Stone Arabia

Stone Arabia is a lovingly rendered novel about a person who is absorbed in the orbit of a sibling. It's also about creativity, and its benefits and curses. It's also a lot about rock and roll.

Dana Spiotta's primary narrator is Denise Kranis, the younger singer of Nik Worth, a marginal rock musician who, in 2004, is tending bar at a dive, living above a garage in Topanga Canyon, and continuing to put out experimental CDS called The Ontology of Worth, in 20 volumes (they are numbered in reverse chronology, and he is down to number 1, his last).

We hear in detail about Nik's tenth birthday, when their itinerant father gave him a guitar as a present. Later that day they went to see A Hard Day's Night: "Nik was a bit of a Beatle skeptic; he had the 45s, but he wasn't sure it wasn't too much of a girl thing. The movie erased all doubt. Denise remembered how everything about it thrilled them--the music, of course, but also the fast cuts, the deadpan wit, the mod style, the amused asides right into the camera. The songs actually made them feel high, and in each instance they felt permanently embedded in their brains by the second repetition of the chorus. They stayed in their seats right through the credits."

Nik goes on to be in a few bands, with modest success. He has a chance at stardom, but ends up largely in obscurity. But, in another expression of his irrepressible creativity, he has written what he terms "The Chronicles," which is his life (and Denise's) in an alternate universe where he is a rock star. He even writes reviews of his nonexistent records, both raves and pans. "I think it is funny, and no doubt at all lost on Nik, that in the end, his life in the Chronicles wasn't all that different from his real life. In some ways it was worse, and in other way it was exactly the same. Not a fantasy perfect life at all, just a different life, perhaps a more artful life. But in the Chronicles he wasn't the author of the Chronicles, which was arguably the thing he had grown to be the proudest of as time went by."

As the novel goes on, we feel for both Denise and Nik. The latter for his dissolute lifestyle: "He did not care, or seemed not to care, about his drinking belly or his general, considerable decay. He did not care that his hands shook when he lit his cigarette. He did not care when his conversation was brought to a halt by his coughing fit. He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future." Nik gets a swollen toe but won't go to the doctor, so Denise is forced to go on the Internet and determine he has gout, and give him medications of her intuition, which include pills for menstrual cramps.

But Denise, who at times tells the story in the first person, or is always the direct focus of the novel, is sad in her own way. She dates a man who delights in kitsch (he gives her Thomas Kinkade memorabilia), has a daughter in New York, but seems to be hollow at the center, constantly worrying about her brother or the events on television, including Abru Ghraib or a fictional kidnapping of a girl from Amish country. There is a humorous self-awareness about Denise, such as when she recalls her first day with the Kinkade guy: "I hadn't been out with a guy in a long time, but even I knew talking about infectious diseases was not appealing first-date conversation."

Late in the book, as Nik's 50th birthday approaches, she worries that he will kill himself, especially when she finds his obituary in his Chronicles. The desperation about Nik is palpable, and the relationship so acutely drawn (Nik describes her as an alternate version of himself) that we can't help be drawn into her sense of panic.

Aside from the sorrow, Stone Arabia also has the bouncy memories of the L.A. music scene. This passage, describing Denise's former boyfriend and father of her daughter, is delicious: "When I first met him, Chris played bass in this eyeliner band called Ether. (Later they moved from New Romantic/new wave to a more death/Goth style and changed their name to the Select and then, after Chris left, to Crown of Thorns. After that they moved beyond death/Goth to life/bright wave and then to Romanesque edge metal and changed their name to Leviathan until they finally broke up or faded out or quietly kept going in someone's garage."

The recent Pulitzer Prizes could not bring themselves to bestow an award this year for fiction; Stone Arabia would have been a worthy winner.