Grade: A+
I flat out loved this book. It's a sad
reminder of the past and how far we've come since the early eighties.
We sometimes forget how much has changed for the GLBT community in
thirty years. The Return shows that beautifully. About 2/3rds of the
way thru the book, I cried, sobbed really, for an entire chapter. The writing is stellar and the characters are complete and consistent throughout. The Return had a full sense of place, Austin felt different than NYC or Fire Island. I
could say a lot about why I loved it and where I think the flaws are.
I'm a Virgo I can pick apart anything, but that's not to say that
The Return is anything less than sublime.
My quibbles are minor. First, the
connections between the present and the past are a little heavy
handed at times and there are too many for the reader to have any
doubts about what's going on. It would have worked better, for me, if
the answer could have been more elusive. The scene at the very end
felt a little too concrete. The concept of reincarnation is too
unknowable to be framed as fact. It would have been fun to argue with
my friends about what I believe and what I think was happening in the
book, but The Return doesn't allow much room for that which is kind
of weird considering the ongoing debates about music that hold the
frame of the book together.
And the music... In some ways, the
integration of the music into the book is what made the book for me.
I read a lot. A lot. It's not unusual for me to love a book, but even
when I find a book I adore and will re-read over and over again, it
doesn't usually change the way I think about things or affect the
quality of my life outside the four walls of my kindle. The Return
did that in a way I will always be grateful for. My relationship with
music has been forever changed... or maybe renewed is a better word.
For most of my life listening to music
was a passion. As much as I wanted to be a musician, it just wasn't
in the cards for me so I was left with listening. I listened with my
whole heart. I cared about what the singer/songwriter/musician was
trying to tell me. For many years, when I couldn't sleep, I would
take the quilt off the bed, curl up on a chair in the corner of the
living room, plug the “good headphones” into the stereo and
manually turn the dial to surf the radio looking for music that
interested me. For hours, I would tune out the rest of my life and
just listen. It was my way of connecting myself to something greater,
the collective consciousness or God, if that makes you more
comfortable. In that private cocoon I could listen to whatever moved
me. I wasn't bound by expectations or the ridicule of my friends or
my own preconceived notions of what I should be listening to as a
teen and young adult. I discovered music and genres that were outside
my little bubble in suburban Boston. From Folk and Reggae to Classic
Rock and Opera, I found music that stirred my soul in a way that was
otherwise inaccessible to me. Those were the times when music became
transformative for me.
It took a while, but one day I grew up.
I was an adult with a mortgage and a stressful job. Over that period,
music dropped off my radar. It became background noise to the rest of
my life. I still listened to it all the time. There is rarely an hour
that goes by that I don't have my iPod in the dock or Pandora playing
as I write or read or work or clean or whatever. I sang along and
listened superficially but I stopped taking the time to listen as a
primary activity. I lost the visceral connection to music that had so
sustained me back in the day. The Return reminded me how important
that connection was and how much I had missed it when it just wasn't
a priority.
Brad Boney gave me the great gift of
returning music to my soul. I won't forget that lesson again and if I
do, I am sure to read The Return again and again and it will remind
me what I almost lost forever.
Listen to the YouTube Playlist, that
goes along with The Return... Here.
If you love pop/rock music and haven't
heard Bruce Springsteen's keynote at the 2012 SXSW, you can watch
it... Here.
It is well worth the hour of your time.
As always, I close with some eye candy...
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| Steve Grand |
