REM'S CHANCE

In Andrae’s novel, an aging member of Generation X looks to revive his adolescent punk rock band while an old friend is hunted by a vengeful murderer.

At 46 years old, Remy “Rem” Bruxvoort is more than a bit lost—his relationship with his erstwhile fiance, Dita, has devolved into mutual contempt, but he continues to live with her until they can sell the bungalow they bought together. Additionally, he has no real professional life—a “cinema hound” who has worked as a movie projectionist, Rem sporadically works on a novel. He obsessively waxes nostalgic about the punk rock band (The Bubbling Samovars) he joined in high school (he was the guitarist) and yearns to find the master tapes for the LP they never released, hoping to now issue it. A lonesome man, Rem misses the band’s rapport and the “relationships with people who fit like a glove and intuitively enriched one another,” a blandly earnest description that typifies the author’s awkward prose style. By a strange twist of fate, Rem bumps into Gene Pawlus, the band’s bass player, and rekindles their friendship, becoming romantically involved with Gene’s sister, Julie, an aspiring poet. As a consequence, Rem tracks down Dusty Lewis, the band’s drummer, who is in possession of the LP’s master tapes and promises to prepare them for release in exchange for Rem acting as a middleman for the conveyance of some very shady packages. Meanwhile, Gene is stalked by someone (for most of the book, he is simply referred to as “the man”), an unsuccessful loner who murders his own stepmother and her boyfriend. He holds a grudge against Gene, now a “website revamper” who he believes cheated his now deceased brother, Jeff. (“He was hell bent on watching Gene die.”)

The author intelligently distills the uniqueness of Generation X, the group that was given an “analog upbringing” only to take up residence in a digital world. Both Rem and Gene are painfully adrift—despite a career and a forthcoming marriage, Gene is stymied by an ennui he seems unable to fully understand, let alone shake. Much of the book is devoted to the casual philosophical musings of its dramatic personae, though little of this material registers as either original or particularly provocative. There’s nothing new in these reflections on the banality of bourgeois work life, the “unbecoming trappings of the white-collar world.” In fact, much of the novel, despite the gathering menace of “the man” and his malevolence, is quietly dull, and the violent climax is as melodramatically formulaic as it is implausible. Moreover, the final lines of the novel, which are wearisomely cliched and sentimental, seemed phoned in. There is much to admire in Andrae’s effort—he paints an astute portrait of a generation brimming with competence and optimism but endowed with an idealism so fragile it easily transforms into a mediocre conformism. (Rem and “the man” are both extreme expressions of an attempt to resist that current.) However, the author is not equal here to the literary task of bringing these ideas to full fruition, and as a result the story feels stale.

A thoughtful but slow-moving novel lumbered with leaden prose.