THE BEST OF GOOD

Middle-aged musician starts over.

Tending bar and living on royalties from long-ago hits, Tom Good doesn’t think much about his glory days in rock ’n’ roll—until a blast from the past on a store’s piped-in soundtrack knocks him for a loop. He sure wishes he could go to the drugstore and supermarket without hearing memory-triggers for everything he’s tried to forget. Gee, whatever happened to Diana, his true love? Her conditioner smelled excellent. Took him forever to throw the bottle out after she left him. According to his buddy Kevin, Diane is the single mother of a fifth-grader—a boy who looks just like Tom (and who’s known as “Good”). Heck, you mean Diana had his kid and never told him? Is that why she went away without a word of explanation? Should he start acting like a father or what? But his son Jack doesn’t want anything to do with his long-lost dad, and the kid isn’t even musical. And Diana would rather sigh a lot than explain much, anyway. So Good goes back to being nice to the old lady upstairs and to the neighbor’s kids, back to just living his life and stuff. But, hey, Diana is thinking of getting married. Is this new guy going to be Jack’s dad and cut Good out of the picture or what? How not-fair is that? Well, okay, so what can he do? Be a knight in shining armor for the old lady and hook up with the just-dumped mother of the next-door gang, that’s what. They start making quilts and whatnot. It’s a metaphor or something. Gee.

Bland prose and long stretches of trivial, repetitive dialogue: a banal and tepid fifth from Lewis (Second Draft of My Life, 2002, etc.).