Glimpses - Hardcover

Shiner, Lewis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688124119 ISBN 13: 9780688124113

Publisher: William Morrow & Company, 1993

Synopsis

Ray Shackleford lives in the ruins of the idealistic 1960s. Veteran of failed garage bands, working as a repairman of stereo equipment, and tending the dying embers of his marriage, Ray dreams of bygone days and the music that almost was.

When he finds the music he dreams of has been mysteriously recorded by his tape deck, Ray is drawn into the past, to revisit the histories of Hendrix, Morrison, and the Beatles...along with the history of Ray Shackford.

Vividly recreating a lost era that might have been, Glimpses fuses the hopes and dreams in the music with a powerful vision of reality.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Ray makes his living repairing stereos in his upstairs workshop. Like so many others of his generation he's trying to cope with lost ideals and broken dreams. The father he rebelled against for years has just died, and his marriage looks like a demilitarized zone. Then the strangest things start to happen. Ray begins to hear music in his head: glimpses of wonderful rock and roll recording sessions that never took place. He doesn't just hear the music - he re-creates it on his tape deck. With the help of the president of a maverick record company, legendary unrecorded albums like the Doors' Celebration of the Lizard and the Beach Boys' Senile become very real bootleg CDs that are transforming the present. Suddenly Ray is having what feels to him like real encounters with Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson, and others. As his marriage, his work, and even his sanity begin to unravel, Ray finds himself on a reckless quest to live the past as it has never been, to challenge the heroes of a generation to complete their masterpieces, and - finally - to confront the ghosts and demons within himself. Glimpses is a novel of music, of sexual obsession, and most of all, of self-discovery. Mixing historical fact, informed speculation and autobiography, it expands fiction into whole new dimensions of reality. Lewis Shiner's earlier novels have earned him a huge cult following. Now, by far his most ambitious book, this brilliantly original, deeply moving novel defines a generation and establishes him as one of the most important new voices in fiction.

Reviews

Can the 60's cure the 90's? That's what Texas stereo repairman Ray Shackleford struggles to prove in this strenuous fantasy of rock- and-roll hits that never were. Shortly after his unloving father drowns in Cozumel, Ray starts to imagine he's hearing impossible songtracks that he's able to record directly from his head. He takes his tape of the Beatles' never- recorded hit ``The Long and Winding Road'' to L.A. producer Graham Hudson, who's already remastered three volumes of Glimpses from rock's legendary past, and Graham persuades him to go after bigger game. So Ray travels back in time, changing history enough so that Jim Morrison can record Celebration of the Lizard and Brian Wilson can persist in his breakthrough album Smile. There's money to be made here, of course, but what Ray and Graham really want is to save the world by recalling the aging rock audience to its ardent roots. (Maybe a little too ardent, as when Ray wonders, ``Was it that way for everybody, music and sex and politics and love all inextricably part of each other, or is it just me?'') Trying to come to terms with his hated father's death, Ray takes time out to retrace his steps in Cozumel, attempting to re-create his own experience of the 60's more directly in 1989, but his romance with a diving instructor seems to open wide the rift in his ten-year marriage without giving him a satisfactory alternative, and he ends up repeating his father's experience instead of accepting it. So it's back to the past for one last try--with a Jimi Hendrix album that Ray hopes can keep the 60's from ending. As you'd expect from versatile fantasist Shiner (Slam, 1990, etc.), Ray's attempts to keep the faith by resurrecting Jimi and laying his own father to rest are powerfully affecting. Much more than yuppie reunions like The Big Chill, this captures a generation's sweet, desperate yearning for the 60's--though it ends up as authentically woolly as the period. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Shiner ( Slam , LJ 8/1/90, among others) has written what may be the first rock n roll time-travel novel. Ray Chackleford is a self-employed electronics repairman whose marriage is foundering and whose father has recently died. These unresolved relationships are complicated when Ray travels to the Mexican site of his father's death and promptly falls in love with a woman even more unstable than he. In the midst of this emotional turmoil, Ray--a rock drummer during his youth in the late Sixties--begins to hear in his head and manages to transfer to tape legendary unfinished recordings by Jim Morrison, Brian Wilson, and Jimi Hendrix. This music is accompanied by "journeys" into the troubled lives of these rock musicians. Shiner's appealing main character and his gripping style overcome the less believable aspects of his story. With the current comeback of the Sixties, this novel should be widely popular.
- A.J. Wright, Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688124119
• ISBN 13: 9780688124113
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 331