Items related to Bluestown
In the first chapter of Bluestown - which as a short story appeared in the 1995 Drue Heinz Prize-winning collection Dangerous Men - Geoffrey Becker emerges as a writer of unusual imagination and talent. Spencer Markus at fifteen wants to believe in his dad, Spider, a local musician whose life and career seem to be going nowhere. So when his dad shows up and pulls Spencer from school one afternoon, inviting him on a road trip, he is eager to go along. But the trip turns out to be Spider's strange way of saying good-bye, rather than facing up to the lies he's told, both to his son and to himself. Seven years later, Spencer is living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and a roommate, and working in Manhattan answering letters for Mutronics, a musical-effects company under siege from both its unhappy customers and a union that wants to organize it. In the midst of an imminent breakup with his girlfriend, and with the labor dispute growing uglier and more violent daily, Spencer suddenly hears from his father. As they try to reestablish some kind of relationship, Spencer must once again confront Spider's essentially unreliable nature, recognize that they may have more in common than he'd care to admit, and get on with his own life.
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From Kirkus Reviews:
A marvelous first novel about growing up confused and trying to adjust to the imperfections of people who are supposed to know better (like your parents), from the author of the story collection Dangerous Men (1995--not reviewed). This is the story, told in his own ruefully funny voice, of Spencer Markus, a disconnected young Brooklynite whose adult life seems compounded of romantic disappointment, job insecurity, and variously addled relations with his vagrant father ``Spider,'' an itinerant rock-and-roll musician (a.k.a. ``Spiderman Dan'') who weaves unannounced and unpredictably in and out of Spencer's life. Becker's beautifully controlled plot gets off to a fast start with Spencer remembering a trip he almost took with his father to Canada, then noodles along agreeably chronicling this unheroic hero's misadventures working as a Customer Service rep for a blandly dishonest musical ``effects'' business (Mutronics), his injury during a peculiar outbreak of labor-union violence, and his rocky reunion with an old high-school girlfriend and her deeply neurotic dog Toby. Everybody here (including Toby) has a vividly distinctive personality, and Becker keeps coming up with amusing particulars. Spencer's patient correspondence with Mutronics' outraged customers (i.e., victims) is hilarious--and is skillfully used to nudge the novel toward its surprising, and moving, conclusion. Among the tale's irresistible details are a thumbnail portrait of Spencer's distracted grandmother (whose ``frequent conversations with her late husband . . . left the rest of us sitting in polite silence''), a baby's crib ingeniously fashioned from a speaker cabinet, and a band made up of law students calling itself the Pop Torts. Best of all, there's the characterization of Spencer's well-meaning, terminally screwed-up father, whose message to his kid memorably resounds over his, and the novel's, salutary craziness: ``Sometimes you have to take things to the extreme. . . . Out on the edges . . . that's where the good stuff is.'' A superlative debut, from a writer of very great promise. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Publishers Weekly:
On the heels of his marvelous debut in the short-story collection Dangerous Men (Forecasts, Dec. 9, 1995), Becker delivers a first novel that enhances his promise as a major voice in American fiction. This confident and touching work opens as 15-year-old narrator Spencer Markus, without his mother's knowledge, embarks on a road trip with his estranged father, Spider, a small-time blues guitarist. Ostensibly, they are heading to Montreal for an audition. But when Spencer gets ditched in a Vermont bus station with $800 in cash-the sum total of his patrimony-he realizes that there is no audition but only, "for a brief while, an idea about the two of us starting over again someplace else." Seven years later, Spencer is living in Brooklyn, working as the customer service rep for Mutronics, a shady manufacturer of electronic guitar aids. His main duty there is to glibly respond to angry letters-reproduced in the text-from customers, their lawyers, Better Business Bureaus and even the occasional prison inmate. Spider's reappearance (in the product-testing room) throws Spencer's life into chaos: his girlfriend leaves, Mutronics declares bankruptcy and a blow to the head earns the young man a trip to the hospital and two holes in his skull. There are high times with Spider as well, such as the Christmas Eve the two spend in a Manhattan blues bar almost picking up models and sitting in with the band. But Spencer mostly floats along in a haze, without ambition, until a shockingly violent act frees him from his ambivalence. Becker is a gifted writer. His prose is steady, authentic and punctuated by intense metaphors. Here, he has produced an exceptional debut novel, full of bittersweet truths and appealing characters.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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- PublisherSt. Martin's Griffin
- Publication date1996
- ISBN 10 0312304560
- ISBN 13 9780312304560
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages292
- Rating
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