Bubbling with lovingly curated knowledge about everything from jazz to pregnancy to airships, Chabon’s rhapsodically detailed, buoyantly plotted, warmly intimate cross-cultural tale of metamorphoses is electric with suspense, humor, and bebop dialogue. This core group of African American and Jewish friends is surrounded by a vivid, scheming supporting cast. Archy also finds himself contending with a teenage son he’s never met before and his down-and-out father, a former blaxploitation film star. A difficult birth puts Gwen and Aviva’s business in jeopardy, just as Archy and Nat face potentially insurmountable competition in the form of a planned megastore. Aviva and Nat have a smart, artistic, gay teenage son. Gwen is pregnant with her and Archy’s first child. The proprietors are “mountainous” Archy Stallings and high-strung Nat Jaffe, whose wives, too, work together, in a midwifery partnership. Until, perhaps, the advent of this even more magnificently crafted, exuberantly alive, emotionally lustrous, and socially intricate saga anchored to Brokeland Records, a funky used-vinyl paradise on the border of Oakland and Berkeley. Even though protean and wizardly Chabon has written an array of stellar books since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), it has reigned supreme as his magnum opus.
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