The Music of Your Life
John Rowell
John Rowell's debut collection of seven tales featuring theatrically bent Southerners fizzes with poignant emotion and pungent humor. For each of Rowell's sweet, starry-eyed protagonists, a mixture of small town values and showbiz dreams yields a psychological cocktail potent in both its balm and its bite.
In the title story, effectively narrated in the second person and set in the late 1960s, a precocious 10-year-old North Carolina boy is smitten with the anachronistic glamour of television's Lawrence Welk show and with the notion of his parents' relationship as an endless real-life dream date. As the lad re-enacts interviews he's seen on The Mike Douglas Show and presents living-room cabaret acts to disappointingly hesitant applause from his father, many readers will identify with the blurry anxiety of a pre-pubescent gay boy who knows himself only subconsciously while those around him are already beginning to draw more pointed conclusions. The poor kid is naturally campy, without the self-conscious armor of air-quotes to protect him.
"Spectators in Love" finds another boy, Hunter memorizing the lyrics to the Mary Poppins soundtrack to help him better connect with the movie, then years later, as a grown-up getting Julie Andrews' autograph when she stars in Victor/Victoria on Broadway. Between these two events, he attends college to study acting and falls for an experimenting straight boy who goes on to become a movie actor, while Hunter goes on to become a Manhattan film critic. It's a sharply rendered, highly romanticized portrait of self-pity with an 'always the bridesmaid, never the bride' melancholy that's reprised in all of the collection's stories (quite literally in "The Mother-of-the-Groom and I," which finds the narrator cruising a mall while helping his mother buy a dress for his brother's wedding).
It's this indelible, insistent refrain that both points to Rowell's great promise and weakens the impact of the collection as a whole. The stories span the decades from Photoplay to Entertainment Weekly brilliantly incorporating essential pop-cultural details, but their narrative voice is very much the same. Its almost impossible not to imagine the film critic, Hunter, in "Spectators..." as a grown up version of the title story's main character. Yet because Rowell gives the gay male character at the center of each tale a different name—despite their similar personalities and longings—he can't help but come off as a bit of a Johnny One-Note, even if he does have perfect pitch.
Rowell's overarching vision is rich enough—and his memory so chock full of piercing pinpoint images—that any one of these stories could likely have be expanded (or several combined) to form a novel or novella that would have avoided the impression of repetition that comes from presenting these seven stories back-to-back. Ultimately, though, this is more of a publishing problem than a writing problem; some latitude must be given. Rowell undoubtedly set out to write individual stories, not to author a story collection, and if savored singly rather than taken in as a seven track album, each tale in The Music of Your Life hums with a satisfying life of its own.
