In America in the 1970s, apparently, the go-to guide for novelty icings was called The Wilton Book of Birthday Cakes. "I used to pore over it, plotting The Rocketship cake, the Raggedy Ann cake, the Holly Hobbie," a daughter, now middle-aged, recalls. "You decided you were too old for funny-shaped birthday cakes, remember?" says her elderly mother, who has the beginnings of dementia. "But I knew you still wanted a cake, you just couldn't admit it. So I went in your room and I found a picture " "Aladdin Sane! With the frosting lightning bolt That was amazing," remembers the daughter, who frets about her own perimenopausal cognitive deterioration. "A beautiful Bowie birthday cake!" They smile, they hug, they say they love each other. "Pay attention to this," thinks the daughter. "This could be one of the last hugs."
A Bowie cake with zigzag buttercream; a mother and daughter, loving but deeply racked; a scrupulous hypervigilance in the writing, a piling of awkward elements in tall and teetering blocks. "Like slightly off, rancid America," as Dana Spiotta has previously written. "The longing. The sadness that leaks through." Her first novel, 2001's Lightning Field, was all bars and restaurants and stand-up sex among people on the edge of "the industry" in Los Angeles. Her second, the marvellous Eat the Document (2007), explored an odd corner of recent American life in which the 1960s underground, 90s anti-capitalism and the Beach Boys could just about meet up. Her third features a rock god, a blogger, Abu Ghraib and Beslan as witnessed on the internet and cable television "Each possibility, not feeling or feeling, each response was inadequate." Mostly, though, it's a "rancid America" story of beauty and talent, failure and disappointment, as experienced by a pair of ageing siblings: the doormat sister, living through her love for other people, and the narcissistic brother who appears to have lost the plot.
The narrator, Denise, is the woman remembering the birthday cake. These days, she mostly looks after people: her mother, her gorgeous daughter and her beloved older brother, Nik. Nik is a decaying beauty with big brown eyes and straight white teeth; he's also a talented guitarist and prodigious singer-songwriter. In his youth he very nearly became famous, except that then it didn't happen; something to do with the "angry-red, keloid-scar rage" of the late-70s LA underground, and something to do with the manipulations of a "pestilent pop impresario". He broke up his bands, he stopped going out, he started making records by himself with a four-track. He wrote his own reviews and profile pieces, and stuck them in a series of scrapbooks he calls his Chronicles. He drank, he smoked too much, he worked in bars, he ran his way through a string of girlfriends. Nearly 30 years later, he's stuck there, still doing just the same things.
The body of the novel concerns events on the way to Nik approaching 50. He comes down with gout, he can't pay his rent, a former bandmate dies of congestive heart failure. Denise's daughter wants to make a movie about him, "My Crazy Uncle Nik". He finishes the final instalment of a massive music project, and suddenly Denise starts fearing for what he might be about to do. The dread is cut with regret and if-onlys: "I remember the moment when I first understood Nik and I had made real mistakes I remember noticing, with real sadness, that we had strayed from an acceptable course." And yet, the good times are told with vitality and relish: bands called the Fakes, the Demonics, Sticky Baby. A pretendy writer called Anna Conda. A fake fanzine called Butter Your Toast.
Why, though, Stone Arabia what is this title about? Stone Arabia is a tiny settlement in upstate new York. Since the 1980s it has been home to a colony of old-order Amish, and it has crossed Denise's radar because of the disappearance of a young girl, witnessed unfolding on the rolling news. Towards the end of the book, she will light out to go there; the impulse is clear enough to her, mysterious to outsiders. "They" the Amish "weren't trying to live in the 19th century They protect their undistracted life. They don't blindly grab at whatever's new. They consider such things with deep scepticism. It wasn't hard to see how much better that might work."
This odd, drifty combination the random-looking title, a cathartic road-trip, the brilliant brother who seems to have gone wrong is very similar to the structure of Lightning Field. I have no idea if there's a biographical explanation for this, but I think there's a deeper artistic reason, too. "I knew his solipsism had become his work, in a sense, that this was complicated to think about, but at some point there is the unyielding, the concentration and the accumulation that becomes a body of work. Whatever the nature of that work, it is hard to argue against No one not me, certainly could deny that this was a form of purity." Does artistic work have to meet an audience, the marketplace, before it can be said to have punched its ticket? Can it ever be allowed, in "rancid America", not to care about the market, but to strive and long for something bigger and beyond?
