The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories

Marquart sang with heavy metal bands in the '70s, and her 21 short stories testify to the haggard after-effects of the rock 'n' roll life. In ""Three Mile Limit,"" Nina, the narrator, is coping with her repressed sexual feelings for her guitarist, TroyDwho, much to her chagrin, has just married a very middle-class girl. When Nina analyzes her own profile, it captures the divided nature of her character and of Marquart's collection overall: ""On the left, my nose turned up in a slight pug... making me look like everybody's cute kid sister. But on the right side, my nose ran straighter.... It made me look aloof, like a woman who could demand things and expect to get them."" In ""The Half Life of the Note,"" Madison, who is living with her three kids on food stamps and steals clothes in futile preparation for an imaginary future career as a singer, pours out her hopes and dreams to houseguest Kinky Salazar, a successful, aging rocker. In the title story, Sal spends part of his time touring with his band and part selling tombstones. After six months in the tombstone business, however, he's never clinched a sale. This story tells about his last failureDwhich is also a liberation. While Marquart's prose is careful and clean, it seems a little too pale and well-mannered for its subject. The path to wisdom in rock and roll is designed to wind through excess; here, it more often detours into exhaustion. But Marquart knows her characters and their world inside out, and musicians will find much to identify with in her stories. (Jan.)