Dana Spiottahandout
What's it like to be the sister of an eccentric genius, or possibly just an eccentric? Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta's third novel, offers some answers, and none is particularly happy. Denise Kranis loves her older brother Nik, a musician who has spent much of his life doing anything but living an ordinary life. Highly imaginative and wildly impractical, Nik spends his life doing as he pleases, and most of his time is devoted to the creation and documentation of that life. As he tells his sister Denise, "Self-curate or disappear."
Nik makes music, and while his group, the Demonics, almost makes it big, Nik's real focus is utter devotion to his "Chronicles" and his one-man CD series, The Ontology of Worth. He starts with Vol. 20 and over the years, as he gets closer to Vol. 1, Denise realizes that significant change is imminent. Unlike Denise, Nik has never given up the excesses of their youth. He drinks and smokes, and to her credit, Denise knows she cannot change him. She lends him money and knows that getting it back is beyond unlikely, but she wants to help him.
Other key figures in the novel are the siblings' mother, who is suffering from dementia, and Ada, Denise's adult daughter. Spiotta blends memory, both the loss of it and the creation of it, within the family circle and the larger public world, and provokes queries about what is real and worthwhile. Nik's labour-intensive output (including handmade covers for his CD series, which all combine to form a self-portrait) makes him no money, but he doesn't care. It's the purity of the creation that matters, even if much of the creation is a fiction: fake CD reviews and rumours of what happened to Nik, circulated by Nik on the Internet, for example. Nik's family worries about him, but he just goes along, working at a bar and making his art.
The structure of the novel plays with the idea of form, and the self-reflexiveness is like Nik's life's work: fascinating and fatally precious. For example, at one point, the third-person narrator, a version of Denise, comments: "She was going about this all wrong – sequential, linear, chronological. From day to day. There were other ways, other connections that were maybe deeper, other ways of ordering and contemplating and telling and showing." The narrative switches to first-person (Denise) and then switches back. The destabilizing effect of the multiple switches in point of view (add in excerpts from Nik's Chronicles, writing by Nik pretending to be Denise and various interviews, among other narrative strategies) tends to be confusing and even annoying. The language isn't compelling enough to withstand the tension created by the fragmented narrative.
And that's too bad, because the basic idea is engaging, and the flow of U.S. news and popular culture situates the novel firmly in time and place: Los Angeles from about 1972 to 2006. But the narrative complications are overdone and result in a sense of flailing instead of textured layers of memory-making and revelations. And it's always a challenge to be told a character has great talent and be unable to hear it.
Spiotta's first two novels, Lightning Field and Eat the Document, garnered much acclaim. Stone Arabia has glimmers of promise, but overall it's a forced effort pushing the promise just out of reach.
Candace Fertile teaches at Camosun College in Victoria.