A Page in the Life: Michael Chabon The Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist - whose 1988 debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, catapulted him onto the bestseller lists when he was just 24 years old - has written often about his intense nostalgia for the pop culture of his youth: the rush he got from pulpy comics, whose bold, futuristic imagery was echoed in the architecture of the Sixties "planned community" of Columbia, Maryland, where he was mostly raised. Music was also important. In the controversial New York Times article in which Chabon's wife - the writer Ayelet Waldeman - wrote that she loved her husband more than their four children, she listed his intimate knowledge of prog-rock lyrics among his faults. When I phone their home in Berkeley, California, she calls him to the phone with the most tender and devoted "My love?" I've ever heard anybody use to their spouse. It was perfect for my purposes because the music of the time was produced and engineered by white guys, so there was a kind of collaboration between black artists and white producers and engineers. The music also often featured quite elaborate string and horn arrangements so it was kind of a melding of the black and European. For Nat is white and Archy is black. The characters were inspired by two guys who ran a real record shop Chabon wandered into after many years of being "disconnected from vinyl." I probably went in for CDs and found this vinyl shrine... smelling of mould and polyvinyl chloride off-gases. It was staffed by a black guy and a white guy and the customers standing around, talking, arguing, teasing each other about music were black and white, too, and it just crystallised one of the things that I value most about where I live now. Because a lot of places I visit in America are not integrated. The planned community where Chabon was raised was designed expressly to counteract the racism prevalent in Baltimore at that time. "There was a very overt history of "redlining" in the area - that means excluding black people from white neighbourhoods by real estate agents. James Rouse - who built Columbia - was opposed to that. His mission was to build for first-time buyers of any race and my parents were in that group. They really did believe in the vision and for the next 10 years it held to its principles. It was not until I went to college in Pittsburgh that I got my rude awakening about reality of race in America and how far we were from the ideals that were articulated by Columbia. Was Chabon nervous about writing from a black perspective? I know and understand what the objections are," he says carefully. I don't even necessarily disagree with them... but it's well within the purview of what a novelist not only is allowed to be doing but ought to be doing, I think. That said, he thinks "White writers do have a tendency to overdo it. I have a tendency to overdo it that I was always fighting against. One thing I've often noticed is when a man writes from a woman's point of view there's the obligatory moment of the woman noticing her breasts and sort of enjoying them. This weird vicariously thrill of "Ooh, I get to be this close to a nice pair of breasts" if I give them to my character. I think that sort of thing can happen writing black characters if you're white. You mean, you have to resist trying on all the "cool" mannerisms of black culture? Right. And one thing I notice reading fiction by black writers is that they almost never tell you who's black or white. They do it through diction and characterisation. But it's much more understated, so that's how I approached it myself. Which means that although Chabon has been getting up every 20 minutes to flip vinyl - "it's very good for the RSI from all those years at the keyboard" - he tells me he hasn't been dancing. Not even a little? Mmmm, well... OK, sometimes in my studio that does happen. Telegraph Avenue is published by Fourth Estate at £18.99