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Stone Arabia

3.32 of 5 stars 3.32 · rating details · 1,459 ratings · 296 reviews

Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta’s moving and intrepid third novel, is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create—in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture.

In the sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,” says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationsh...more

Hardcover, 235 pages

Published July 12th 2011 by Scribner

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New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2011

30th out of 100 books — 41 voters

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Jun 14, 2012 Lou rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc, july-read

You will find in this novel some swell writing, the story flows well and touches many issues of the modern era. The protagonist Denise rambles on life, the bubble around her brother Nik the music artist and her mother Ada who is slowly heading down the Dementia road. The story includes real news headlines from timeline of 1978 to 2004 and the protagonists take on it and her heart felt view on matters. Lots of family stuff what could have been, what’s liked and disliked.

This book takes me back to...more You will find in this novel some swell writing, the story flows well and touches many issues of the modern era. The protagonist Denise rambles on life, the bubble around her brother Nik the music artist and her mother Ada who is slowly heading down the Dementia road. The story includes real news headlines from timeline of 1978 to 2004 and the protagonists take on it and her heart felt view on matters. Lots of family stuff what could have been, what’s liked and disliked.

This book takes me back to Freedom by Franzen, but Spiotta connects better with Denise’s plight and the world around her, philosophical, intelligent and witty. The book’s ending could be better but I think the writer knows better than me the plotting of her story. That brings on a thought can perfection lead to insanity if you don’t balance the scales in life.

Excerpts

“Written words demand the deep attention that spoken words just aren’t entitled to. Writers get to pull something solid out of our relentless, everyday production of verbal mucilage. A writer is a word salvager and scavenger and distiller.”

“I have discovered how much memory can dissolve under pressure. The more I try to hold on to my ability to remember, the more it seems to escape my grasp.

I find this terrifying. I have become alarmed at my inability to recall basic facts of the past, and I have worked to improve things. I have been studying various techniques and even tricks, and I should employ them. Memory, it seems, clings to things. Named things. Spaces. Senses.”

“I believe I know that photos have actually destroyed our memories. Every time we take a photograph, we forget to embed things in our minds, in our actual brain cells. The taking of the photograph gets us off the hook, in a way, from trying to remember. I’ll take a photo so I can remember this moment. But what you are actually doing is leaving it out of your brain’s jurisdiction and relying on Polaroid’s, Kodak paper, little disintegrating squares glued in albums.”

“When I think of my family, I think that our history really lives in our bodies. The mind distorts and fails, but the body endures until it doesn’t, and up until that moment it held it all. I knew that when she died, it would be her body I would remember, her physical presence, and to recall any part of her body her smell, her hair would make me weep and grieve for her.”

“The Beslan School broke her open, but what purpose did it serve? What was a person supposed to do with all of this feeling? Feeling nothing was subhuman, but feeling everything, like this, in a dark room in the middle of the night, by yourself, did no one any good. Certainly not Denise, who held her head and wept, and watched two hours of breaking, beating new coverage. Of children and blood and chaos. Each possibility, not feeling or feeling, each response was inadequate.

The worst part would come tomorrow, when they repeated these images over and over; or the day after, when the world out there would move to the next thing, the next terrifying and electrifying and stupefying thing. Are we supposed to forget? If not forget, then what?”

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Aug 24, 2012 Robert B rated it 4 of 5 stars

Dana Spiotta has been reading my mail and walking through my memories and dreams. Which is fine, really. She is most welcome.

Not since Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad has an author captured so much of what drew me and my crew to certain types of music when I was a kid. Three decades on, I've begun to realize I may never again feel such unfettered passion, but Stone Arabia comes tantalizingly close to revivifying some heady feelings. At times I could smell Aqua Net while I was readin...more Dana Spiotta has been reading my mail and walking through my memories and dreams. Which is fine, really. She is most welcome.

Not since Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad has an author captured so much of what drew me and my crew to certain types of music when I was a kid. Three decades on, I've begun to realize I may never again feel such unfettered passion, but Stone Arabia comes tantalizingly close to revivifying some heady feelings. At times I could smell Aqua Net while I was reading.

Upon finishing Stone Arabia - at 2 AM or so, because I could not put it down - I felt new life coursing through old friends and bandmates, most of whom, like me, did not get the brass ring. Some are dead, some simply broken, but a precious few, like Stone Arabia 's rock and roll hermit genius Nik Kranis (AKA Nik Worth) remain creative in the face of dashed hopes and dreams deferred. These are my people.

49-year-old Nik, however, who hasn't played a gig since 1979, is several cuts above in terms of his obsessive devotion; he makes music, yes, but he also creates an alternate universe in which he is a star. Nik's arc is wildly impressive, and not only includes many self-recorded/designed/released albums, but also reviews and interviews by journalists of Nik's own invention. One reviewer, in fact, loathes the work, and the pith and tone of the ersatz music journalism is, at times, hilarious. Yet, brilliant as he is, anti-digital Nik allows a scant few folks to actually hear his music and read the cut-and-paste scrapbooks he calls his Chronicles. Among them is his devoted little sister, 47-year-old single mom Denise, who narrates Stone Arabia.

Denise is as much a piece of work as Nik, and although the novel takes brief excursions into third person, we mostly experience Stone Arabia in Denise's head. The tone is both conversational and epistolary, with lengthy philosophical excusions bumping against brief emails, blog entries, and transcripts from Denise's 22-year-old daughter Ada's documentary about Nik.

As much as I latched on to Nik, the meat of the story is Denise's personal struggles, of which her increasingly remote, alcoholic brother is but one. Spiotta renders these trials with familiar ache, but also refreshing sucker-punch humor. Denise struggles with credit card debt (exacerbated by frequent loans to Nik) perimenopause, and an addiction to the 24-hour-news cycle. Plus, Nik and Denise's mom has Alzheimer's (deadbeat dad is long dead) and Denise herself is beginning to feel her own memory cracking beneath the weight of her years. Yet her recollections of both her and Nik's childhood, and then formative years as latchkey kids in glittery-then-punky Los Angeles, are vividly cinematic; the Kranis kids walk out of a screening of A Hard Day's Night and share amazement that the world is unchanged; teenage Denise obsesses over fey boys; at a disastrous pool party, young single mom Denise realizes, with horror, that she has gone from carefree to careless.

The rock & roll stuff is great, but Spiotta's multi-leveled depiction of a modern, albeit eccentric family is really the heart of the book. And it's a big, beating thing, that heart. We ride the emotional tides of daughters, siblings, girlfriends, parents; but through the disappointment, rage, anxiety, and irritation shines an abiding, treacle-free love. Spiotta reminds us that memories fade, people change, plans don't pan out, dreams die, fuck-ups accrue, but we all hope for love through it all. Stone Arabia spins that love around, surface noise and all.(less)

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Aug 09, 2011 Al rated it 2 of 5 stars

A weird thing happens a few times where a change in narrator (from 1st person to 3rd) is signaled by nothing more than a page break. It really threw me off the first time it happened.

I'm really surprised that some of the other negative reviews I've seen (on goodreads, anyway) direct their disdain primarily at the two main characters, who are apparently "losers". If being middle-aged, cash poor and lonely makes them losers, then sure, but how often is a compelling novel written about a "winner"?...more

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Sep 14, 2011 aPriL MEOWS often with scratching rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: why-does-everyone-love-this-ick-ick, literary

It misses on every level. Oh, there are paragraphs here and there of fine writing and phrases, there are the starts of intelligent explorations of memory, family, rock and roll musicians, holding on to love, but then phytttttt. It feels like a lit firecracker which unexpectedly goes out. It didn't go far enough with any theme or topic. This would have made a better short story.

My personal frustration built as I passed the middle of the book. Reading was like being on a treadmill, mileposts pass...more It misses on every level. Oh, there are paragraphs here and there of fine writing and phrases, there are the starts of intelligent explorations of memory, family, rock and roll musicians, holding on to love, but then phytttttt. It feels like a lit firecracker which unexpectedly goes out. It didn't go far enough with any theme or topic. This would have made a better short story.

My personal frustration built as I passed the middle of the book. Reading was like being on a treadmill, mileposts passed but no change. None of the characters stood out and seemed too ordinary for a book. No tension. Nothing happens. They wake up, go to work, drive home, call on each other and say hi, go home to bed, sleep. Done. Nic is a musician who apparently has spent decades making CDs for his family that consist of experimental sounds rather than music, which we can't hear since we are reading a book, which makes the pages referring to his music excruciatingly boring after the first five or so pages discussing it. His sister, Denise, appreciates Nik for 235 pages. Yawn. Denise is helping her mother through the middle stage of Early Onset Alzheimer's which is interesting but is only about 40 pages of the book and most indicative of the family losing itself through inertia and memory loss. Nik is a boring person. He never shows his work, never has a real job for long, has no family except Denise, her daughter Ava, and his mother. The book focus is on Nik, his Chronicles, which appear to be complete fiction and also boring since they are either slightly altered versions of his real life or made up PR releases which in real life everyone skips through. When is the last time you've read all the ads in a magazine? Probably when you were a kid and not so familiar with all the typical ad language. Well, that is exactly what half of Nic's chronicles consist of. Which means a third of this book is reading Rollingstone Magazine type ad copy or faked music reviews. Denise is deeply frightened by her mother's illness and her brother's poor health, since he hardly ever leaves his rented house, since all he does is make experimental sounds and fake ad copy, since he has no money. Denise thinks he's a genius (not that there is any proof of that in the book except Denise's feeling) and she's frightened that she will lose both her brother and mother, which means she won't have anyone in her life to have memories with. Both her mother, through her failing brain, and her brother, with his fake diaries, have been rewriting all of the real memories of Denise's life as it is.

What was the reason for writing this book? A book about a family of boring, do nothing, went nowhere, said nothing, met no one family that loves to admire the one brother who does the least of all except in his head? And all he does is experimental sounds we can't hear and ad copy he doesn't actually earn? If it's about family, yawn. Really too boringly done in this book, so boring I couldn't pick up any interesting story about this family. If it's about memory, that has been done already and much better elsewhere. If it's about creative process, there REALLY is only a hint of that. If it's about rock and roll, well, again there was a page or two and then it was done. About Denise, a character obsessed with her brother and fearful of losing her mother? So obsessed she lives through observing her brother and his 'art' and watching CNN in her spare time with great sobs? It sounds more interesting here than it did in reading it in the book.

For me, an utter waste of time. What am I missing?(less)

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Mar 08, 2012 Lisa Lewis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: just-plain-novels, musically-inclined

I don't usually take book recommendations from Spin magazine, but when I read a little piece in which Spiotta was interviewed along with "Visit from the Goon Squad" author Jennifer Egan, I decided to check out "Stone Arabia". I'm glad I did!
This is a book I wouldn't recommend to just everyone, but for me, it really struck a chord. A story about an eccentric musician/artist, told through the eyes of his sister, this book reminded me of people I have known in my life, and brought back feelings fr...more

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Aug 28, 2012 Lemar rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, 21st-century-fiction

So many human emotions and experiences are timeless but there is something about recent fiction that can further the intimate relationship between author and reader. Spiotta includes current phenomena like the crawl under the t.v. news and the emotions that brings as our brains are fed this diet rich in salaciousness. The main character Denise is with us on our long strange trip. Spiotta has the wonderful talent of telling a great story with deceptive ease. One has the deep literary enjoyment of...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Diane Gilbert-snyder rated it 5 of 5 stars

Let me say it upfront: I loved Stone Arabia. The story is creative, funny, and full of interesting insights on youth, aging, art, and life in our mediatized culture. The writing is full of clever “wordsmithing,” with delightful neologisms and original turns of phrase (“movie-drunk,” “strangled underlaugh,” “hyperpervious…”). But what I loved most is the book’s unusual structure, and the depth and originality of the main characters.
Spiotta structures the story around a mysterious crisis that is...more

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Feb 15, 2013 Cara rated it 3 of 5 stars

There are many things I like about this book: the subject matter of a brother-sister connection, dealing with memory loss in a non-linear way, and the way Spiotta creates a soundtrack to the novel. However, I found the characters hard to relate to, particularly Nik, and while I get this is the point, that he is a collage of fantasy, reality, branding, imagination, music mythology, Polaroid moments, I still found him disappointingly flat and distant at the end. This affected my feelings for Denis...more

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Dec 06, 2012 Tina rated it 2 of 5 stars

My professor assigned this book to our workshop class, and I kept hoping that by the time we had our discussion in class, I would finally understand the book. And I feel pretty terrible that the book didn't click with me, though I should say that several other classmates enjoyed the story. So this is just my personal opinion.
The sibling relationship in the story was unrealistic. I was surprised, since the tension at the beginning of the story made it seem like the two of them had the typical un...more

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Sep 24, 2012 Jennifer rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

Wishing (again) for a half star for 2.5!
This book is a weird mixture of interesting riffs (on family, memory, aging,etc), a boring plot (was there even a plot?), moments I could really identify with, and characters I didn't care at all about. The first three pages are filled with blurbs of praise from everyone from the NYT Book Review to Vogue which is why I decided to buy it at the airport yesterday to read during take off and landing - the time that I can't read the book I'd downloaded on to m...more Wishing (again) for a half star for 2.5!
This book is a weird mixture of interesting riffs (on family, memory, aging,etc), a boring plot (was there even a plot?), moments I could really identify with, and characters I didn't care at all about. The first three pages are filled with blurbs of praise from everyone from the NYT Book Review to Vogue which is why I decided to buy it at the airport yesterday to read during take off and landing - the time that I can't read the book I'd downloaded on to my Kindle. I wound up never powering on my Kindle. That sounds good, doesn't it? As though I couldn't stop reading this book. And while that is true, it's not the whole truth. This book left me completely flat and insanely curious about what all that hype was about. The story itself was not compelling and the characters were fairly bland and right out of central casting (the dependent aging alzheimer's mother, the unsuccessful down-and-out-rock-and-roller-in-midlife brother, the now-adult-aspiring-filmmaker-in-NYC daughter). But it was fast and flowed and always held a hint of something more meaningful lurking behind the next page turn.

The brother/sister relationship that is the heart of this book feels strangely underdeveloped. We hear a lot from Denise about their sibling bond with Nik: "knowing someone your whole life - no first impressions, no seduction, no getting to know each other. It is all know, at times too much know." And yet, I never really saw that bond between them, no matter how many times she told me it was there. Spiotta creates a certain mystique around Nik that was interesting and could have been explored even further. Denise creates a mythical aura around Nik and his music that no one will hear and his Chronicals that no one will read....and yet, when he appears he is an aging alcoholic bartender with gout who need food stamps to keep himself fed. Denise clings to this old image of her big brother even as she is writing checks to give him money she doesn't have. So while Nik is elusive, Denise is an enabler and the story is going no where, I still see this tidbit of something interesting that makes me hope there will be more if I just keep reading....

The plot was essentially dull nothingness so I have to assume that it was not Spiotta's point to tell a story so much as to give a framework to her thoughts about family and memory and what memories, how old photos become more memorable than the experiences themselves, and how losing one's memory can be a frightening thing. Denise's mother is slowing losing her memory and essentially losing her self, while Denise's brother Nik is creating his own self and his own memories in his fictional Chronicals that he tries to make realistic so that if anyone reads it years from now they will not be able to tell that it wasn't true. Meanwhile, her daughter is making a documentary of the family history which means stories from memories of the past. So are we our memories? Do they define who we truly are? Again - this review sounds deeper than it felt while I was reading it. I'm not even going to write about Denise's emotional obsession with the news because it just felt like filler rather than something that added to the book.(less)

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Jul 26, 2012 Margaret rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was marketed a bit like a designer imposter--if you liked A Visit from the Goon Squad, you'll love Stone Arabia: A Novel. I did not love Stone Arabia, but I also didn't read it. I listened to it, and like Goon, it's got some stories within stories, connections that become clearer later, and (I imagine) fancy-pants formatting from time to time, that make it worth paging through rather than listening to.

The novel explores the connections between the fantasy lives of two siblings, Nick and Den...more

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Jul 20, 2012 Lynn rated it 2 of 5 stars

I loved "Eat this Document," and was incredibly excited about "Stone Arabia" -- because it seemed to have received even more acclaim. But the book lacks nearly all of the tension of Spiotta's earlier novel. Because there was always real danger, real political passion, grief, regret, and deceit always in the background in "Eat this Document" -- the narrative could handle Spiotta's sometimes meandering style. In fact, the book seemed better because of that style. It seemed to hang together perfect...more

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May 21, 2012 Michelle rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book puzzled me a great deal. Some of the story was incredibly involving. I really felt for the narrator Denise, a 47 year old single mother with a daughter Ada in her twenties, a complicated relationship with her brother Nik and a mother suffering from dementia. The story talks often about memory, making such arguments as to how the internet has alleviated our need to remember small details but what we need to remember from our lives can not be found on the Internet. Denise wants to help N...more

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May 09, 2012 Tom Baker rated it 4 of 5 stars

There's an old, probably apocryphal story about JD Salinger that goes something like this: the famously reclusive writer one day encountered an acquaintance who asked if he had been writing anything. Of course I have, Salinger replied. Great, said the acquaintance, when will you be publishing it? And Salinger, as though his acquaintance had made the most outlandish suggestion imaginable, replied: "Publish it? What in the world for?"

Nik Worth, the focus of Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia, is somethin...more

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May 09, 2012 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars

A small novel--it's short, with basically two characters, though it does span some 40 years--that has plenty of meaty writing and interesting ideas, well expressed, about the nature of creativity and its relation to/reliance upon an audience, AND the ways in which memory forms and defines a person, and a life. Also: the meaning of family. And music. Which makes Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia sound all heavy and think-y, but it's not at all, really. Rather, this is a fast-paced, contemporary tale ab...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Stephanie added it

A resonant, intelligent novel by the author of Eat the Document about a woman's relationship with her brother, a reclusive musician who, as well as creating music, documents his work in "Chronicles" that include fictitious reviews, fanzines, etc. It resembles her previous book in a few plot details and in that it comes at its themes from different angles: here, memory and loss, the representation of reality, also empathy--I guess what it means to "know" something. I missed the more complex struc...more

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Nov 23, 2011 Joshua rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2011

Terribly titled novel set in Los Angeles and based around a brother and sister who are in their 40s as they take stock in their mostly unfulfilled lives. Brother is a musician who is lost in creating his own mythology that consumes him. Sister is the lifelong supporter who is wrapped up in his life while also wanting to be apart of her daughter's life as well. I didn't care for STONE ARABIA early on, but it kind of grew on me as it ebbed on. There's something appealing to "Nick" and his refusal...more

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Oct 25, 2011 Jim Braly rated it 3 of 5 stars

Nik Worth, an isolated, aging, reclusive rock-and-roller/balladeer, chronicles his imaginary life fastidiously and obsessively. I began to see "Stone Arabia" as a metaphor for the Facebook generation. Am I famous yet? No? Check my latest status update, No. 345. How about now? Are you following me on Twitter? #moreme . . . Whether that was Dana Spiotta's intent, I have no idea. Perhaps that means the novel is art, invitingly open to the reader's interpretation.

Adding another level to the introsp...more

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Sep 05, 2011 Carol rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you are going to write a book about Los Angeles, and the city will be, even in some small way, a theme in your writing, you are going to have to convince me to stick with you. The winner and still champ-peen of the Los Angeles novel is Joan Didion's "Play it As it Lays." Didion drove the highways first, both lamented and soaked up the colors and light first, and got the best of the pre-War on Drugs meds stash. (Please note here that I don't read noir or mystery, so I can't speak to how these...more If you are going to write a book about Los Angeles, and the city will be, even in some small way, a theme in your writing, you are going to have to convince me to stick with you. The winner and still champ-peen of the Los Angeles novel is Joan Didion's "Play it As it Lays." Didion drove the highways first, both lamented and soaked up the colors and light first, and got the best of the pre-War on Drugs meds stash. (Please note here that I don't read noir or mystery, so I can't speak to how these genres treat Kaleefornia.)

It takes a lot to convince me that I should invest time in yet another tale of the superficial vacuity of a centerless, sun-raked place. We Americans make a deal with California -- we whisper to it that this is the farthest we can run so we'll turn you into a company town while you let us go on bumping our asses into our own limitations.

This deal, like all deals in America, only works for a tiny minority. Luckily for the same industry that supports the place, the deal goes sour more than it pays.

In Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta almost succeeds in making me care about a woman and her brother and her daughter who carefully cultivate the brother's legend-in-his-own-mind status as an outsider musician. Nik Worth was supposed to be the Next New Thing coming out of LA in 1979 but the deal, surprise, fell apart. Now, he lives in a rundown apartment in Topanga Canyon making albums and writing his life story for an audience of 50, or maybe 10, or maybe 3.

His niece, in her attempt to make a film about her uncle, begins asking uncomfortable questions. Her uncle is turning 50, and this milestone, along with Nik's sister Diana's addition to cable news sob stories means the grownups are dodging the task of sharing their histories with the filmmaker, even as you suspect neither has much history to hide.

I picked up this book because I like stories of people reinventing themselves -- but Spiotta seems to fall back on the well-trod ideas of LA as a place where most everybody is just out of reach: of their dreams, of a manageable commute, of paying all the bills on time.

I did appreciate Spiotta's fragmented yet conversational style. She turned the plot into just enough of a mosaic to make me work at it but not enough that I had to stop and ponder what she just told me.
(less)

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Sep 01, 2011 Jen added it

Shelves: 2011

Middle-aged siblings Denise and Nik are "alternative versions" of the same person; she is too open to the outside world and can't stop watching the news, becoming obsessed with world events, while he draws inward, writing a fictional memoir in which he became a rock star instead of a brilliant but obscure musician. She discards her life's detritus without a second thought, while he archives and hoards. She feels the pain of strangers on television; he cares only about himself. As Denise and Nik...more

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Aug 14, 2011 Jennyreadsexcessively rated it 5 of 5 stars

Denise and her older brother Nik grew up in the Los Angeles rock and roll scene of the 70's and 80's. Now middle-aged, Denise lives alone and agonizes over her obsession with stories of suffering on the cable news channels and her own perceived memory loss. Nik, who experienced limited success with his rock band experimentations in his youth, has spent his adult life in relative solitude chronically his music and songwriting that he produces solely for his sister and only a handful of others. Ni...more

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Jul 24, 2011 Larry Hoffer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Dana Spiotta's third novel is a sometimes moving, poetic story about family, fame, memory, fear of loss and obsession—and how each can take their toll on life.

Nik Worth, born Nicholas Kranis, was a musician on the fringes of celebrity in the late 1970s. After his period of minor fame passed, he continued making music under the guise of several fictional bands (and record labels)—and obsessively building a fictional chronicle of his career, authoring myriad reviews, fan magazine interviews, news...more

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Jul 23, 2011 christa rated it 4 of 5 stars

In the winter of 2007 my boyfriend and I invented a game called "Let's just see where the day takes us." This would start with taking a bus downtown and end 18 hours later passed out in a stony booze coma, snoring out a toxic mix of carbon dioxide and alcohol fumes. A few days ago he found photographic evidence of one of those days. The shots taken early in the night are quiet and abstract: a series of match books lined up on the counter of the bar, a pint of beer, candid portraits before our fa...more

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Sep 23, 2012 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a story of a brother and sister born in the 1950s who grew up at the peak of 1960s - 70s rock and roll, and are in 2006 are close to fifty years old. The brother, Nik, is or was a sometime rock musician, played in some bands, but found a calling as a songwriter. His sister, Denise, has been the caretaker, at least in an emotional sense, of Nik, their mother, and her daughter, essentially as her main occupation for most of her life. About the time that Nik did not make it as a musician is...more This is a story of a brother and sister born in the 1950s who grew up at the peak of 1960s - 70s rock and roll, and are in 2006 are close to fifty years old. The brother, Nik, is or was a sometime rock musician, played in some bands, but found a calling as a songwriter. His sister, Denise, has been the caretaker, at least in an emotional sense, of Nik, their mother, and her daughter, essentially as her main occupation for most of her life. About the time that Nik did not make it as a musician is when he started documenting his faux life as a songwriter/musician, writing his Chronicles, which include items such as album covers, reviews, fan letters, and the like, but also includes all the original music that he has never played publicly - each album is released only to a limited group of family and friends.
I find this is a story that is about trying to capture genius, reminiscent in that sense of The Moon and Sixpence, The Aspern Papers, and Orhan Pamuk's Snow (about a poet and poetry created while being snowbound in eastern Turkey) and is fascinating as such - would be great to hear the music and read the Chronicles. The story is also complicated by the fact that it is not clear what of the book is The Chronicles, and what is Denise's story, as part of the Chronicles includes fictional documents for Denise. At some point I will need to read this again to try to sort this out.
Another source of interest is hearing voices of people who are now older - Denis is concerned about losing her memory, and is questioning and challenging whether memories can be captured or enhanced by say photographs, which finally seem to be their own story rather than a memory assist, since a story is only remembered the way the photograph shows. (Nik, of course, has been carefully documenting non-existent memories for most of his life.) The contrast between being teenaged and middle-aged is well captured : "I had, in middle age, become a person whose deepest emotional moments happened vicariously (watching human interest stories on the TV). Which reminds me again of my preteen years. How then I also lived through others, how I was dominated by fantasy."
this is a very quick read, a page-turner, and is well worth reading.(less)

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Apr 30, 2012 Kate rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-reading

I really liked this book and want to give it four stars, but I'd rather give it three and a half, can't (c'mon, goodreads, give us half stars!), and am not in the rounding-up mood. I saw a lot of strange parallels here and that drew me to Denise. I very often worry about strangers when they appear they could use a helping hand. Maybe I'm nice like she's nice. I think mostly what made Denise compelling is what made her seem so totally vulnerable - who the heck is she? There is zero autonomy in he...more

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Dec 16, 2011 Jill rated it 5 of 5 stars

What is the worth of art, memory, or life itself? In this intelligently rendered novel, Dana Spiotta, a meditation-of-sorts on the quest for stardom, she carefully deconstructs the concept of what is valuable and how we strip down to reveal our true identities.

Outside artist Nik Worth – appropriately named – is an aging non-starter rock ‘n’ roller, a legend in his own mind, who has spent his lifetime pursuing art for art’s sake. “I grew up to like not having an audience,” he reveals. “Imagine be...more What is the worth of art, memory, or life itself? In this intelligently rendered novel, Dana Spiotta, a meditation-of-sorts on the quest for stardom, she carefully deconstructs the concept of what is valuable and how we strip down to reveal our true identities.

Outside artist Nik Worth – appropriately named – is an aging non-starter rock ‘n’ roller, a legend in his own mind, who has spent his lifetime pursuing art for art’s sake. “I grew up to like not having an audience,” he reveals. “Imagine being freed from sense and only having to pursue pure sound. Imagine letting go of explanations, of misinterpretations, of commerce and receptions.” At another point, he muses, “Do you need an audience to crate work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?” Nik has spent his so-called career pursing that question and creating a sometimes true, sometimes false history in his written work, The Chronicles, filled with self-written reviews and interviews.

Denise, his sister, has remained faithful to Nik; indeed, she is his number one fan. While she is his cheerleader, he is her alter ego. In important ways, they channel the other; she reconstructs his last year and he takes on her voice in certain entries in The Chronicles. In ways, they each rely on each other to provide structure for the other’s sense of self.

In many ways, Denise remains disengaged from day-to-day feelings; instead, she is consumed by salacious stories – murders and other human misfortunes – that she views on the nightly news. “Let’s call them breaking events. I don’t mean breaking news. I mean breaking of boundaries.” She is the keeper of her brother and also of her aging mother, whose memory seems to be unraveling more and more each day. Some of the most poignant passages of this book appear in the reinterpreting of the relationship between mother and daughter as the mother’s own grasp of reality.

This intrepid novel – about inventing and reinventing ourselves, adjusting our memories to passing time, and creating real and faux windows into our lives through journals, computers, and the ceaseless onslaught of TV news-entertainment, raises deep and provocative questions. It is not a book for everyone but for those who are willing to surrender to it, it is filled with thoughtful insights about the creation and endurance of art (less)

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Jul 18, 2011 Yvonne rated it 2 of 5 stars

There are points in this book where I was so frustrated with the clunky attempts at post-post-modern structure games that I had to put it down. Reading through all the positive reviews of this work, I almost feel I must've read a different book. This is not a "rock'n'roll" novel but instead a mish-mash of prose about two sad people living pathetic lives. There's little here that's compelling although the character "Nik" has his moments. The forced connections between the narrator Denise's obsess...more

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Sep 05, 2012 Caitydid rated it 3 of 5 stars

Dana Spiotta's quick, nostalgic novel Stone Arabia about aging, memory and forgetting, and the punk and post-punk music scene of the 70's and 80's boasts an impressive pack of praise from critics, authors, and appropriately enough, our buddy Thurston Moore. It's a story about stories, and the narrator Denise (whom we can only assume is a stand-in for Spiotta herself) relies on the drama and creativity of others to tell her story. Denise, a neurotic, tired and sensitive middle-aged mother, obses...more Dana Spiotta's quick, nostalgic novel Stone Arabia about aging, memory and forgetting, and the punk and post-punk music scene of the 70's and 80's boasts an impressive pack of praise from critics, authors, and appropriately enough, our buddy Thurston Moore. It's a story about stories, and the narrator Denise (whom we can only assume is a stand-in for Spiotta herself) relies on the drama and creativity of others to tell her story. Denise, a neurotic, tired and sensitive middle-aged mother, obsesses over the news on tv, cares for her mother, who is slowly declining into an Alzheimer's confusion, keeps a youthful bond with her young adult daughter, and finds herself tangled in the self-abusive and compulsive inner world of her brother, Nik. Nik is an aging rock star, or would be, but when he failed to find success in the music world of reality, he retreated to a made-up fantasy of fame and it's foibles. The Chronicles, a decades-long project created by Nik for seemingly no other audience than his own destroyed ego, documents years of fake bands, fake fame, even fake downfalls. Denise's daughter Ada, a happy-go-lucky blogger and indie filmmaker, is inspired by her eccentric uncle to make a documentary about him and his prolific outsider art projects.
Spiotta's writing deserves, in it's most thoughtful, unembellished moments, the praise it has garnered from critics. The character of Denise is so worried, by her Mother's mental decline, her brother's physical decline, and her own hypochondria that it's tiresome, but it's also out of these neuroses that the occasional passage of brilliant, emotionally affecting writing is hewn. The book has been compared, with it's obvious parallels in the topics of aging and rock stardom, to Jennifer Egan's Visit From the Goon Squad. That book was also critically praised, and won the national book award in 2010, but many of the problems I had with Goon Squad are revisited in Spiotta's Stone Arabia. It may be an unfair bias of my own, but whenever I'm reading a novel and 'myspace pages' or 'googling health symptoms' and the like come up, it's a huge turn-off. The world of the internet, celebrities, and tv are so plastic and stagnant compared to the visceral emotions I expect from a good novel. Don't we get enough of that in our own lives? Reading a good book sinks you into another mindset, another life, and as Spiotta remarks in one of her lovelier passages, art provides us with a reflection of ourselves and in doing so, shows us that we are not alone, no small feat. Yet Stone Arabia throws us into these sensitive, artful moments and then startlingly pulls us out again with irritating pettiness. Denise's sleepless news-watching obsession, recounting true new stories from 2003-4, is frankly boring. Many of us share this somewhat morbid voyeuristic tendency, but reading about someone else watching the news and crying over a child's kidnapping provides no interest or insight beyond a vague 'yep, I do that too.' The hubbub over a certain young army soldier and her horrifically-posed photos with tortured Guantanamo Bay inmates was an overcooked spectacle then, and reading several pages of Denise reflecting over this news item in particular felt like incredibly lazy writing. Dana Spiotta proves herself a much more competent, worthwhile writer in other parts of the book, but her reliance on the action and drama of external stories, instead of her own, seems careless. Near the end of the book, Denise wonders if she might be a 'pain tourist', a great term for the problem with her character. Indeed, the one narrative yarn that promises us some sort of climactic rise and fall is so worked over throughout the entire book that it's hardly a surprise, hardly of interest.
Still, the best bits of Stone Arabia nearly make up for it's unfortunate doldrums, and I would still consider it worth reading, especially if you are interested in the post-punk music scene, or lived through it. There are pages that qualify it for the praise it's been given, and I was at times moved by the echoes in my own life of Denise's relationship with her daughter and with her elderly mother. The story of Nik's bizarre compulsion to create a faux-stardom for himself with his 'Chronicles' wants to be as odd and compelling as the true story of Henry Darger and his outsider art, but it falls flat with narcissism and a lack of imagination. In the end, the writing and characters were just enough for me to plug through to the end, and not regret it, but had it not been a quick read, it would've been left unfinished on the subway and not worth the space on my bookshelf.(less)

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Jul 29, 2011 Tess Malone rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is the last time I read a 235 page novel because I liked a 3-sentence quotation from it I happened to see online. I enjoyed this quotation because Spiotta's writing is reflective, astute, and honest. Unfortunately she puts this voice into the character of Denise, a horribly neurotic middle aged loser who lives her life vicariously through the fictional lives of others. She is so close to her older brother, Nik, a failed rocker, that both of them refer to each other as their other half. Nik...more

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Aug 19, 2011 Laurie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This book is interesting, but not compelling. The narrative voice, Nik's sister Denise, is insightful, yet boring. You get to know about her, but you never care about her. She's more a composite of traits than a realized character. Perhaps intentionally, Nik is fascinating, and fully three-dimensional, which makes the book readable, but seeing everything through Denise's eyes makes it even more depressing than it would be through the eyes of an omniscient, more-removed narrator. Of course, no on...more

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About Dana Spiotta

Scribner published Dana Spiotta’s first novel, Lightning Field, in 2001. The New York Times called it “the debut of a wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today.” It was a New York Times Notable Book of the year, and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the West.

Her second novel, E...more

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Quotes from Stone Arabia

“The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.” — 8 people liked it

“Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?” — 4 people liked it

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