Stories From the Road
Novelist Madison Smartt Bell makes a departure with his latest work—one that doesn’t always succeed, but engages the reader nonetheless
by Lacey Galbraith
Anything Goes
By Madison Smartt Bell (Pantheon Books, $24, 336 pp.)
As music towns go, Nashville can be a tough crowd. Whether a musician, an industry executive, a journalist or someone on the fringes, everyone here is a critic. We all know someone in a band or a songwriter struggling to make it. So any author looking to tell the “real story” about what it’s like to play music for a living, well, watch out, because Nashville has seen it all before.
Madison Smartt Bell’s new book, Anything Goes, isn’t so much an exposé as it is a novelized Almost Famous. (And like any good movie nowadays, there’s even a soundtrack of sorts, the author and poet Wyn Cooper having recorded a companion CD.) It’s the story of a young man, Jesse, and his traveling bar band. Moving up and down the East Coast, they play gigs in places with sawdust on the floor and with names like the Black Cat. They do what everyone imagines musicians do on the road: They stay in cheap, out-of-the-way motels and make just enough to pay the rent back home. They fight, drink and squabble amongst themselves. They pick up women and have run-ins with the cops. They change lead guitarists about as often as Spinal Tap did drummers.
More than anything, the book is a fan’s paean to music and musicians.
Bell’s characters are of the High Fidelity type; they’re obsessives who can’t just listen to a record—they have to dissect the lyrics, the singer’s voice, the production. They wax philosophic over such questions as whether or not Emmylou Harris’ voice is as true and powerful on her later albums as it is on her earlier recordings. They disdain “new country” and its oversized, just-bought cowboy hats, for Jesse and his bandmates are the salt and grit of Nashville, the folks who play in honky-tonks and small bars night after night because they love the music and the rambling lifestyle.
The irony, however, is that in trying to render the characters authentic and exciting, the writing at times comes across as clichéd and stilted. Bell is an accomplished writer, the author of 12 previous works of fiction and a National Book Award finalist. His work has always been of a serious nature, most often described as “dark and gritty” or “sweeping and historical.” His last book, Master of the Crossroads, concerned the revolution and uprising in Haiti, and critics couldn’t say enough good things about it. But writing about music is challenging. A novelist can use all the inside terms and phrases he wants, he can have characters talk about G-chords and melodies, but if the reader can’t hear the music, can’t feel the rhythm and the energy, then the author’s intentions fall flat and attempts at revealing character or staging a mood come across as showy. As a result, Bell’s words sometimes feel more like a study in criticism or music theory than anything to make you wanna get up and dance.
Take, for example, the passage in which Jesse hears the voice of Kurt Cobain in his head while trying to learn an Eric Clapton song: “The Clapton tape had run out, so I turned up a little and hit the low E hard, letting it throb till the snare talked back to it from behind me. Then E, G-flat, D-flat, A, and louder, C, D, hold on B and back to the top except Cobain, the dead guy, was shaking his head—uh-uh, it turns around on D before it repeats—and that was it, you could hear it in the lyrics too because even they were sort of mismatched with the chords, slip-sliding around on top of the progression.” Unless a reader is familiar with the song, or unless the author infuses every sentence with a load of similes and metaphors, much is lost in the translation to paper, for music is meaningful because of the vibrations that we feel, the melodies that we remember.
Perhaps this is why the best parts of the novel are the ones in which the music takes a backseat to the relationships. This is a coming-of-age novel, after all, and so the most convincing and lyrical of sections occur when Bell writes of Jesse and his father. After years of bearing the scars of parental alcoholism and abuse, Jesse begins to come to terms with his father and his past. He learns what every therapy-riddled adult finally does: that your parents weren’t perfect, they were just doing the best they could and, in the end, it’s best to move on. Anything Goes details Jesse’s search for peace and independence as the reader watches him shrug off the old haunts and bad memories and declare his life as his own. For him, music is the vehicle, the force that carries him through the various stages of growing up. And in the end, isn’t this what we all wish for—something to look toward, something to pull us forward?
Bell’s book is definitely a departure from his earlier work, with its heavy overtones and issues of race, but it is a good book nonetheless. Though more in the vein of a summer read, something to take poolside, the story of Jesse learning to make it on his own outweighs the places where Bell’s prose feels labored. Jesse’s a good kid, one who’s found his passion—and even if Bell can’t evoke the source of that passion, he can get us to root for his young protagonist when he has to make the toughest decisions.
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