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Wire to Wire
by
Scott Sparling (Goodreads Author)
Wire to Wire assembles a cast of train-hopping, drug-dealing, glue-huffing lowlifes, tells a harrowing tale of friendship and loss, and creates a stunning portrait of Northern Michigan in the late 1970s.
While riding a freight car through Detroit, Michael Slater suffers a near-fatal accident—a power line to the head. After recovering, he tries to lead a quiet life in the de...more
While riding a freight car through Detroit, Michael Slater suffers a near-fatal accident—a power line to the head. After recovering, he tries to lead a quiet life in the de...more
Paperback, 375 pages
Published
May 24th 2011
by Tin House Books
(first published May 11th 2011)
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Video editor Michael Slater sits in New York, popping speed and watching his life unfold on the screens in front of him. Michael and his best friend, Harp Maitland, were riding the rails some years earlier. Standing on top of a boxcar, Slater saw a power line looming above them. He pushed Maitland to safety, but was hit by the line himself and nearly killed.
Slater will never fully recover, but he makes his way back home to Wolverine, Michigan, on the Northern Peninsula. He discovers that his bel...more
Slater will never fully recover, but he makes his way back home to Wolverine, Michigan, on the Northern Peninsula. He discovers that his bel...more
Scott Sparling’s debut novel “Wire To Wire” is a dark panoramic view full of fleeting nightmares and bad memories racing across the electrified brain of Michael Slater. That’s because while riding atop a train through Detroit his head meets a power line that almost kills him. The “electricity used Slater’s body as a raceway, entering at his forehead and shooting through his feet, rearranging the molecules as it went.” After having his skull cut open and surgically retooled, his perspective is c...more
I was really dissapointed with this book, my husband and I had seen a review in the local paper on it because the author is from our state (Michigan.) We love detective/crime stories, and we are huge train fans.... so this seemed like a perfect fit. When a book jumps around and is really hard to follow I can usually over look it, and when there is an excessive amount of sex and violence I can usually over look it, but both together made this book take more effort to read than I care to give. Per...more
I found this book to be a little hard to follow at first but as I read it I found it hard to put down.
Wire to wire is about this gentle man who starts out with his friend as a train hopper and one day while riding on the top of one of the cars with his friend finds himself if a shocking spot as he saves his friend from loosing his head by a low hanging electric wire and instead has it hit him right smack in the head sending him to the hospital to try and save his life.
through out the story he is...more
Wire to wire is about this gentle man who starts out with his friend as a train hopper and one day while riding on the top of one of the cars with his friend finds himself if a shocking spot as he saves his friend from loosing his head by a low hanging electric wire and instead has it hit him right smack in the head sending him to the hospital to try and save his life.
through out the story he is...more
This book was fantastic. It totally consumed me for the few days that I took to read it. It reminded me of Ken Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion in that there are so many stories that weave together, which make for a complex, gritty atmosphere, and a epic scope. The characters are well developed, troubled, lonely, yet relatable. Sparling makes witty comments throughout the book which I have more than I couple times felt the need to sticky note (my favorite being on pg 359). He holds nothing back...more
I picked the book up because of the imprint: "A Tin House New Voice." Reminded me a lot of early Robert Stone, circa Dog Soldiers and Hall of Mirrors. The prose was beautiful, but I'd have to say author Scott Sparling doesn't know how to cobble it together into a cohesive whole. The main character has had brain surgery so possibly the disjointedness was a deliberate author choice, meant to immerse the reader in the protagonist's inner landscape, in whihc case Bravo. Still. Very hard to figure ou...more
While Sparling insists that WIRE TO WIRE is not a crime novel, but rather an homage to the crime novel, the novel's strengths are in its genre elements. For all the literary bells and whistles that adorn the narrative, they are distractions from a solid character-driven story at the center.
Sparling does a wonderful job opening the reader up to his world of glue-huffers and boxcar train jumpers, its own sub-culture. The characters are aimless, yet interesting. People rather than archetypes.
If the...more
Sparling does a wonderful job opening the reader up to his world of glue-huffers and boxcar train jumpers, its own sub-culture. The characters are aimless, yet interesting. People rather than archetypes.
If the...more
Scott Sparling's WIRE TO WIRE further clarified for me a couple of the things that draw me into a book. The first I've known for a long time. I crave surprise. It's here in spades. But I also have noticed lately that awareness of the beauty or specificity of language has become more important to me as well. Sparling's descriptions seem new, unique, and perfectly crafted.
With MEMENTO-like flashbacks in time, we wander willingly into Michael Slater's sometimes horrific lifeline following him until...more
With MEMENTO-like flashbacks in time, we wander willingly into Michael Slater's sometimes horrific lifeline following him until...more
This is a novel populated by drifters, druggies, assholes, and lost souls of characters who are also rather sure of exactly what they want and generally unashamed of taking it. In other words: it's a heck of a lot of fun to read.
Ultimately, this book is Michael Slater's story. He's a bit of a twitchy speed freak with a metal plate in his head thanks to an incident with a power line on a freight train. There are other key ingredients here as well, though: his estranged train riding compatriot, Ha...more
Ultimately, this book is Michael Slater's story. He's a bit of a twitchy speed freak with a metal plate in his head thanks to an incident with a power line on a freight train. There are other key ingredients here as well, though: his estranged train riding compatriot, Ha...more
Awesome. This guy writes like an 18 year old fucks. Careless, angrily, and with an overwhelming sense of disbelief. Difference is you won't mind sleeping in Sparling's wet spot. His prose is spot on, the plot is cohesive, and the characters are a bunch of miserable wrectches with hearts. This book made me want to sniff glue and be a lumberjack.
Appropriate blurbs from Willy Vlautin and Donald Ray Pollack as this is a similar tale of a low life group of outcasts, junkies, murderers, and fools. Shades of Thompson and McCarthy but similar to Kem Nunn in that the fall of the characters is echoed by the squandered potential of the landscape they inhabit. He nails the druggy despair of lower Michigan, I had the outline for novel of druggy lowlifes in Michigan (where I grew up) but now I’m wondering what the point would be (weirdly the author...more
An exciting and engaging book that drew me in immediately. The characters seem so real, and despite the fact that they are all so obviously flawed from the get-go -- drugs, crime, betrayal -- you cannot help but care about them, back them, stay with them so you find out what happens to them. Sparling's writing is fresh and fast, and as someone with a deep connection to Michigan and especially the area that Wire to Wire is set in, I felt like I was right there all along, walking through the town...more
This is a well written book about Michael Slater and the tale of his life. Throughout the story, we wind out about how he arrived to where he is at now. This includes a love triangle, drug dealers, cops and train hopping. I gave it 2 stars not because of the writing or content (I have no complaint about how it was written)but because I just did not like the book. It is not something the I found particularly interesting to read and it just did not catch my attention.
I won this book in a Goodread...more
I won this book in a Goodread...more
I found Wire to Wire to be an interesting premise however, it was a little difficult to read. The main character Slater suffers from a rare and unique injury, which he suffered while jumping freight trains. A whole bunch of drugs, women, and violence prevents him from leading a normal life.
My issue with the book is that it is written in a style that lacked coherence as I was constantly trying to figure out who the author was talking about. It’s a shame cause I always enjoy a good junky lowlife...more
My issue with the book is that it is written in a style that lacked coherence as I was constantly trying to figure out who the author was talking about. It’s a shame cause I always enjoy a good junky lowlife...more
I disliked this book enough that I didn't even finish the book. I did not like any of the characters and decided not to waste my time finishing the book as I really didn't care how it ended.
I'm only about a third of the way through, but Scott Sparling's writing reads at an exhilarating pace, much like the trains being hopped in this excellent debut. He switches masterfully between locations and points of view, delivering a fast-paced frolic of a novel that's both literary and adrenaline packed--a difficult feat indeed.
Sparling's novel has most of the elements of a so-macabre-it's-funny film by the Coen brothers. The economic picture he paints of Northern Michigan unsettled me but the details about freight trains, ferries, and glue-sniffing were interesting.
fantastic rollicking novel of young people in the usa with nothing really to live for, nothing but money, sex, love, drugs, and moving. from a new series from Tin House called New Voice.
My review:
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http://20thousandroads.blogspot.com/2...
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Originally from Michigan, Scott Sparling lives outside Portland, Oregon, with his wife and son.
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