Wonderfully written, a punk-rock novel of many intertwined lives, with lots of mistakes, growing up, and some redemption thrown in. It's probably good enough that even people who don't like music will like the book.
Read in Glen Arbor, MI
Quotes:
It began the usual way,
“Don’t you get it, Steph?” Bosco finally exploded. “That’s the whole point. We know the outcome, but we don’t know when, or where, or who will be there when it finally happens. It’s a Suicide Tour.”
Time’s a goon, right?
It was several weeks before the general’s picture appeared again. Now the hat was pushed back and the ties were gone. The headline read: EXTENT OF B’S WAR CRIMES MAY BE EXAGGERATED, NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?
Word had gotten out, and Dolly was deluged with offers of work from mass murderers hungry for a fresh start.
“That wasn’t me, in Naples,” she told you, looking out at the crowded bar. “I don’t know who it was. I feel sorry for her.”
“We’re going to meet again in a different place,” Bix says. “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.”
Because he never could quite forget that every byte of information he’d posted online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use it—that he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he’d felt most subversive?
Her confidence seemed more drastic than the outcome of a happy childhood; it was cellular confidence, as if Lulu were a queen in disguise, without need or wish to be recognized.
“I’m fine. I just get tired of talking.” “Ditto,” Alex said. He felt exhausted. “There are so many ways to go wrong,” Lulu said. “All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can’t ever just Say. The. Thing.”
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—“friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity,” “search,” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever
Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.
They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.” Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said, “just like the rest of us.”
th blu nyt
th stRs u cant c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy
A sound of clicking heels on the pavement punctured the quiet. Alex snapped open his eyes, and he and Bennie both turned—whirled, really, peering for Sasha in the ashy dark. But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.
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