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Overview
In the sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,” says Denise Kranis. For Denise and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate and acute audience; she is also the crucial support for Nik and for their aging mother, whose dementia seems to threaten her own memory. When Denise’s daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities escalate.
In Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta “explores the inner workings of celebrity, family, and other modern-day mythologies” (Vogue).
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia is a dreamlike meditation on fame and success, technology and the imagination. The novel beautifully manifests Ms. Spiotta's gift for transforming her keen cultural intelligence into haunting, evocative prose."—Jennifer Egan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad“Added to the brilliant glitter of Ms. Spiotta’s earlier work...is something deeper and sadder: not just alienation, but a hard-won awareness of mortality and passing time... both a clever meditation on the feedback loop between life and art, and a moving portrait of a brother and sister, whose wild youth on the margins of the rock scene has given way to the disillusionments and vexations of middle age.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Is there a more electrifying novelist working than Dana Spiotta?...[Stone Arabia] makes for a sharp character study: A portrait of the artist as middle-aged never-was. Yet Spiotta’s genius is to recognize that Nik’s journey is representative not just for his sister or his mother but for every one of us.”—David Ulin, LA Times
“I read Stone Arabia avidly and with awe. The language of it, the whole Gnostic hipness of it is absolutely riveting. It comes together in the most artful, surprising, insistent, satisfying way. Dana Spiotta is a major, unnervingly intelligent writer.”—Joy Williams, author of The Quick and the Dead
“Fascinating...resonant...what’s most remarkable about Stone Arabia is the way Spiotta explores such broad, endemic social ills in the small, peculiar lives of these sad siblings. Her reflections on the precarious nature of modern life are witty until they’re really unsettling.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Outstanding...Male American writers have talked about the incursion of the real into territory previously held by the novelist’s capacity for invention; but who before Spiotta has written about reality’s threat not to imagination but to memory itself?...An essential American writer.”—Jonathan Dee, Harper’s Magazine
“Transfixing...It’s as though Nabokov had written a rock novel.”—Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly
“Evocative, mysterious, incongruously poetic…gritty, intelligent, mordent, and deeply sad...Spiotta has created, in Stone Arabia, a work of visceral honesty and real beauty.”—Kate Christensen, The New York Times Book Review
“Dana Spiotta’s stunning, virtuoso novel Stone Arabia plays out the A and B sides of a sibling bond...”—Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
“A smart, subtle, moving story about the complicated business of knowing the people you love...a wild, sorrowful, rambling, deeply subjective, incandescently beautiful document.”—Matthew Sharpe, Bookforum
Michiko Kakutani
Ms. Spiotta lavishes on Nik all her eclectic, deeply felt knowledge of music and pop culture. While her skeptical, appraising eye lends a satiric edge to her portrait of this willful narcissist, her understanding of his inner life also fuel-injects it with genuine emotion…[Spiotta] has written a novel that's both a clever meditation on the feedback loop between life and art, and a moving portrait of a brother and sister, whose wild youth on the margins of the rock scene has given way to the disillusionments and vexations of middle age.—The New York Times
Ron Charles
What's most remarkable about Stone Arabia is the way Spiotta explores such broad, endemic social ills in the small, peculiar lives of these sad siblings. Her reflections on the precarious nature of modern life are witty until they're really unsettling. She's captured that hankering for something alluring in the past that never was—a moment of desire and pretense that the best pop music articulates for each generation and makes everything else that comes later sound flat and disappointing.—The Washington Post
Kate Christensen
Spiotta has created, in Stone Arabia, a work of visceral honesty and real beauty.—The New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
Spiotta's extraordinary new novel is an inspired consideration of sibling devotion, Southern California, and fame. Nik Worth is a reclusive musician in his late 40s at the tail end of his "blasé and phlegmatic glamour," who once almost made it big. But as he careens toward 50, he begins to retreat into a private world, living in his tiny "hermitage" apartment, recording a multivolume series called the Ontology of Worth, and assembling the Chronicles, a scrapbooked alternate history of his career, complete with fake news clippings, doctored photographs, and reviews. Nik's primary links to the world, and biggest fans, are his devoted younger sister, Denise, and to a lesser extent, her daughter, Ada. But when Ada begins a documentary probing her uncle's "whole constructed lifeology thingy" just as the inner logic of Nik's "chronicled" life unspools, Nik and Denise are plunged into a crisis. With her novel's clever structure, jaundiced affection for Los Angeles, and diamond-honed prose, Spiotta (National Book Award finalist for Eat the Document) delivers one of the most moving and original portraits of a sibling relationship in recent fiction. (July)Library Journal
Nik Worth is an eccentric artist who, when he's not working at an L.A. dive bar, records his own music and updates his third-person autobiography, The Chronicles. It's hard to say whether or not Nik is a genius or a solipsistic whacko, but his middle-aged younger sister, Denise, and her daughter, Ada, a fledgling filmmaker who wants to make a documentary about her uncle, think it's the former. The narrative is told from Denise's perspective as she writes down what happens to Nik. Besides childhood reminiscences, she includes extracts from The Chronicles' fictional reviews of Nik's music, extensive liner notes from his CDs, and even his own obituary. In this world of make-believe, Denise struggles to discern fact from fiction while doing her best to help Nik survive his destructive lifestyle. VERDICT Award-winning writer Spiotta's (Eat the Document) quirky, highly imaginative novel generates questions that echo Nik's pseudonymous last name: What constitutes artistic worth, and what makes life worth living? This is cutting-edge literary fiction with plenty of rock references for music buffs. [See Prepub Alert, 1/24/11.]—Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CAKirkus Reviews
A woman tussles with memories of her brother, a rock 'n' roll cult hero, in a sharp, challenging novel about identity and family history.
Spiotta (Eat the Document, 2006, etc.) claims Don DeLillo as one of her mentors, and her third novel bears a resemblance to DeLillo's classicGreat Jones Street(1973). Both novels are concerned with the invention of pop-culture personas, and Spiotta shares DeLillo's plainspoken, often clinical style of observation. It's best not to draw too close a connection between the two authors, though: Spiotta's blend of human portraits and big-picture thinking is wholly her own. Denise, the novel's heroine and occasional narrator, has had a long love-hate relationship with her brother, Nik, an L.A. rock musician who flirted with mass popularity in the 1970s but more often shunned the spotlight. Using various pseudonyms and working in various styles, he produced a host of self-released albums and kept a regular set of "Chronicles" about himself filled with invented news stories and reviews. Spiotta's theme of crafted personas is clear (Nik's most popular band was called the Fakes), but Denise's wry, mordant character moves the novel beyond a philosophical exercise. The siblings' mother increasingly succumbs to dementia, which adds human detail to Denise's musings about what connects us outside of shared memory. She has strong reactions to news of far-away events (the book's title comes from the name of a tragedy-struck New York Amish community), which gives an emotional pitch to her thoughts about mediated experience. But for all its hard thinking,this book has plenty of novelistic energy: It's filled with in-jokes about pop, punk and new wave music, and Denise's character engagingly echoes the music's tone of irony and defiance.
A fine novel about heartbreak. Spiotta keenly understands how busily we construct images of ourselves for the public, and how hard loved ones work to dismantle them.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Halfway into her masterpiece The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot writes this about her agonized hero and heroine, the siblings Tom and Maggie Tulliver: "While Maggie's life-struggles had lain almost entirely within her own soul, one shadowy army fighting another, and the slain shadows for ever rising again, Tom was engaged in a dustier, noisier warfare, grappling with more substantial obstacles, and gaining more definite conquests."
It's a typically discerning passage in The Mill on the Floss—no English novelist has ever seen more deeply into the machinery of human psychology—and it could well be describing the demon-chased siblings in Dana Spiotta's stirring novel, Stone Arabia. Nikolas and Denise Kranis make a battered pair, middle-aged in Los Angeles and very far from their dreams: he's an unemployable musician with multiple volumes of a fictional autobiography, she a brooding isolato in constant existential crisis. As with Tom and Maggie Tulliver, their brother/sister union is both sustenance and heartscourge, Denise too emotionally bedraggled to pry herself away from her self- destructive brother, and Nik too broke ever to be without his faintly more competent younger sister.
The Romantic poets idealized the brother/sister bond in a way that strikes us today, post-Freud, as highly suspect—what was really going on between William and Dorothy Wordsworth?—and many of the great nineteenth-century novelists, including Dickens, glorified the union as something next to holy. This romancing of the bond was an entirely different enterprise from the first important sibling story, the Antigone of Sophocles, in which a bereaved Antigone seeks proper burial for the slain body of her brother Polynices. (Hegel viewed the Antigone as a perfect tragedy, and, not surprisingly, believed that the brother/sister bond was the only uncontaminated relationship.)
Spiotta's siblings enjoy no such Romantic idealization or lofty Sophoclean program because they are ensconced in a twenty-first- century Californian malaise (movies factor prominently in the novel). Obsessing over her gifted brother only slightly more than she obsesses over herself, Denise wallows in a spiritual vacuum that threatens to annihilate her. She works as a wealthy person's assistant, half-heartedly tends to her ailing mother, worries about Nik one minute and then her daughter in New York the next, dates a man she has no attraction to, and in her spare time wills herself to become consumed by salacious stories on the nightly news and Internet. She weeps a lot, unstrung by the misfortune of strangers: "I had, in middle age, become a person whose deepest emotional moments happened vicariously." Disengagement from genuine feeling, from genuine human communion, is always a brand of nihilism brought on by self-absorption. Worship your own precious heart and you worship in a defunct church of one.
But Denise's penchant for sentimentality and self-pity is matched by her intelligence, evidenced by an exacting introspection. Some of the sharpest observations in Stone Arabia involve her musings on memory: "You can go back forever to grab a context for a brother and sister. And even then the backward glance is distorted by the lens of the present. The further back, the greater the distortion. It is not just that emotions distort memory. It is that memory distorts memory." But her finely calibrated insights aren't all directed within. About a credit card application: "The first time you actually read the words printed on these things was to feel the last connection to your childhood die." Nancy Spungen, the famous hell-for-leather girlfriend of punk-rocker Sid Vicious, "had a face like a wound."
Spiotta's characters might be made-for-TV clich?s—the skinny, alcoholic, drug-addicted, neglected musical genius who dresses in black and smokes a pack a day; the forty-something single female who can't commit and is just hours away from owning a cat; the ambitious, do-good daughter; the elderly mother with incipient Alzheimer's—but Nik and Denise know they are clich?s and constantly claw after uniqueness, dumbfounded when they can't achieve it. The word clich? appears several times throughout the novel, and in some ways the story becomes a comment on how to abide in a media-mad culture that aims to make you a clich?, to deprive you of all individuality. When Denise's daughter, Ada, travels to L.A. to film a documentary about her uncle, she reads his fictional autobiography, called the Chronicles (Bob Dylan's memoirs have the same title). Puzzled, she says to him, "You have your critics call you derivative, immature, and clich?, " and Nik responds, "Well, I wanted it to be realistic." He possesses that rarest of qualities: an ability to see himself for exactly what he is.
Denise says of her brother that "his solipsism had become his work"—scores of self-produced albums, dozens of volumes of artificial autobiography—and yet her own solipsism has been equally poisonous to her development. The solipsist's fatal flaw is not self-worship but rather the moral myopia that inevitably results from it. Her daughter's affair with a married man elicits from Denise only a sigh and the facile, ethically lame admission that her approval of this affair "was clearly another instance of my poor parental guidance." Clearly. If Denise's world has become a storm of distress, she has her own awful decisions to blame. Intelligence and introspection aren't enough to rescue her from the emotional devils she has devised. They never are.
The "dustier, noisier warfare" that Nik has in common with Eliot's Tom Tulliver will eventually force him to take a precipitous leap in his life, while the "shadowy" burdens "within her own soul" will cause Denise only more self-obsession and media fixation. In one of the many wise, arresting passages from this novel, Spiotta writes: "The world is full of the lightly obsessed, the faintly committed, the inch-deep dilettantes. All those contrived and affected and presented passions." Feel what you will about this brother and sister in disrepair, but their passions are real, and in the end, Stone Arabia is a superb story of American siblings besieged by ghouls, by the false promises of rock and light.
William Giraldi's novel, Busy Monsters, will be published in August. A regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, he teaches at Boston University and is a senior editor for the journal AGNI. Reviewer: William Giraldi