as yet invisible to the naked eye. Chabon could visualize them, though, aided by a detailed map Rouse provided to the residents to aid them in envisioning what was to come.[12] Serendipitously, streets, parks, and entire neighborhoods were named after American literary figures, an endowment the author would only appreciate in retrospect: “To me the remarkable thing about those names was not their oddity but the simple fact that most of them referred to locations that did not exist. They were like magic spells, each one calibrated to call into being one particular stretch of blacktop, sidewalk and lawn, and no other,” Chabon recalls. “It was a powerful demonstration to me of the incantatory power of names and naming” (“Maps and Legends” 31).

  The enchantments of Chabon’s childhood were not solely attributable to his sense of creative exultation sparked by maps, models, and miniatures of all sorts.[13] There was also the utopian promise of racial reconciliation, “that here, in these fields where slaves had once picked tobacco, the noble and extravagant promises that had just been made to black people in the flush of the Civil Rights movement would, at last, be redeemed” (“Maps and Legends” 29–30). Chabon grew up with black friends, teachers, and neighbors and was conscious of himself as a keenly willing participant in a noble social experiment: “I was plunged into intimacy with black people, with all the unreserved and boldness of Rouse’s and my own small, visionary heart” (“O. J. Simpson”). It was an everyday experience of interracial propinquity that he later came to regard sorrowfully as a utopian idyll, one that faded away.

  By the time Chabon reached adulthood, Columbia’s promise had dimmed.[14] Rouse’s plan lay in tatters and along with it, Chabon’s innocence. The recession of the mid-1970s was particularly hard on “new town” initiatives like the one led by Rouse, which depended on generous financing terms from the federal government and had to answer to institutional investors like Connecticut General, who were themselves retrenching in an unfavorable economic climate. In fact, nearly all the subsequent real estate developments that were designed according to the principles of the “Columbia Process” (the title of seminars offered by Rouse’s employees to industry peers) ended up in bankruptcy (Olsen 234; Bloom 144). The ones that remained, including Columbia, struggled to stay afloat and jettisoned their idealism as circumstances demanded, disappointing the true believers like Chabon who felt corners were being cut and obligations ignored. The author’s boyhood home became “a garden-variety suburb in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor; there was crime there, and racial unrest” (“Maps and Legends” 33). Disenchanted by the failure of Columbia to hold to the plan, to live up to its founder’s vision, Chabon recounts the tarnishing of youthful idealism: “For a while I was inclined to view the lessons I had been taught with a certain amount of rueful anger. I felt that I had been lied to, that the map I had been handed was a forgery” (33).

  Of course, Chabon’s disillusionment lies less with the flaws in Rouse’s business model than with the survivor’s guilt that accrues to a child of a broken home. In his case, the painful aftermath of his parents’ divorce is inextricably bound up with his sharp sense of disappointment that, far from being a permanent condition, the racial amity he enjoyed in his youth was temporary and fragile, a precarious place where he had merely sojourned for a time. Much later, looking backward from the vantage point of the O. J. Simpson trial (the former NFL star was on trial for murdering his wife and her alleged lover) Chabon discovered to his great unease that the easy sense of familiarity with African Americans that he had once taken for granted had vanished. He recalls his astonishment at the jubilation with which many in the black community greeted Simpson’s acquittal. His astonishment, in turn, made him realize “to my shame, to my absolute wonder and horror, that . . . I had somehow become a racist. To qualify as a racist, you don’t have to go to the extreme of slurring, stereotyping or discriminating against people of another race. All you have to do, as I realized on that autumn morning in 1995, is feel completely disconnected from them” (“O. J. Simpson”).

  Disturbed by this epiphany, Chabon set about reconnecting with his heritage. The first step consisted of acknowledging Columbia’s seeming failure as a paradoxical kind of success, that “just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie” (“Maps and Legends” 33). Chabon began the process of renewing this promise in 1997 when he and his family decided to move into an East Bay neighborhood much like the one depicted in Telegraph Avenue, once again “living significant portions of every day among people of color” (“O. J. Simpson”).[15] More than that, however, his art reflects a renewed commitment to the liberal values of his youth by representing in fiction the everyday and unremarkable utopia of tolerance first inspired by his upbringing in Columbia. Interracial friendships and partnerships abound in Chabon’s fiction.[16] This insistence on connection may seem like slavish adherence to the slogans of progressive orthodoxy if not for the fact that it is rooted in the minutiae of shared existence. Chabon’s practical insight is that we are most sincere in expressing our ideals when we do so inadvertently through seemingly trivial matters of habit and custom, so he is sensitive to identifying the grand gestures obscured in the smallest of acts. The hard work of building utopia is in the routine struggle and in the struggle for routine; the determination to build a better world day by day and to do so from the ground up by revolutionizing our expectations of what it means to be mundane. It is a lesson Chabon attributes to the example of James Rouse, whom he credits in the acknowledgments page of his most recent book Telegraph
Avenue as being “the dreamer of the original Brokeland” (468).

  The President of Brokeland

  Telegraph Avenue runs south from the University of California campus in the wealthy liberal enclave of Berkeley through the neighborhood of Temescal into North Oakland, a district more commonly associated with its predominantly working-class African American community. It spans the privileged and the proletarian, traversing a variety of ethnically mixed areas along the way. Telegraph Avenue makes ample use of its namesake, with much of the action taking place among the merchants populating its faded commercial strip, including Brokeland Records, the shop owned and operated by Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, whose unraveling partnership is at the center of the narrative. Brokeland, we are told early in the novel, is how the locals affectionately refer to the neighborhood traversed by Telegraph Avenue, “the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted” (35). A clever play on words, “Brokeland” is also richly suggestive in its collision of the social and subterranean. By alluding to tensions seismic and otherwise, Chabon subtly invokes memories of the East Bay’s apocalyptic history and foreboding of its precarious future.[17] But he also celebrates the area for the passionate energy of its encounters, the friction generated by the collision of cultures and cuisines, languages and peoples, and above all music, the sounds and styles of every tradition all jumbled together in a Brokeland Creole. It is an everlasting improvisation, a ceaselessly unfolding process with no clear beginning and no certain end, a ceaseless stir of dissolution and reconstitution that resembles nothing so much as the virtuosic creativity of jazz.[18]

  For Archy and Nat, Brokeland is a state of mind and a way of life. Brokeland Records is less a business than the commercial expression of an all-encompassing obsession with everything vinyl. Both men boast encyclopedic knowledge across a variety of genres and when they aren’t arguing about music, they play it together. Their shop is really a social club, the “caravansarie” where they and their fellow travelers “all get together and chill, hang out, listen to good music, swap wild tales of exaggeration” (374). Even their families are linked. Archy’s wife Gwen shares a midwifery practice with Nat’s partner Aviva. At the outset of the narrative, however, it is all falling apart. The midwives find themselves in a precarious situation and at odds with one another after a difficult delivery. And Brokeland Records is about to be swamped by a competitor, part of an aggressively expanding chain of music megastores. Nat is willing to fight a rearguard battle to save the shop, but Archy is ready to move on. “He was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat” (108). But Brokeland Records is about to be the least of his problems.

  In fact, Archy finds himself in the midst of a full-blown generational crisis. After discovering that he has been cheating, his very pregnant wife Gwen leaves him, her departure coinciding with the awkwardly timed appearance of a teenage son he was only dimly aware he had. Meanwhile there’s his own deadbeat dad, Luther Stallings, who has recently resurfaced from a life spent on the margins, eager to hustle a local politician by blackmailing him about a thirty-year-old murder.[19] Finally, there is the solemn task of grieving Cochise Jones, legendary jazz artist and sometimes bandmate to Nat and Archy—not to mention the closest thing to a father Archy ever knew—who dies when his heavy Hammond organ topples over on him as he prepares to perform at a Berkeley fund-raiser for then Illinois state senator Barack Obama, fresh off his memorable speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Archy, in short, has a number of choices to make regarding just about every aspect of his life but stubbornly vows to everyone around him that no decisions will be forthcoming until Cochise Jones has been properly mourned (in the form of a community wake concluding with a New Orleans–style funeral march).

  Telegraph Avenue is a fantastically diverse and ambitious novel, populated with a crowd of compelling characters and a prolific plot, the energies of which are only barely contained by the author’s strategy of embedding Archy’s moment of decision at the heart of the story. Chabon’s choice is worth scrutinizing, particularly given the affinities between the author and Nat Jaffe, whose main dramatic function in the narrative appears to be to passively await the verdict of Archy’s deliberations.[20] That is to say, where Archy is a reluctant man of action, forced by a cascading set of circumstances to abandon habit and embrace change, Nat is much less dynamic—at least outwardly so. His struggle is purely internal in that it has to do with his ability to accept the fact that if Archy needs to move on, then Nat needs to let him go. This isn’t simply a matter of winding down a business partnership or canceling a gig. By conceding to Archy the space he needs in order to change, to grow, Nat experiences what amounts to a crisis of the faith in the idea of Brokeland itself:

  For years his life had balanced like the world of legend on the backs of great elephants, which stood on the back of a giant turtle; the elephants were his partnership with Archy, and Aviva’s with Gwen, and the turtle was his belief that real and ordinary friendship between black people and white people was possible, at least here, on the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California. (410–11)

  The lesson for Nat is that in order for his “real and ordinary friendship” with Archy and Gwen to continue, he needs to relieve it—and them—of the burden of exemplifying his ideals. “Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it’s just not their fantasy,” he indignantly tells Aviva earlier in the narrative, by way of expressing solidarity with Gwen in her ongoing frustrations with the power structure of hospital bureaucracy (363). Of course, at that point Nat isn’t quite ready to acknowledge that Archy and Gwen play starring roles in his fantasy of racial concord. It’s only later that he can recognize and accept that the utopian sentiment behind Brokeland can congeal into nostalgia if not replenished and renewed by an openness to change, an optimistic belief in the future. Moving on, in other words, is not the same as giving up. Nat isn’t abandoning his cherished values, he’s simply ensuring that his firmly held and richly lived commitment to the ideal of racial harmony doesn’t harden into a rigid orthodoxy. After all, Brokeland “was all just a theory we had” and that, like any other theory, is subject to verification, falsification, and ultimately revision as new data comes in (459). In this case, the salient fact, at least for the author, is the arrival of Barack Obama on the national stage.

  In an opinion piece written for the Washington Post in the run-up to the 2008 election, at the height of the primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Chabon urges readers to stand up against what he describes as the phobocracy, those avatars of received wisdom who had been saying all along that the idealism of Obama’s campaign would never survive the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics—and were proved wrong every step of the way. Chabon rightly calls this fear what it was, a fear of disappointment, characterizing it thusly: “If we do fight for Obama, work for him, believe in him, vote for him, and the man goes down to defeat by the big-money machines and the merchants of fear, then what hope will we have left to hold on to?” It’s a failure of imagination cloaked in the tough-minded rhetoric of pragmatism and expediency. As he points out, it’s also a self-defeating logic, one that seeks to mitigate idealism’s inevitable soiling by reality by forswearing idealism itself: “Thus in the name of preserving hope do we disdain it,” he cautions. “That is how a phobocracy maintains its grip on power” (“Obama vs. the Phobocracy”).

  Chabon’s 2008 exhortation against the phobocracy was, he admits, “the first piece of overtly political writing I had ever felt moved to attempt” (“Obama & the Conquest of Denver”). His point is that it was those who dismissed Obama’s candidacy as unrealistic who were truly deluded, precisely because they believed nothing would ever change. In mistaking itself for pragmatism, such wisdom trades in the most pernicious kind of nostalgia
by refusing to acknowledge the new. So for all their insistence on being realistic, they fail to recognize that every once in a while there does come a time to get real and that 2008 was indeed one of those times. Chabon’s passionate advocacy for Obama is thus rooted in a hardhead idealism, a product of a childhood spent in “the broken Utopias of the 1970s and Columbia, Maryland” (“Fountain City” i). Inspired by his belief that Obama’s candidacy matched the man to the moment in a manner unseen for a generation, Chabon saw in Obama the politician the fulfillment of James Rouse’s dream of a more perfect union. But in the figure of a mixed-race, fatherless boy from exotic lands, familiar with the experience of exile, and a literary artist in his own right (see Dreams from My Father), one keenly attentive to the musicality inherent in words, Chabon felt a deeper kinship, recognizing Obama as a fellow citizen of Brokeland—indeed, so much so that he even makes a cameo appearance in Telegraph Avenue.[21] In a brief scene that takes place during the aforementioned fund-raiser, Obama watches Archy and Nat perform, unaware that they do so with heavy hearts having just lost Cochise Jones.

  Of course, it is easy to object that by setting his novel in 2004, Chabon indulges in a cheap sort of nostalgia himself by depicting Obama in the first flush of popularity, his public persona as yet unencumbered by the compromises attendant upon the actual wielding of power. Indeed, Telegraph Avenue is nothing if not an experiment in what the author describes elsewhere as aetataureate (or golden age) thinking: “the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia” (Amazing 340). Crucially, though, the author limns his memories of the optimism of 2004 with a tragic presentiment of what is yet to come. That is why it is important to note that the author sets the pivotal moment of the novel on 29 August 2004—exactly a year to the day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast. On that morning, the day after the funeral for Cochise Jones, Archy wakes up determined to get real. “Today was the day he was sworn to get serious about his life” (Telegraph 394). By nightfall, he will have begun the long process of reconciling with Gwen, forgiven his father, apologized to Titus, and agreed with Nat to bring their partnership at Brokeland Records to an end. He will also hold his baby son, squeamishly delivered by Nat after Gwen’s meticulously detailed birth plan goes awry. For the first time in a long time, Archy is fully present, finally at ease with being a father, a son, and a husband, and ready to face the future, to put nostalgia behind him and get on with the business of living. It is a powerful moment, one made all the more poignant because for all its promise, its sense of possibility and potential, we know that Archy is blissfully ignorant of the storm ahead.