Dana Spiotta's "Stone Arabia": A Quick Review

Just finished reading Dana Spiotta's new novel Stone Arabia.  Fantastic read, a bit on the brief side (I finished it in two days), but it does what it needs to do.  Set mainly in Los Angeles in the mid 00's, the story centers on Denise Worth, a middle-aged divorcee dealing with mounting debt, a dead-end job, and a mother suffering from the initial stages of Alzheimer's, and her brother Nik, an immensely prolific, idiosyncratic, and utterly unknown musician whose health is deteriorating after years of hard living.  After a brush with a record deal in the late 70's, Nik retreats from any public mention of his music, yet he continues to hand-produce not only scores of albums by various "bands" that no longer exist (on fictional record labels of his own design), but an entire world of press releases, record reviews (with varying degrees of praise and condemnation for his work), and artist interviews, all of them staged.  He calls the project the Chronicles, and the massive contours and intricacies of the dozens of volumes eventually form a type of alternate history of his life crafted totally in isolation: no one apart from a small handful of family members and friends knows of their existence.  And while Nik spends years meticulously arranging a separate narrative of his own life, he and Denise's mother is literally losing her mind as she slips further into dementia, releasing her hold on her own identity as her memories dissolve.  This leaves Denise in the middle to witness her family falling apart, and to try and situate her own self in light of her growing sensitivity to the isolation and pain of modern existence, and the converse realization that every day is truly its own reward.  When Denise's only daughter Ada, a young filmmaker living in New York City, decides to try and make a documentary about Nik's carefully created alter-existence, the project brings a lifetime of issues to a head, for all involved.  The novel is a powerful commentary on relationships, change, identity, and the perseverance of creativity in the face of the end that awaits us all.

In Stone Arabia, Spiotta manages to ask some fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of identity and self through these troubled characters, as she uses the relationships and storylines of the novel to reveal an undercurrent of hopelessness and futility running straight through the mainline of modern life.  But all dark spots have their more illumined edges, and the relationships in the novel end up constituting what truly matter, as painful and difficult as they may be.  Spiotta doesn't attempt to answer any of the questions she poses, but who can really answer them anyhow?  Rather we see the sometimes frayed bonds between the members of a family and most of all the manner in which these bonds both shield us and cut us off from the world outside.  The writing style is accessible and bright, and often deceptively short-winded.  There's a lot to unravel in this novel. 

One of the things I found most salient is the undercurrent surrounding Nik's artistic output.  Nik's dedication and creativity coupled with his outright denial of the 'proper' artistic channels, even going so far as to create decades of art in total obscurity, brings up a lot of issues that fascinate me about 'outsider art' in particular.  The book has Nik mention that he might be remembered as a Henry Darger type character (the reclusive janitor discovered to have been a prolific writer and artist upon his death--see the recent documentary Into the Realms of the Unreal), further pointing to Spiotta's own interest in these topics.  I've always been invested in these issues, and in the processes involved in completely and willfully removing oneself from the artistic mainstream (for the record, one might note here that the record label moniker I've been using on my hand-distributed discs over the past 12 years or so is a totally fictional entity, among other things I've often claimed, though all the music is real).  There was a lot that hit home for me about what makes art personal and what makes it public, and how it relates so intimately with the personality of the artist, as well as larger forays into notions of integrity and realism in a sphere (mainstream music) so fraught with fakes, ego, and general soul-destroying bullshit of all stripes.  But that's another post altogether.

A side-note: I would be surprised if Spiotta didn't base at least some small part of Nik's character on the whole Jandek spectacle of some years past (see previous post "Jandek Eschews Obfuscation in Austin").  The similarities are too close: Nik produces well over 30 or 40 albums in complete obscurity, never plays live, and manages to create a whole alter-ego for himself that is really just a mildly distorted picture of his own life, had he perhaps made different choices earlier on.  The novel is even set at the same time that Jandek was emerging from self-imposed obscurity to a fanbase just as interested in the amazing oddity of the story than in the music itself.  I first heard of Stone Arabia via a recent interview that Spiotta did with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air", in which she mentioned that part of Nik's character was also inspired by her uncle, an LA musician in the 1970's and 80's with the punk band Village.  According to Spiotta, Richard (her uncle) eventually took an approach similar to Nik's, creating a whole legend about himself as a recognized musician despite the fact that he had officially stopped performing decades before.  (In a side note, Richard's band Village was featured (briefly) in the scene at the Roxy in Cheech and Chong's 1978 LA stoner classic Up In Smoke.  They had the song which I believe is called "Bi-School".)