A Great Rock n' Roll Novel: Dana Spiotta's "Stone Arabia"
A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about the idea of “The Great Rock n’ Roll Novel” and how it had not yet been written. “I’ve yet to read a novel that convincingly sums up the experience and the value of making popular music,” wrote The Guardian’s Graham Thompson, “or that captures the weird, savage compulsion that keeps everyone from Bloc Party to Bob Dylan traipsing around the world, year-in year-out.” In fact, Thompson wondered whether such a novel could ever be written. “Perhaps pop music is essentially worthless as an abstract idea and must be experienced at first hand to have value.”
I was thinking about this as I read Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, which tells the story of a 49-year-old musician who does not traipse around the world year-in year-out, but instead works as a bartender in Los Angeles and spends most of his time holed up in his apartment, recording music that only a few friends and family will ever hear, constructing elaborate album artwork and promotional items, and writing himself a fictional alternate life as a famous rock star — complete with extensive liner notes and made-up record reviews from made-up critics — which he collects, year-in year-out, in a row of trapper keeper scrapbooks that take up an increasingly large amount of shelf space. Robert Pollard did stuff like this in the ’80s, when he was a grade school teacher in Dayton, Ohio, and Guided By Voices was more of a personal hobby than a professional band; him and his friends drinking beer and making songs in his garage.
The book, which was published earlier this year by Scribner, got good reviews when it came out, and was then recommended to me by my friend Stephen, who is a rock n’ roll musician and also a rock n’ roll scholar. So I started reading it and liked it okay in the beginning. But I didn’t love it.
It’s told through the eyes of Nick’s younger sister, Denise — sometimes in the third person, sometimes in the first. The switching back and forth bothered me a little, as did the portions of the story that excerpt Nick’s fantasy writings, which he calls The Chronicles. Most of The Chronicles are written in a style meant to mimic conventional rock-journalism clichés (this is the fictional writing of a fictional character writing in the voices he imagines for other fictional people — layers upon layers upon layers of artifice.) As such, these parts of the book read somewhat clunkily. Here is a passage from the liner notes of a Nik Worth album called The Ontology of Worth: Volume 2, written in the voice of one Mickey Murray, “Greil Marcus Professor of Underground, Alternative, and Unloved Music” at the New School for Social Research.
“Nik Worth, we later learned, had been living as a Buddhist monk in a monastery in New Mexico. He took a vow of seclusion and adopted the Dharma name Jikan, which means ‘silence.’ Would he ever record again? In 1990, we got our answer…”
It’s a problem: to put clunky, clichéd writing in a book for effect. The reader has to read it just the same. (The liner notes of The Ontology of Worth: Volume 2 are three-and-a-half pages long.) Also, it’s a little gimmicky. I don’t think gimmicks are necessarily bad, but in this case, it dragged things down some.
But then! Right around the 100-page mark, the book really takes off. The focus of the story shifts to 47-year-old Denise herself, her struggles with aging and memory lapses, her isolation and an addiction to cable news and internet gossip sites she fell into in the years following 9–11. She describes a series of “Breaking Events” (which she originally titled “My Fragile Border Moments”), basically news stories that she becomes obsessed with, watching the same video clips and interviews with talking heads over and over and over again, culminating with a missing child case in the small Amish town of Stone Arabia, between Albany and Utica in upstate New York. The child’s mother defies her community’s taboo against going on television, risking excommunication, in order to plead for help in find her daughter. Denise describes watching the interview, and here, Spiotta’s prose is beautiful.
“The woman spoke with an odd German torque, a hard-up inflection at the end of the words. She was not beautiful. She was not the picture of Amish beatitude. She trembled. She looked down, she appeared frightened. Her voice shook, and then she couldn’t speak any longer. She glanced up one last time and shook her head a tiny bit as she looked into the camera.”
Denise is devastated by the tragedies that happen to these people she doesn’t know. She sobs for hours, sobs through taking a bath, she sobs herself to sleep. She doesn’t answer the phone. She feels desperate and alone, but she doesn’t talk to anyone about it. “No one is going to comfort you for what you saw on the news,” she says.
It’s so good, this part of the book. It does the sort-of magic trick of making the previous 100 pages seem better in retrospect. Well worth it, or maybe even necessary to get us here. It reminded me of one of my very favorite books to have come out in the past ten years (“One of the best books of the century!” — Dave Bry) Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, too, has a central chapter that breaks dramatically from what came before it in style and theme. (In Ferris’s case, the switch is more explicit, from the first person plural “we” of a group of office workers, and a mostly humorous tone, to a third-person account of one woman’s being diagnosed with breast cancer.) And in that book, too, the device served to give the book as a whole heft and gravity that had been lacking (no matter what Janet Maslin might tell you) and make the earlier, lighter, more gimmicky stuff seem better than it had prior. It’s so cool, how good writing can control your brain.
Lifted up by the “Breaking Event” chapters, Stone Arabia soars the rest of the way to the end. (This language seems self-contradictory, doesn’t it? A book “takes off” when it gains “gravity.” It’s “lifted” by its “heft.” But it’s accurate, I think. This is what it feels like to read: the increased emotional weight of the story pulls you in, you care about the narrator more than you had previously, it pulls you along, forward, and makes the reading feel like flying. It’s heavier and lighter at the same time. More magic, I guess.) Juxtaposed against Denise’s real-life sadness, which is expressed through her reaction to real-world news stories, Nik’s retreat into rock n’ roll fantasy becomes more poignant. And the book’s main intrigue, which I won’t detail, takes its shape.
I don’t know that I’d call Stone Arabia “The” Great Rock n’ Roll Novel. It’s not only about rock n’ roll, for starters — it’s as much about family and getting older and loneliness and our media-saturated culture. But I’d call it great. The last chapter is a flashback to 1972, when Denise and Nik were latchkey teenagers. Denise and a friend are putting on make-up before going out to a party and Nik comes in and picks up an eyeliner pencil and sits down in front of the mirror. It’s perfect and satisfying in a way that last chapters all too rarely are. And while and I don’t think it “sums up the experience and the value of making popular music” (and I don’t know of a book that could; summing up any experience so wide and varied is, I think, an unfairly tall order for a novel) the argument it makes for artifice as essence, its rendering of the abstract idea of rock n’ roll escapism is certainly not worthless. It’s all about worth. It’s totally valuable.