A Boy’s Dream

People invariably relate to coming-of-age stories: everybody has to grow up sometime. Stories about the search for a parent’s love are sure reader pleasers, too, because on some level we never actually do grow up. But good writers can make these familiar roads seem new, taking readers places they don’t expect to go. In his latest novel, Fiddler’s Dream, Gregory Spatz uses the story of a young musician’s professional rite of passage, and his simultaneous quest for his long lost father, as routes to explore the primal connection between love and artistic inspiration. Jesse Alison, the 19-year-old protagonist, is a preternaturally gifted string player—fiddle, mandolin and guitar—who leaves his backwoods Vermont home for Nashville. He’s in search of two men: his absentee dad, a once-successful musician and songwriter who has dropped out of sight; and the man he regards as his musical father, bluegrass legend Bill Monroe. The young man sees in Monroe’s band, The Bluegrass Boys, a kind of spiritual family that will fill the emotional void he has long felt. The story is set in the period prior to Monroe’s death in 1996. Jesse knows that the master is well past his musical prime, and getting a gig with his band is not a great accomplishment, but that fact doesn’t deter him. He’s driven by a desire he struggles to understand, a desire born from some deep connection between his love of music and his need for his father’s love. His quest for musical acceptance is inseparable from his fantasy of a father-son reunion. “The point is something else more obscure—something he can’t put his finger on and would never say aloud, having to do with honor and with knowing himself, and with believing in his heart he’s destined to be a Bluegrass Boy, to wear that suit and hat, and something else more embarrassing relating to his father: I’d like him to see me on the Opry, he thinks. That’s how he’s meant to find me—there on the stage with Monroe, playing my heart out.” The novel’s title is taken from the classic bluegrass tune, but in telling Jesse’s story, Spatz gives us a fiddler’s dream in a very literal sense. The narrative never veers away from Jesse’s point of view, and we get a running account of the images that haunt Jesse’s troubled sleep, as well as the confused fantasies and ambitions that fill his waking hours. Jesse’s father-longing is somewhat inchoate—most of his mental energy is devoted to music and sex—but Spatz does such a masterful job of portraying the dense web of his thoughts and feelings that the reader can empathize with this insecure, remote young man. We get a clear sense of the organic relationship between Jesse’s barely conscious emotions and the musical inspiration that seems to bestow itself on him magically. Spatz equips the reader to understand Jesse with detailed exposition of the mechanics of making music. There are endless references to the bluegrass songbook and many accounts of the macho gamesmanship between musicians. Genny, Jesse’s best friend/mentor/love object, is a luthier, and we hear plenty about the art of repairing and building violins. All this arcana could get tiresome for the non-musician, but Spatz uses it as a way into Jesse’s psyche. The material facts of musicianship fill his mind, and music is his tool of expression in almost every encounter. Understanding something about this world helps the reader speak Jesse’s emotional language. He uses music to compete with and impress other players, but he employs it in more intimate ways, too. He expresses his anger at Genny by playing in a manner deliberately unlike himself, as a way of telling her he’s not the boy she takes for granted: “Worse than showing off, he realizes, what he wants is to hurt her—shock and stun her and make her feel he’s become unknown. The red fiddle helps; he barely recognizes himself, playing it.” Music, in spite of its universal appeal, is fundamentally mysterious. The various systems used for codifying and creating it are handy tools, but they don’t do anything to explain the potent experience of music, nor its source in the human psyche. People who devote their lives to making music are, in a sense, mystics or spiritual seekers, chasing a deeper understanding of something that is ultimately impenetrable. Jesse is on a quest for something much bigger than an encounter with his two fathers—as he realizes after all three of them come together, fittingly, in a dream. Afterward, he realizes, he’ll go “wherever the music takes him, east, south, north, west, and try not to regret it.” Spatz is himself an accomplished musician and plays fiddle with the bluegrass group John Reischman and the Jaybirds. At his website, gregoryspatz.com, you can hear him play his own version of “Fiddler’s Dream,” a moderately up-tempo tune with a slightly tense, delirious quality. The chapters of the novel are headed with the chord changes of the song, and Spatz notes in a preface that Jesse’s story can be seen as corresponding to its harmonic structure. It’s an interesting conceit, and it’s too bad Spatz and/or his editors chose to explain it. Even with the note, the idea is pretty meaningless to non-musicians, and it would have been more fun for musically literate readers to figure it out for themselves. The novel merits a couple of other quibbles, which will matter mostly to Nashville readers. Spatz’s sense of Nashville geography is a little confused, and he has a surprisingly poor ear for local speech. For instance, he makes a point of noting the way Nashvillians call soft drinks “pop” (they don’t), and his attempts to portray the local twang are pretty wide of the mark: “I say, you ’rat songs?” It seems odd that Jesse is described as feeling so alienated by Southern speech; he’s spent his whole life listening to bluegrass music. But Fiddler’s Dream isn’t intended as a document of its Nashville setting, or of the bluegrass music scene. It could have been set anywhere people make music—which is to say, anywhere on earth. Its genius lies in the way it gives readers a window deep into a young musician’s heart and mind, showing us a glimpse of the alchemy that turns experience into art.