In the infinite high desert of Utah, a poignantly moving scene unfolds: 14-year-old Mark is in his sleeping bag, into which a soulmate he has found, and loves, creeps with stealth. This is not some idyllic hiking holiday, it is an extended boot camp – at once punitive and supposedly curative – to which Mark and the girl – Lainey, aged 17, with scarred wrists – have been dispatched by their parents, for behaviour considered beyond control; in Mark’s case striking a friend, then his mother. But this is a stolen moment of redemptive, subversive young love. “Until I met Lainey, I didn’t know that talking was another form of breathing,” Mark reflects.
But the moment is then cruelly shattered by a sudden flashback: Mark recognises the same skin condition as that of his uncle, and the instant is ambushed by something he had kept “far back in the dark” of his own mind. In a destructive – and self-destructive – consternation, he pushes Lainey away, and with her their mutual feelings for each other.
Jonathan Wells is an acclaimed American poet, and was hosted for the UK presentation of this first novel among the vinyl racks at Rough Trade records in Ladbroke Grove, west London, beneath posters for the Sex Pistols and the Clash on one wall, New York’s Television and Patti Smith on another. Why? Because although The Sterns… is a tight and taut family drama, it unfolds against a backdrop of rock’n’roll generally, and mid-1970s American punk specifically, to which Wells devoted much of his youth at the famous CBGB club – as did, in the book, Mark’s uncle Spence and father, Benjamin.
And while the heart of this story is dark, there is a wondrously comic subplot. Toxic Spence – or rather Wells – comes up with an inspired idea, about rock, roll and ageing. Spence is in the hearing aid business, vexed at how elderly people resist his products as a sign of surrender to time, “no longer a player in the external world”. His plan is to buy the brand franchise of the now closed CBGB, and market a line of unapologetically decorative hearing aids called the Rocker, on the marvellous premise that: “Wouldn’t that transform us from being hobbling, ageing men into esteemed veterans, into actors in a great drama [having made] a sacrifice for rock and roll?”
Music, and often farce, drive the narrative. But it is the crafting and writing that give the novel its cogency and intelligence. The vocabulary is delicious: “The moon, a magnesium white strip, split the floor between them.” And after Lainey’s heartbreaking departure: “I watched her scurry away as if she didn’t have any weight, a ghost flying between the snowflakes.”
This is a book about listening: to music, to parents, to children.
Ed Vulliamy is the author of When Words Fail: A Life with Music, War and Peace (Granta)
The Sterns Are Listening by Jonathan Wells is published by Ze Books (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
