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Your Silent Face
"A meandering but vigorous story about wayward youth and the necessity of art." --KIRKUS REVIEWS What lies ahead that doesn’t suck? Summer break forces Stuart Page to return home and wrestle with his fraying ties to the East Side of Flint, his memory an archive of cassettes he would like to erase. His freshman year of college was lame. More early Cure than Spandau Ballet, he might be overheard saying. More Gary Numan than Falco. Flustered by visits from a stoic viking, fueled by an endless supply of beer, Stu picks apart an obsession with the lead singer of Joy Division and chugs the sour dregs of insecurity as he drunkenly veers through Flint’s blue collar fight culture, summer hook ups, the aftereffects of Old School Catholicism and Reaganomics in Your Silent Face.
333 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 12, 2020
5 people are currently reading
9 people want to read
About the author
Tim Lane
3 books1 followerTim Lane is an artist, writer and poet. He lives in Lansing, Michigan.𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘍𝘢𝘤𝘦 is his debut novel.
"A meandering but vigorous story about wayward youth and the necessity of art." --𝘒𝘪𝘳𝘬𝘶𝘴 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘴
"A meandering but vigorous story about wayward youth and the necessity of art." --𝘒𝘪𝘳𝘬𝘶𝘴 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘴
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 26, 2021
3.5 stars rounded up to 4.
This book is unlike anything I've read in a long time, mostly for it's subject matter - identity & disaffected youth - but also for its fragmented presentation & the way it jumps back and forth in time.
Stuart, the protagonist, drinks too much, pines after multiple girls, obsesses over music, spends a lot of time bumming around with friends, half-asses it at his stultifyingly dull summer job, all while watching his family slowly crumble and trying to figure out how he still relates to them.
This book mostly reads like a fever dream but it's still quite a compulsive read.
This book is unlike anything I've read in a long time, mostly for it's subject matter - identity & disaffected youth - but also for its fragmented presentation & the way it jumps back and forth in time.
Stuart, the protagonist, drinks too much, pines after multiple girls, obsesses over music, spends a lot of time bumming around with friends, half-asses it at his stultifyingly dull summer job, all while watching his family slowly crumble and trying to figure out how he still relates to them.
This book mostly reads like a fever dream but it's still quite a compulsive read.
October 30, 2020
After a year of college, Stuart Page returns home to the senseless violence of Eastside of Flint, more disenchanted and disoriented than ever before. Stuart's need to sensationalize every interaction makes for an exhausting but endearing narrator -- he's a Ferris Bueller with none of the self-assurance. Prone to monologing, condescension, and self-aggrandizing, Stuart's still a protagonist worth hearing out, as his starry-eyed poeticism & bleary-eyed narcotization are what ultimately allow him to grapple with the difficult questions so many of his Eastside peers skate around.
Your Silent Face is an adult coming-of-age story, as violent as it is tender, that tackles the improbability of the building (and preserving) a sense of self in a place designed to crush those who can't or won't assimilate. It's a universal story, powerfully told, but key elements of Stuart's internal struggle (an identity assembled through popular culture references, ever-present feelings of displacement, severed family ties, and the presence of the quizzical character "The Viking", and more) make this a distinctly Native story; the first piece of Urban Native Fiction I have ever read. I look forward to more from this author and recommend his poetry on similar themes
Your Silent Face is an adult coming-of-age story, as violent as it is tender, that tackles the improbability of the building (and preserving) a sense of self in a place designed to crush those who can't or won't assimilate. It's a universal story, powerfully told, but key elements of Stuart's internal struggle (an identity assembled through popular culture references, ever-present feelings of displacement, severed family ties, and the presence of the quizzical character "The Viking", and more) make this a distinctly Native story; the first piece of Urban Native Fiction I have ever read. I look forward to more from this author and recommend his poetry on similar themes
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August 25, 2022Reading Tim Lane's YOUR SILENT FACE is quite an experience, and I'm not sure quite how to review it. I guess I should start by resisting (or at least postponing) the temptation to rant about the East Side at length.
In one sense, letting you know what to expect is extremely easy: Your Silent Face is like Nick Hornby's High Fidelity set on the East Side of Flint, Michigan, with the prosodic instincts of Ben Hamper's Rivethead, and the narrative circuitry of Kerouac's On the Road (though YSF scarcely leaves Flint in its 359 pages). If you get those three references, you'll have a very good idea of what it's like to read Lane's novel.
It's also a master class in stream-of-consciousness narrative, where the prosaic and the profound mingle freely in the mind and words of narrator Stuart Page, a halfway burnt out college kid at home for the summer, a musical critic with an obsessive streak, and a young but practiced alcoholic. Someone could write a thesis on hangovers in this book. The constant encounters with beer, with wine coolers, with gin-and-tonics, with malt liquor never lead to Lane's characteristically vivid prose on the raptures of young drunkenness, but we get to experience the stabbing pains and regrets and confusion of I don't know how many hangovers. Drinking is ubiquitous but it's the hangovers we get to experience as readers. And then there's a vast number of characters, friends and friend's friends (some of whom were startlingly familiar to me, and who I felt I might have even met in Real Life) and family (Page's martyr of a mother, his wannabe union boss of a father). And despite playing fairly close attention, I ended the book fairly unsure of Stu's relationship with Karen.
Anyway, these are all parts of the story, brilliantly and incisively rendered. And as you move beneath the Hornby, the Hamper, the Kerouac, the Thomson Twins and Joy Division, the Mickeys and the gravy fries, the endless parade of characters at Grand Daddy's supermarket (the Davison Road Kroghetto, right?), at El Oasis (the Copa, right?), at Thoma's (definitely Angelo's), you find themes and big ideas that Stu cannot escape anymore than he can escape the East Side of Flint. It involves generational trauma, I think, and fight or flight. It involves the potency of love, the audacity of romance, and the risk of commitment. Rootless youth, firmly rooted is in there I think. Poetry, for sure. Loyalties to the undeserving, and disloyalty to the faithful. The whole mess of community. If I read the book two or three more times, I might even get a better grasp on how it all connects.
In short, it's a difficult book, but not an indulgent book. Like the best difficult books, our imagination projects outward at first, but eventually we end up looking inward, and pondering more than just the stories the author has crafted for us.
It's a truly great debut and deserves to be widely read.
A few days ago, when I was in the final stretch of Your Silent Face, I picked my daughter up from her flute lesson and took her for a drive through the East Side, past many landmarks referenced in Lane's novel. We live less than a mile from this neighborhood, but almost never venture over there.
"That garden is where the house where your mom and I used to live once stood." (Maryland and Iowa)
"That right there is the foundation left over from my best friends' house." (Mabel and Minnesota)
"That abandoned building is the coney island where I worked as a dishwasher when I decided to buy your mom and engagement ring." (Franklin and Davison)
"That's the apartment building where I lived with the old people the summer before I met your mom." (Franklin and Nebraska)
The East Side of my youth, and of Tim Lane's youth, is gone, much of it literally burned to the earth. I am glad that he has written of it, and its people, with such nuance and depth. It's as worthy an homage as I've read anywhere.
In one sense, letting you know what to expect is extremely easy: Your Silent Face is like Nick Hornby's High Fidelity set on the East Side of Flint, Michigan, with the prosodic instincts of Ben Hamper's Rivethead, and the narrative circuitry of Kerouac's On the Road (though YSF scarcely leaves Flint in its 359 pages). If you get those three references, you'll have a very good idea of what it's like to read Lane's novel.
It's also a master class in stream-of-consciousness narrative, where the prosaic and the profound mingle freely in the mind and words of narrator Stuart Page, a halfway burnt out college kid at home for the summer, a musical critic with an obsessive streak, and a young but practiced alcoholic. Someone could write a thesis on hangovers in this book. The constant encounters with beer, with wine coolers, with gin-and-tonics, with malt liquor never lead to Lane's characteristically vivid prose on the raptures of young drunkenness, but we get to experience the stabbing pains and regrets and confusion of I don't know how many hangovers. Drinking is ubiquitous but it's the hangovers we get to experience as readers. And then there's a vast number of characters, friends and friend's friends (some of whom were startlingly familiar to me, and who I felt I might have even met in Real Life) and family (Page's martyr of a mother, his wannabe union boss of a father). And despite playing fairly close attention, I ended the book fairly unsure of Stu's relationship with Karen.
Anyway, these are all parts of the story, brilliantly and incisively rendered. And as you move beneath the Hornby, the Hamper, the Kerouac, the Thomson Twins and Joy Division, the Mickeys and the gravy fries, the endless parade of characters at Grand Daddy's supermarket (the Davison Road Kroghetto, right?), at El Oasis (the Copa, right?), at Thoma's (definitely Angelo's), you find themes and big ideas that Stu cannot escape anymore than he can escape the East Side of Flint. It involves generational trauma, I think, and fight or flight. It involves the potency of love, the audacity of romance, and the risk of commitment. Rootless youth, firmly rooted is in there I think. Poetry, for sure. Loyalties to the undeserving, and disloyalty to the faithful. The whole mess of community. If I read the book two or three more times, I might even get a better grasp on how it all connects.
In short, it's a difficult book, but not an indulgent book. Like the best difficult books, our imagination projects outward at first, but eventually we end up looking inward, and pondering more than just the stories the author has crafted for us.
It's a truly great debut and deserves to be widely read.
A few days ago, when I was in the final stretch of Your Silent Face, I picked my daughter up from her flute lesson and took her for a drive through the East Side, past many landmarks referenced in Lane's novel. We live less than a mile from this neighborhood, but almost never venture over there.
"That garden is where the house where your mom and I used to live once stood." (Maryland and Iowa)
"That right there is the foundation left over from my best friends' house." (Mabel and Minnesota)
"That abandoned building is the coney island where I worked as a dishwasher when I decided to buy your mom and engagement ring." (Franklin and Davison)
"That's the apartment building where I lived with the old people the summer before I met your mom." (Franklin and Nebraska)
The East Side of my youth, and of Tim Lane's youth, is gone, much of it literally burned to the earth. I am glad that he has written of it, and its people, with such nuance and depth. It's as worthy an homage as I've read anywhere.
July 17, 2024
I was immediately intrigued by the title of Tim’s Your Silent Face, being a New Order song I love, and was quickly drawn into the story. Anyone who grew up listening to all the brilliant 80s British bands will find something to appreciate here. And although I’m a little younger than protagonist Stuart Page - the book takes place mid-late 80s - Lane captures that late teen angst perfectly, specifically that summer after your first year of college when you’re back in your hometown, still quite tied to it though having begun to branch out beyond, dealing with your limited surroundings while faced with what calls to you from the wider world, here especially Joy Division’s legacy. Drinking too much, working a crap job, heading to strange places at strange hours, tied to old friends and lovers whilst yearning for others, dazzled by folks who offer that bridge to the life you want, this last presented in the character of Nigel, with his poetry, record collection, and minimal family drama. There’s the local club night with the good music but same old songs, the making of mixtapes, the awkward and brief romantic encounters. Lane makes you remember what was great and what was awful about being in your late teens and early 20s, the sapping ennui and the promise of brilliant dreams. There are also a few mentions of Van Halen, which I truly appreciated. Lane has a new book out, Phil’s Siren Song, dealing with the same scene, though through a different focal point, that I’m very much looking forward to reading.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews