THE LIGHTNING BOTTLES

A reviled musician chases clues that her former bandmate and husband is alive and searches for him, accompanied by an unexpected party.

In 1999, 17-year-old Henrietta Vögel listens to a radio broadcast commemorating five years since Elijah Hart, “front man of the multiplatinum-selling husband-and-wife duo, the Lightning Bottles,” disappeared in Iceland. Jane Pyre, Elijah’s disgraced bandmate and wife, arrives in rural Wölf, Germany, and discovers that the secluded farmhouse she purchased as an escape has a close neighbor—none other than Hen, who insists that Elijah is alive and trying to communicate with Jane via street art, convincing Jane that they have to follow the clues in the art to find him. Lengthy flashbacks that start 10 years earlier show Elijah and Jane, born Janet Ribeiro, bonding and falling in love from 2,400 miles apart via music-focused BBS chat rooms and lengthy letters. Jane travels to Seattle to be with Elijah and they form the Lightning Bottles, though their romance and rise to fame are plagued by friendship drama, family tragedy, sexism against Jane, a legal battle over song ownership, and addiction. Some readers might be pleased to recognize real influential people (William Orbit, Steve Albini, a female musician clearly based on Sinéad O’Connor) and places (Sin-é, Central Saloon) in the Seattle music scene of this era. The costs of fame, especially addiction, are huge themes throughout the book, so it’s unfortunate that the writing around addiction is grating. The pacing of the novel is also terrible—the improbable scavenger hunt in the late 1990s is overshadowed by the sections charting the Lightning Bottles’ rise to and fall from fame, and multiple major would-be conflicts or revelations are summarized and resolved in mere paragraphs. Readers looking to indulge their nostalgia may find something worth discovering in these pages; anyone searching for quality prose should look elsewhere.

A literary misfire soaked in 1990s musical nostalgia.