"Telegraph Avenue", adapted from an idea for a TV series pilot that Chabon was asked to write in 1999, is a social novel set on the borders between Oakland and Berkeley in the summer of 2004 that sees a "large cast of characters grapple with infidelity, fatherhood, crooked politicians, racism, nostalgia and buried secrets." Chabon said upon publication in an interview with the "San Francisco Chronicle" that the novel concerns "the possibility and impossibility of creating shared community spaces that attempt to transcend the limits imposed on us by our backgrounds, heritage and history." Five years in gestation, "Telegraph Avenue" had a difficult birth, Chabon telling the "Guardian" newspaper, "I got two years into the novel and got completely stymied and felt like it was an utter flop... I had to start all over again, keeping the characters but reinventing the story completely and leaving behind almost every element." After starting out with literary realism with his first two novels and moving into genre-fiction experiments from "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" onward, Chabon feels that "Telegraph Avenue" is a significant "unification" of his earlier and later styles, declaring in an interview, "I could do whatever I wanted to do in this book and it would be OK even if it verged on crime fiction, even if it verged on magic realism, even if it verged on martial arts fiction... I was open to all of that and yet I didn't have to repudiate or steer away from the naturalistic story about two families living their everyday lives and coping with pregnancy and birth and adultery and business failure and all the issues that might go into making a novel written in the genre of mainstream quote-unquote realistic fiction, that that was another genre for me now and I felt free to mix them all in a sense." The novel has been optioned by film producer Scott Rudin (who previously optioned and produced "Wonder Boys"), and Cameron Crowe is adapting the novel into a screenplay, according to Chabon.