"Telegraph Avenue," by Michael Chabon "Telegraph Avenue," Michael Chabon's rich, comic new novel, is a homage to an actual place: the boulevard in Northern California where Oakland - historically an African-American city - aligns with Berkeley, whose bourgeois white inhabitants are, as one character puts it, "liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken." The novel is equally a tribute to the cinematic style of Quentin Tarantino, whose films its characters study and discuss, and whose preoccupations pepper its pages: kung fu, cinematic allusions and the blaxploitation films of the 1970s; and an interest in African-American characters and experience. Chabon and Tarantino make an unlikely duo; while the latter's films tend toward gaudy eruptions of violence, Chabon bends Tarantino's sensibility to a warmhearted novel about fatherhood in which the onstage violence consists of two graphic childbirth scenes and a 15-year-old boy whacking a chubby thug with a wooden sword. A self-help book in the style of Andrei Tarkovsky would be hardly more oxymoronic. Yet Chabon has made a career of routing big, ambitious projects through popular genres, with superlative results - in "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," he used the history and tropes of comics to render the convulsions of American life during and after World War II; the more recent "Yiddish Policemen's Union" is a thought experiment, in the form of a ­noirish whodunit, about an alternate Jewish state. The scale of "Telegraph Avenue" is no less ambitious: Chabon sifts through the layers of Oakland's archaeology, from the Miwok Indians, "dreaming the dream, living fat as bears, piling up their oyster shells," and the arrival of a black middle class (thanks in part to the Pullman Company, which hired black men as porters in its sleeper cars) to the wildness of the Black Panther days and the summer of 2004, when the novel is set in a technological eddy that makes it feel 10 years earlier. The father (and son) at the center of "Telegraph Avenue" is one Archy Stallings, a sometime bassist who is African-American and Oakland-raised. With his white best friend, Nat Jaffe, Archy owns a store called Brokeland Records, selling used vinyl on the site of a former barbershop whose old-timers and nostalgics it has inherited. Like many characters in "Telegraph Avenue," Archy and Nat belong to "a league of solitary men united in their pursuit of the lost glories of a vanished world." They are holdouts, unplugged and awaiting, in a state of dread, what Archy calls "the great wave of late-modern capitalism." Archy also dreads fatherhood. In the novel's opening pages, Gwen, his pregnant wife, catches Archy cheating on her, setting in motion one of several parenting plots that converge around Archy like a swarm of angry wasps: his own feckless, absentee father, Luther Stallings, a onetime blaxploitation star finally clean after years of drug abuse, arrives in town scheming about a comeback underwritten by his blackmail of a shady local politician over their shared Panther history; Archy's illegitimate 14-year-old son, Titus, whose existence he's barely registered, also washes up in Oakland, and falls into a sexual relationship with Nat's beloved gay teenage son, Julius; and Archy's surrogate father, an elderly organ player, is crushed to death under his keyboard while trying to heft it for a political gig starring State Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. As if all of that weren't enough, Gwen, a midwife in business with Nat's wife, explodes at a racist doctor, causing a chain of repercussions. And Brokeland Records finds itself in the path of the encroaching empire of Gibson Goode, a former N.F.L. star who plans to break ground on a slick new mall (with a music store selling vinyl) two blocks away. Jennifer Egan is the author, most recently, of "A Visit From the Goon Squad."