Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon: review Set in mid-Noughties California, Michael Chabon's new novel is a multi-generational, anatomy-of-a-community doorstopper with a plot like clockwork and sentences like toffee, delicious with the potential to cause face-ache. It centres on the friendship between two married couples, one Jewish, one African-American: the women, Aviva and Gwen, are midwives caught up in a race row after a complicated delivery, while their husbands, Nat and Archy, own a record shop about to go under thanks to a new-in-town mega-chain. Most of the trouble here is Archy's: first Gwen catches him in flagrante - she's heavily pregnant - then his teenage son turns up, the result of a secret fling after Archy fought in the first Gulf War. Also causing mayhem is Archy's dad, a drug-addicted Blaxploitation star with serious dirt on the councilman giving the green light to said mega-chain. Nearly every line here sets out to wow: there's a description, which I love, of someone's "dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition of a homemade jet pack"; and a birth scene in which we see a mother's "pale abdomen shot like an eyeball with capillaries." It's perhaps inevitable that Chabon can't nail it every time. Aviva angrily mixes pancake batter in which "the buttermilk and baking soda enacted their allegory of her emotional pH." Of Gwen, 36 weeks gone, we're told that "whenever she leaned one way or the other, her thighs peeled away from each other with a sigh, like lovers reluctant to part" - surely "sigh" is figurative enough. Chabon risks overdoing more than his prose. The novel quietly works hard to unseat racial assumptions, but almost spoils its effects when Nat considers how "differences in class and education" among the four friends "cancelled out without regard for stereotype or cultural expectation... The white guy was the high-school dropout, the black woman upper-middle-class and expensively educated." It feels like a loss of nerve - as if Chabon isn't quite sure he managed to set down what lay in his head as he conceived the book. Even so, Telegraph Avenue is too formidable (and pleasurable) to misfire just because it wears its heart on its sleeve. Telegraph Avenue Michael Chabon 4th Estate, £18.99, 465pp