Ghost Town
Author’s name was familiar, the set-up, oddly reminiscent of an adjacent childhood I didn’t have. Certain novelistic experiences, so individual yet universal?
“It was a garden-variety case of the midlife blues, nothing that couldn’t be cured with a little Zoloft and some pickleball, or so everyone told me.” Page 59.
Midlife crisis.
A writer, writing about a character who is writer, who is then writing about his fictional works of fiction, and if this isn’t handled well, it falls apart. But oddly enough, the fictional plot of fictional story told by a fiction author in a work of fiction?
It worked.
Ghost Town
Elements of the two tracks for the story, one contemporary and one culminating in August, 1974, the two threads, intertwined and does it resolve?
The music, the backdrop, my own personal memories flood the text. There’s a touch of magical realism, and one reviewer suggested supernatural pieces. I hardly think a Ouija Board is part of the supernatural.
It’s a novel about the reflection of growing up and how what happened then affects us now.
Ghost Town
Previously, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, looked at here.
I finished read this text after seeing Winedale’s Love’s Labors Lost, which as an adaption of the Winedale season from 1976.
This is where material runs together, part reminiscent, part foggy memory, part historical in looking back.
While both the book and the play’s adaptation used musical references, allusions to tunes that might, or might not, be contemporaneous to the show, the novel, I have to dredge through old memories of the times. Remember the Chevy Vega?
Austin, and by extension, the setting for that version of the play, was the epicenter for a truly revolutionary musical renaissance as it started the rise of the Progressive Country music. The outlaws, Waylon and Willie, et al.
These are elements that shape us, and this book unburied old treasures.
Weird close to a weekend.
