Like her National Book Award-nominated Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta's new novel has roots in the 1970s. This time, instead of focusing on the era's politics, she attends to the intimate details of family life, the slow erosion of dreams and the faint persistence of hope.
Narrated mostly in the voice of Denise Krasnis, a woman struggling in midlife, Stone Arabia is the story of her relationship with her older brother, Nick Worth, a talented if only modestly successful post-punk musician in bands with names like the Demonics and the Fakes. Now, in 2004, Nick lives in obscurity in Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, subsisting on a bartender's income. When not working on an elaborate fictional narrative of his life he calls "The Chronicles," he's recording an equally imposing, provocative series of experimental CDs, distributed sporadically and rarely.
Denise, who calls her own story "The Counterchronicles," can't escape the incessant drumbeat of stories from the wider world that insinuate their way into her life as she realizes that she "had, in middle age, become a person whose deepest emotional moments happened vicariously."
Spiotta captures the stew of love, frustration, anger and lack of communication that are the stuff of adult sibling relationships: "We don't talk out everything," Denise tells her daughter, Ada, a filmmaker who's working on a documentary on her uncle's career. "We keep a lot in the air between us." As she watches, with concern and alarm, her brother's increasingly reclusive behavior, she must deal with their mother's early dementia, fearing she's destined for the same fate.
In a voice that rarely rises above an intense whisper, Dana Spiotta's novel leaves us with some profound questions: How well do we know the ones dearest to us and, in the face of our most well-intentioned efforts, can their inner lives ever truly be known? --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer