His characters worship at culture’s niches, such as the comic-books-obsessed duo Joe and Sam who star in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Other times Chabon’s own love for a genre animates his work; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is in part an ode to Raymond Chandler. His exuberant new novel, Telegraph Avenue, has at its center one of those temples of geeky obsession and eternal bullshitting: a vintage-record store, in this case one specializing in jazz and set in a neighborhood the characters call Brokeland, "the ragged fault line where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted." Superheroes, magic, cartography, baseball, sci-fi, detective fiction—Chabon’s enthusiasms are many. But a problem he encountered early on while writing Telegraph Avenue was that jazz wasn’t one of them.