Synopsis
Set against the backdrop of Patty Hearst's kidnapping in 1970s San Francisco, Ronnie Reboulet, a former jazz trumpet star and emotionally troubled man, strives to live a life void of drugs and relies on the companionship of his daughter and his soulmate to make the comeback of a lifetime
Reviews
Ronnie Reboulet, the Chet Baker-esque hero of this coolly passionate debut, has lost a lot: his teeth, his looks, his wife, his daughter and his career as a singer and trumpeter. On the positive side, he's beaten a heroin habit and found Betty, a girlfriend who forgives his weaknesses and admires his soul, no matter how far he wanders or how hard he tries to keep her at a distance. Then, one evening in the 1970s, his teenage daughter Rae?an aspiring singer who is struggling to give her own baby son the care Ronnie never gave her?appears on his doorstep, desperate for direction and love, and forces her way back into his life. Under her sway, Ronnie starts playing again, first alone, later in a club where the local San Francisco press rediscovers him. The masterful passages that follow Ronnie through his slow relearning of music are full of frustration, beauty and moments of elation. The individual dramas of Ronnie, Betty and Rae are all set against another family crisis that gripped the nation?namely the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. The contrast between the image of Randolph Hearst on TV, forced to make public declarations of his love for Patty, and Ronnie's battle against the urge to flee his family is particularly poignant. With grace and dexterity, Schneider cuts to the heart of the matter, his characters' losses and redemptions, outlining their lives in deceptively simple terms. By the end of the novel, just Ronnie's gesture (described en passant) of slipping off his shoes moves us because we know that it means he's using drugs again. Ronnie's singing style is described as "intimate, and yet free of affect." The same could be said about this smooth first novel from the editor of the Hungry Mind Review. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A heartfelt debut, by The Hungry Mind Review's editor, about a burnt-out jazz musician who's obviously modelled on the brilliant, self-destructive trumpeter-vocalist Chet Baker. The story occurs in and around San Francisco in 1974, when Patricia Hearst was kidnapped--an event that absorbs Schneider's characters almost obsessively. Protagonist Ronnie Reboulet, ``pushing fifty,'' is drug-free at last but left with a mouthful of false teeth and a horn that's been locked away for some five years. Ronnie's ex-wife ``Cat'' willingly crashed and burned along with him. Now their daughter Rae, herself beginning a career as a jazz singer, struggles also to raise her racially mixed four-year-old, the product of her affair with a handsome black kid she met at Altamont. Ronnie's currently quiet life (working at a golf course, living with Betty Millard, a goodhearted nurse who has survived mastectomy, unhappy marriage, and bereaved motherhood) is disturbed when Rae and son reenter it, and as he's gradually persuaded that he's ``frozen inside a tree of unplayed music.'' Following this extended exposition, the novel riffs through short chapters describing Ronnie's, Rae's, and Betty's experiences and reminiscences, and the relevance of the Patty Hearst theme grows clearer, hinting at the question of whether people can separate themselves from their loved ones so decisively that there's no way back. Schneider knows his subject, and all the right tunes, but the account of Ronnie's imperfect rejuvenation is miked, as it were, too high. There are actually scenes that suggest both Christ's agony in the wilderness, and a ``baptism'' that accompanies Ronnie's return to playing in public. Conversely, the story does trail off into a perfectly modulated downbeat ending. A better-than-decent try, but more emotion than technique is displayed in this first solo effort. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
In the late 1960s, Ronnie Reboulet was a brilliant but drug-wrecked jazz trumpeter who had blown notes of aching beauty for decades and then laid down his instrument for good. Five years later, all he has to show for his hard-won sobriety is ruined good looks, a nowhere Bay Area job, and the steadfast love of Betty, wise from her own sorrowful chapters. In 1974, Ronnie's life undergoes a sea change. His long-estranged, too-young daughter shows up on his doorstep with a child of her own just as Ronnie follows his troubled heart back to the freedom only music can bring him. Schneider, editor of the Hungry Mind Review, pulls the reader into the rhythm of this tale with vignettes of lovely artistry that weave back and forth throughout Ronnie's life. The standard formula of drugs plus musical wizardry equals heartbreak does not necessarily apply to this poignant tale of good-hearted people working hard to carve a life, hopefully with each other. Highly recommended.?Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"A man goes through his life and people miss his point." But what is the point of Ronnie Reboulet--jazz trumpet player, singer, scratch golfer, heroin addict, father, lover of many women? Fans remember him as a stunningly handsome young man with a deliriously romantic singing voice, but Ronnie himself, nearing 50, with false teeth and a time-ravaged face, struggles to stay clean and get to know his daughter, herself an aspiring jazz singer. And yet, the trumpet beckons: "the sharp and blatty, hard-driving piston work of the horn. The utter impossibility of it." This story of Ronnie's comeback as a musician in the 1970s is equally about jazz and families. As Ronnie and his friends in the San Francisco Bay Area watch the events of the Patty Hearst kidnapping unfold, he plays out his own family drama: attempting a reconciliation with his daughter while the lure of the jazz world pushes him in a different direction. Drawing loosely on the career of singer-trumpeter Chet Baker, Schneider, editor of the Hungry Mind Review, writes with quiet, lyrical intensity about the jazz player's art and about the exhilaration and loneliness of the jazz life. Blue Bossa is the best jazz novel since John Clellon Holmes' The Horn, written 40 years ago, but Ronnie Reboulet is more than a jazzman: the unresolvable contradictions of his life, the pushing and pulling in opposite directions, speak to all of us and give his story its irresistibly melancholy soul. Bill Ott
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