Boarded Windows

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Overview

"Do yourself a favor and read this smart, tender book. The characters will haunt you with their longing and inspire you with their sweet, caustic wit. Dylan Hicks knows his music and his prose is a song in itself."—Sam Lipsyte

"A continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con man." —Greil Marcus

Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He's also a complicated father figure to this novel's narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes ...

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Boarded Windows

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More About This Book

Overview

"Do yourself a favor and read this smart, tender book. The characters will haunt you with their longing and inspire you with their sweet, caustic wit. Dylan Hicks knows his music and his prose is a song in itself."—Sam Lipsyte

"A continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con man." —Greil Marcus

Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He's also a complicated father figure to this novel's narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes both clearer and more confusing through Wade's stories, jokes, and lectures. Through the eyes of a keenly observant, underemployed record collector, Wade emerges as a sly, disruptive force, at once seductive and maddening.

Shifting between flashbacks from the seventies and nineties, Boarded Windows is a postmodern orphan story that explores the fallibility of memory and the weight of our social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks' debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America's boomer counterculture.

Dylan Hicks is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Star Tribune, City Pages, and Rain Taxi, and he has released three CDs under his own name. A fourth, Sings Bolling Greene, is a soundtrack to this novel and will be released in May 2012. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife Nina Hale and his son Jackson. This is his first novel.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In his protagonist, musician-writer Hicks presents Wade, a slacker wading through life with little concern for consequences—or people. In Minneapolis, he shows up on the doorstep of the unnamed narrator who abandoned him after being his pseudo-stepfather for several years in late-’70s North Dakota, intent on couch surfing until he can get his act together. Meanwhile the narrator, worried about his houseguest’s intentions, stays busy working fulltime at a downtown record store. Eventually, Wade, an egocentric musician and drug peddler, offers intricate pieces of his and the narrator’s pasts, adding dramatic tension and atmospheric texture to an unhurried narrative buttressed by longing and loneliness. Woven in are reflective flashbacks about the narrator’s mother; a band called Bolling Greene; and the disjointed childhood that created the “cold, passive, and evasive” person he’s become. Glacially paced yet nuanced with fluid prose and a pensive, melancholy undercurrent, Hicks incrementally details Wade’s insinuation into the lives of the narrator and his wife, spilling stories of adoption and missed opportunities that threaten everyone’s happiness. Hicks composed and performed a companion soundtrack for this debut. (May)
Kirkus Reviews
Hicks delivers a postmodern novel likely to appeal to a segment of sophisticated 21st-century readers. The unnamed narrator was born to a drug-addled woman, Martha, who gave him up to her girlfriend Marleen for adoption. Wade, who is into music and drug-dealing, lives with Marleen and serves as a sort-of stepfather (and perhaps biological father) to said narrator (let's call him S.N.). Wade plans to go to Berlin to become a DJ. S.N. has many orgasms. Wade goes to Berlin. Story ends. Oversimplified? Yes, but not by much. Do not expect a plot. Interspersed with flashes of brilliant writing, this book is a page-turner only in the let's-get-this-over-with sense of the phrase. S.N. isn't a bad person, but who cares about his sexual activities (they're not even exploits)? Who cares that Wanda wants him to ejaculate for target practice? For almost half a page, S.N. plays with a pile of his dandruff and loose hair, imagining them to be comets and stars. Surprisingly, that brings this review to something positive. Hicks is a terrific writer who can craft a simile with the best of them. Some of his wordplay makes the read almost worth the while ("icicles hanging from its grille like drool from a Saint Bernard"), but then he gets artsy, filling pages with erudite references that seem designed only to impress. The main issue isn't his writing but his storytelling. Readers expect a progression: S.N. wants something important (other than sex, which is much too easy). He encounters obstacles and shows his mettle by how he faces them. An antagonist has conflicting wants. Ultimately, S.N. either triumphs or fails, and we see what, besides testicular tissue, he is made of. Read this book to admire Hicks' mastery of language, for the titillating sexual references and for the interesting characters. But if you want a story with a point, Hicks misses the target.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781566892971
  • Publisher: Coffee House Press
  • Publication date: 4/24/2012
  • Pages: 240
  • Sales rank: 532,294
  • Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 0.70 (d)

Meet the Author

Dylan Hicks is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, New York Times, Star Tribune, City Pages, and Rain Taxi, and he has released three albums under his own name. A fourth, Sings Bolling Greene, is a companion album to this novel and will be released in May 2012. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and his son, Jackson. This is his first novel.

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