“You all wanna be looking very intently at your own belly buttons.” ~Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity.
The above quote kept running through my head as I read Stone Arabia, a novel with a protagonist given to the kind of introspection that is best described as navel gazing.
The protagonist, Denise Kranis, is a forty-something woman living in Los Angeles. The story focuses on her relationship with her brother Nik, a talented (?) but failed musician/artist. If the book’s blurb is to be believed, the pivotal moment in the story–inciting incident if this were genre fiction, perhaps–occurs when Denise’s daughter, Ada, decides to film a documentary about her reclusive uncle (Nik). Except, Ada doesn’t show up until late in the novel. Instead, most of the narrative is taken up by Denise’s thoughts on family, memory–memory being the theme–and her peculiar obsession with certain current events.
The latter being Denise’s most irritating characteristic because I don’t have much any patience with real life people who obsess on whatever the media has decided is important this week–Tiger Wood’s dick, the Casey Anthony trial, etc. I guess it’s really no different than falling into fascination with a television show, or a movie, or book. Nevertheless, it always seems that those who are most captivated by salacious current events are trying to make up for some lack in their own life. Which, I guess, describes Denise Kranis to a tee.
Certain aspects of Denise’s ramblings are compelling, especially her ruminations on memory. Like this one, where she realizes that so much of memory isn’t based in events, but grounded in the senses, especially touch:
“I felt the memory of my father on my body, the way you feel a breeze or the heat of the sun. He did not feel–and so was not–entirely lost to me. Inside, beyond my recall of events and dates and talk, there was this hot-wired memory of his body. I know now how much all of us live in these body places. Your experiences, the hard-felt ones, don’t fade. They are written forever in your flesh, your nerves, your fingertips.”
Honestly? In smaller doses, I love this level of introspection, this evaluation of the minutia that make up our lives, the utterly mundane. I think it’s what’s sometimes missing from the genre fiction I read, especially romance and fantasy. In romance, for example, there’s a tendency to engage in tell-rather-than-show explanations of what the characters are “feeling.” This is supposed to reveal character, but instead leaves me cold. I admit, I can learn more about a character by listening to them ramble about the strange twists their mind takes. Similarly, a character’s observations on the mundane in her world, even a fantastic world, would tell me much more about a novel’s setting than lengthy description–Fantasy, I’m lookin’ you.
OTOH, I’m primarily a fan of genre fiction for a reason. Two hundred-plus pages is too much time to spend immersed in someone’s belly button lint.
The main problem, however, with Stone Arabia is that I just don’t like Nik. I believe I’m supposed to see him as the great undiscovered talent, that the music scene lost a bright star when Nik rejected fame. Or something. Nik, however, is revealed only through his sister Denise, and a few excerpts of his Chronicles, the fictional, aggrandized version of his life. Those excerpts are some of the dullest portions of the novel, sort of like contemporary versions of The Simarillion, world-building disease run amuck, made worse with a touch of Mary Sue-ism. Given Denise’s descriptions, Nik’s music is the sort of aural noise that’s beloved by critics and that leaves prols like me wondering WTF the fuss is about, because that, “That ain’t music.”
And finally, Nik is a user, IMO. The kind of vampire who sucks family and friends dry, emotionally and financially. Denise is up to her eyeballs in debt, but still feels guilty because she hasn’t given Nik more money. In this respect, the characters are very real, since I know people who are living this kind of sick dynamic. I don’t, however, read fiction to engage with “real,” people; I read it to engage with people who seem real but act better (or worse).
I don’t find Nik’s end particularly tragic. This isn’t the kind of narrative where even happy moments are shadowed by a prescient dread, a sense that all good things must end, and yet you read on, needing closure or perhaps hoping for a happy ending (all the while knowing that a HEA would ultimately be unsatisfactory).
My reaction to Nik’s rather nebulous demise, frankly, was to hope that Denise would realize how much better her life was without him. A big part of the problem is that the story leaves some of the most important memories, the stuff that explained why Denise and Nik are so close, to the very end. At that point, I just didn’t care and the information felt superfluous.
Rating 2.5/5, but I rounded up to 3, because I’m an author too, and I’m feeling squishy-soft about reviews.
(This is an expanded, better-edited version of my review posted at Goodreads and Shelfari.)
