On Dana Spiotta's "Stone Arabia"

I have not been as blown away as I was expecting to be by Spiotta's latest - Stone Arabia - but that might be because the bar was set very high with reviews here, here, here, and here.  The best one sentence summary might be from an on-line advert for the book:

A narrative within a narrative about a failed musician, as told by his adoring and pretty much fed-up sister.


I think "failed musician" is less accurate than "musician who never tried to make it in the first place," (admittedly poor advert word choice) as the sister, Denise Kranis, tells the story of her brother Nik's life, who has invented a separate avatar for himself, also named Nik, who is a now-reclusive genius musician quietly putting out yearly records of "antimelodic sound experiments" after having changed the course of punk/pop music in the early 1980s with his band, also fictional, called the Demonics.  

Thing is, Nik's not only made his own fantasy world where he's the star (don't we all in some sense do this, eventually?), but he's committed, over 30 years or so, to writing his "Chronicles" (not to be confused with Robert Zimmerman's "Chronicles") containing fake reviews, criticism, and news articles about Nik and his music, Nik and his band, and Nik and his effect and influence on popular music.  Nik produces his own CDs, designs the cover art, liner notes - well, you get the idea.  If Spiotta wasn't so adept at showing Nik to be the broke drunk that he is, you might think you'd have stumbled into a punk-rock novel version of St. Eligius, but one centered solely on, say, Dr. Mark Craig.


Denise is not only Nik's only "fan", though Nik doesn't see it this way.  In a rock-u-mentary produced by Denise's daughter, Ada, about her eccentric uncle Nik, he reports, in a transcript of the film included in the novel, that "my sister doesn't count as my audience because she feels like an extension of me.  She's, well, an alternative version of me."  Denise's position in relation to Nik is complicated by her mother's dementia - Denise's brother has a life that isn't real and that he is well aware of having been invented; their mother can't tell what is real or if she's invented false memories. 


The main value of the novel, as I see it, lies less in the unfolding story of Nik's outre behavior, but in the subtle plaintive wisdom Denise displays in her observations of the world around her - the unravelling world events circa 2004 - of the descending and castrating violence of the Iraq War, the premier of YouTube (where any event can live on ad infinitum) and news-alert crawls broadcasting useless information (again, ad infinitum, albeit in 17-minute doses) to a populace now numbed to the bad news (oh, to be back in 2004 and just worrying about the success of the Iraq War and President Bush's pronunciation of "nuclear").  Consider:   



"Even the most pointless obsession can yield a certain kind of depth if it is pursued unfailingly."


Or, regarding the now ever-popular self-diagnosis via WebMD (which perfectly in my mind reveals contemporary America writ personal - biological - each of us instant experts on the cause of our own demise):


"They all led back to you and your lonely, sad little search.  Each decision you made, each click or go-back button, each time you put one more thing in the search box or bookmarked a page, this was your desperate, pathetic self applying some insular logic and order to the information, however inadequate it might be. It exhausted you because you got lost in the flow of endless data, and it exhausted you because you never stopped trying to find your way in it, to apply some little spit of personal agency to it.  It was a fucking war, that's what it was."


Finally:


"We all long to escape our own subjectivity.  That's what art can do, give us a glimpse of ourselves with every human, now and forever, our disconnected, lonely terms escaped for a moment. It offers the consolation of recognition, no small thing."


Ironic, then, given Denise's musing above, that her brother's "art" does not involve Nik giving himself a "sense of himself" but rather a fake-self, a self where he is both author and reader, performing on stage as he listens to himself in the cheap seats, but not in service of, say, "recognition" but an apparent attempt at engineering a connection to his sister, and perhaps his even absent father, who at 10 gives Nik a gift of a guitar.  The only issue, then, is to determine what Nik's point is, what Spiotta wants us to take away from Nik's obsession with not-Nik's rock-star life, which becomes a sort of double-dip layer of irony - Nik may not tell us, Spiotta does not tell us, but perhaps they do in the not-telling.  Of course, I began to wonder, did Mimsie actually die?

There are some missteps in the narrative - one doesn't (and surely didn't) "subscribe to the internet" in 2004 (1997? well, maybe, but more like "subscribe to AOL").  But this a piffle for what is a mature, engrossing novel that is less astounding than some reviews have made it out to be, but no less serious for the illumination it provides restless souls, yearning, perhaps, for some type of connecting in America 2011:


"We are all really good at pretending we are a normal family, and somehow us pretending all at once is a big part of what makes you feel like a family.  It is like a willed self-delusion.  Or maybe you can lie to yourself, that's a self-delusion, but if you have a delusion about several people, if you all share in this delusion, that isn't a self-delusion, is it?  That is a family."




SPECIFICATIONS:


An author's note indicates that the inspiration for "Nik Worth" is Spiotta's stepfather, Richard Frasca.


235 pages of text


Notable author acknowledgements:  Thomas Pynchon's wife and uber-agent Melanie Jackson, and TBV Most Favored Author Don Delillo.


Want to hear what Nik Worth sounds like?  After you read the book, listen to the Methodist Bell's "Arbitrary Dice".