Their used vinyl business is threatened by ex-NFL superstar Gibson Goode's planned construction of his second Dogpile Thang megastore two blocks away.

A subplot concerns their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, who together run Berkeley Birth Partners, a midwifery.

Another storyline concerns Julius Jaffe, Nat and Aviva's 14-year-old son, and his new best buddy, Titus Joyner, who has shown up from Texas after his grandmother died.

[5] In The New York Times, Jennifer Egan wrote, "In the end, Chabon's novel suggests, what has the power to fill the void inside us isn't artifacts, but paternity.

"[6] In The Guardian, Attica Locke wrote that the novel contains "themes of fatherhood, abandonment, diaspora and complex questions of identity".

[7] Matt Feeney of The New Yorker wrote, "Chabon's characters join with the giddy excess and unlikely rigor of his prose to mount a sort of meta-argument that we might bridge racial distance using the skills found in our bigger-hearted novelists".

[7] Ron Charles of The Washington Post felt that "despite Chabon's dazzling brilliance as a stylist, huge sections [...] read like they've been written by a man being paid by the word who has a balloon mortgage due.