From Publishers Weekly
Following the alleged suicide of a rock legend in 1994, a 22-year-old librarian called Fiat Lux disappears, leaving behind her 21 notebooks recording the circumstances surrounding the death. The rocker, who fronted for the band N, is known only as Kurt C, and shortly before his death, according to the notebooks, he returned to his hometown of "Dayton, O—," where he moved into the dilapidated former residence of Orville Wright. An ironic discourse on the myths around dead celebrities might be expected, but this ambitious debut novel remains more coy than keen. The notebooks unfold from multiple, obliquely identified points of view, including those of Fiat, a housebound opium-addicted Orville Wright and a local musician working on both a Wright biography and a book about "our life in rock" (perhaps an alter ego for Greer, former bassist and Guided by Voices biographer). While Greer's maverick disregard for narrative conventions works early on, the layered, disjointed structure becomes labored and confusing by mid-book. Greer's eloquence on the booze-soaked angst of the gritty Midwest alternative music scene may speak to indie fans, but too often the narrators disappear, leaving the author airing his insider opinions, stripped of the thin cloak of fiction.
(July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
In his ambitious and intriguing debut novel, indie rock expert Greer, author of
Guided by Voices (2005), employs one of literature's oldest gambits, the book-within-a-book structure, three times over. A young librarian calling herself Fiat Lux fills a set of notebooks with her passion for books and an enigmatic account of her interlude with Kurt C, a famous indie rock star who appears unheralded in Dayton, Ohio, and buys the long-abandoned Orville Wright mansion. A member of the rock group Whiskey Ships is trying to write about his musical odyssey but longs to return to his book about Orville Wright, whose long-lost diaries also feed the narrative stream. Greer picks the lock on the Kurt Cobain mythos and the rapid commercialization of indie rock, although he burdens the story with an excess of skewed and meandering erudition and literary allusions. Yet strong writing and shrewd perceptions prevail, backed by wry humor, compelling stumblebum characters, a true-blue louche atmosphere, and arresting insights into the dream of art, be it literature or rock and roll.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
