Stone ArabiaA Novel

A first rate rock ‘n’ roll novel, and an ode to family
Dana Spiotta’s third novel is, among other things, a poignant ode to the act of writing and the ways we document the events of our lives. Set in Los Angeles in the middle of the last decade, it tells the story of Nik Worth, a prolific and talented musician who spends his life on the outskirts of the industry. It turns out Nik, now approaching 50, had a chance to make it big decades ago. But in place of that elusive record deal, Nik turns his obsessive documentation of his career — journal entries, letters, press clippings — into a fictional account of what could have been, achieving through his imagination what he couldn’t achieve in real life. The Chronicles, as they’re called, support the art and vice versa: Experimenting in different genres and founding homemade record labels, Nik also creates volumes of fake album reviews and a variety of dramatic yarns to go alongside his massive oeuvre. To add to the intrigue, it’s only through the book’s narrator, Nik’s younger sister Denise, that we get to experience the Chronicles. Her documentation of Nik is a second purview woven through his.

The Chronicles are quite a feat. What Nik writes might be fictional (and, when juxtaposed with reality, depressing), but in his creation of another life richer and more public than his actual one, he holds a certain power, a control over his existence. Denise, meanwhile, is an ex-bad actress who feels her life’s destiny is to “witness and witness and stupidly survive.” She is preoccupied with other people: Nik, her daughter Ada and strangers, particularly the subjects of headline-making tragedies — murder-suicides, abductions and the like. College-age Ada is also transfixed by Nik, and soon enough the three of them have added a third layer to the story, a documentary film created by Ada about her uncle’s life in the musical margins.

Listeners will find Nik as utterly fascinating as Denise and Ada do, owing to the verisimilitude of this eccentric yet charming character. Stone Arabia is an ode to family, to the people in our lives we never don’t know — “no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,” as Denise puts it. But it is also a first-rate rock ‘n’ roll novel. Spiotta was as meticulous and inspired as Nik when she dreamed up a fake life for this die-hard musician, a true artist who finds a strange and beautiful way of sublimating that very human desire to stand out in the crowd.