Jill likes this folk song that is quite appropriate for our generation. The song, written and sung by a Gen Xer, tells about how all the Baby Boomers tell her that "it must be sad to have been born a little late." Being born late, the Gen Xer missed out on so much: the Summer of Love, Peace Marches, etc. The Gen Xer thinks this is a load of crap and wishes the Baby Boomers would just get over it (and grow up, for chrissakes). I've expressed a similar sentiment before in these pages, but directed at the generation before the Boomers and their fixation on the crash of the American Pie and the loss of Valens, et al. So when I say that I found this Boomer book--about how the music and culture of their collective childhood was so great--fabulous, you know that it faced a tough audience.Glimpses does not hide the fact that it is about the 60s and rock music (given the demographics of the population, probably wise--there are a lot more reminiscing Boomers than fed-up Xers), and I likely took my time turning to it because it wore its influences on its jacket. I bought the book when it came out because I knew Lew Shiner from Austin and had all his other books. Lew's previous novels are kind of a mixed bag. His first, Frontera, was published by Baen, not your usual source for quality literature, and while enjoyable enough at the time, I'm not sure that Frontera has weathered quite as well as its cyberpunk contemporaries. In his second novel, Deserted Cities of the Heart, Lew's style and subject matter improved tremendously. In my internal cataloging schema, I tend to group Deserted Cities of the Heart with Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After and Karen Joy Fowler's Artificial Things. See the paradigm shift: from Cyberpunk to feminism in one novel. Deserted Cities of the Heart was still genre, however, and Lew totally dispensed with that in his third novel, Slam. It's not quite correct, but the voice in my head associates Slam with the line in Michelle Shocked's "Anchorage" that goes "what's it like being a skate-boarding punk rocker." The writer's progress in the three novels is readily apparent, and I liked each succeeding book much more than its predecessors. But there was still that jacket painting of Jim Morrison, Brian Wilson and Jimi Hendrix prompting the irrational knee-jerk response.Several things finally broke through my resistance, including Glimpses winning the World Fantasy Award, unsolicited comments and recommendations for the book from several First Impressions and Rondua members, and then it appeared in the middle of all the Anthony Powell that Alexandria Digital Literature recommends that I read. A long plane trip to New Jersey was the final straw.I started reading it hesitantly, then slowly relaxed and started enjoying it rather than dreading it. By the time I got to page 50 I had to close the book and let the wave of "good vibrations" flow over me before continuing. It did not matter that I had waited three years before reading this--everything was alright in the world because I was only a sixth of the way into a book that I knew was my type of novel and I did not have to worry about stopping reading for at least 2,000 miles.Glimpses is about the late 60s, but it is much more about the late 80s and one man's relation to both decades, his father, and his wife. Ray Shackleford repairs stereos in Austin, his father has just died, and he is starting to realize that his marriage is falling apart and that he is an alcoholic. Escaping from it all, he sits in his repair shop imagining what things would be like if things had been different. If he could have understood his father. If the Beatles had not broken up. If that aborted session that would have been their last studio album had actually come about. And then there it is, coming from his radio: "The Long and Winding Road." But not the over-produced, orchestrated version that we are familiar with, but a more basic version. Something that was not supposed to exist.It is a fantasy novel, no doubt about that, but the ready acceptance of the fantastic by the characters means Glimpses is more kin to Jorge Luis Borges or Jonathan Carroll (i.e., magic realism) than Raymond Feist or David Eddings. While the fantastic elements are fun and Shiner does a superb job of re-creating the atmospheres of the recording sessions, it is Ray, his friendships, and his family relationships that drive you to keep reading. Before you are halfway through this novel, you want happiness for Ray, but know that there will be a lot of pain and suffering before he will achieve peace. And you know that his power to re-create music that never was will be as much a danger to him as a gift.Glimpses has my highest recommendation, and given a sufficient waiting period, will likely be on my list of Top 10 favorite novels.
GLIMPSES was Lewis Shiner's 4th novel, published in 1993. The protagonist, Ray, a late 30s ex-drummer and now full time musical equipment repair guy discovers that he has the ability to imagine music that might have been, but never was, and not only get it to play out of a stereo system, but actually be recorded. When he plays a recording of "The Long and Winding Road" the way if would have sounded before Phil Spector got his hands on the master tapes for the owner of a Rhino Records type company that releases old bootlegs and rare outtakes and the like from 1960s era bands, he gets talked into trying to first recreate the rumored but never actually recorded "Celebration of the Lizard" by the Doors. There is a segment on Brian Wilson's begun in 1966 but then abandoned "Smile", and a final one about Jimi Hendrix's "The First Rays of the New Rising Sun. In between and at the end there is a lot of not particularly interesting stuff about Ray's relationships with his father, mother, wife and past and present girlfriends.The writing is OK but not particularly poetic and the pacing is best described as languid. If one is interested in the history of the Doors, Beach Boys and Jimi they will probably like this novel. The Brian Wilson segment is the best (and also the weirdest, as Ray time travels back to 1966 and Brian's Hollywood mansion a lá the movie "Somewhere in Time"), and the Hendrix segment the weakest (perhaps because I cared the most about it and as a 60 year old guitarist, knew more about Hendrix's music and life than I did about the Doors or the Beach Boys).And, being written in 1992 or 1993, the author could not have anticipated that "Smile" would actually have been completed by Brian Wilson in 2004, and "First Rays of the New Rising Sun" compiled and released in the late 1990s, followed by a Spector-removed version of "Let itBe". None is very much as described in the novel but one can hardly fault the author for that. Music fans like me who were there when this all went down might like it or not, depending on their degree of familiarity with the source material, but I think that the best audience might be the next generation who heard about these bands but were not there when they were playing live and who didn't grow up steeped in 1960s rock and roll culture.Not bad, especially for the price, but not awesome either. It was OK.J.M. Tepper
Do You like book Glimpses (2001)?
Plot Summary: Man discovers that he can "create" rock albums as they should have been (instead of as they are) at a time when his life seems to be coming unglued. He was a teenager in the 1960's, when rock was still young and exciting and not-yet commercialized. Rock and roll adventures ensue. This book is well-written. The research is detailed, but the details don't overwhelm the story. The main character (Ray) is human and flawed and still sympathetic. I think someone who loves rock music would enjoy the hell out of reading this. I'm not a huge fan of music, and I still loved it. The book is a product of its time in some ways. It was written at the tail end of the 1980's when the people who'd cut their teeth in the Nixon adminstration were back in charge. Being a child of the cynical 90's and two Depression babies, I had a trouble sympathizing with Ray's crises, but the emotions were believeable, and the writing is so good and the characters so engaging, I was engrossed the whole way through.
—Melinda
Lewis Shiner has written a great American Rock 'n Roll novel. Honestly, it was hard to get into as the pacing is a little awkward, but chalk this to the backbeat and keep pressing forward. Ray Shackleford has attained the ability to step back in time to music that was and tweak it to the greatness it deserved and could have been. He develops this ability shortly after a spiritual catharsis where he has to deal with his wounds and trauma of life - alcoholic abusive father, father's death, codependent mother, and more. It is a shamanic journey of messy spirituality in all the glory of Sex, Drugs and Rock'n Roll. . Only a healthy dash of The Beatles, The Doors, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and Hendrix can push Ray to the spiritual transformation he so desperately needs.
—David Sellers
This may be one of the oddest books I've ever read...and yet I liked it very much. This is the second of Shiner's novels I read and again, just like in "Say Goodbye" an honest sentimentality underlies the entire story.If you love good literature or are looking for a fascinating story...I'm not sure how you'd feel about this work. Truckloads of metaphors are pretty much dumped onto it's pages. It gets weird at times, airy and light at others. The books real charms come in the glimpses we get of classic rock legends.If you're a fan of classic rock or a fan of The Beach Boys, Doors, Jimi, or to a lesser extent the Beatles, this is a must read.
—Mark
