Lost Highway

The new novel by the much-praised Currey (Fatal Light; The Wars of Heaven) is as eloquently piercing and deeply American as a classic folk ballad. In fact its first-person narrator, Sapper Reeves, is a West Virginian who learns to play the banjo as a boy and then finds that music is taking over his life--with often disastrous consequences. He and two fellow musicians form a little group they call the Still Creek Boys and take their act, singing and playing songs largely written by Sapper, all over the tiny towns and backwater hamlets of the mountain country, usually sleeping in the car to save money, sometimes not getting paid at all. It's just after WWII, and existence in the hardscrabble country is tough. Sapper meets and marries loving Riva, has a little boy, Bobby, but is still away more than he's home. There is a moment of fame at a big broadcast jamboree; a small company in Nashville cuts a record of the group; but essentially their worn lives do not change, and Riva's patience with their eked-out existence wears thin. Then Sapper is badly hurt in a barroom brawl, takes to the bottle, abandons his music and begins to slip away into lonely pointlessness. Bobby grows up and is injured in Vietnam, there is a quiet reconciliation with Riva and, at last, like an infinitely slow dawn, recognition for Sapper's great gifts begins to come his way. This is all told by Currey in haunting, limpid prose that allows the brooding sweetness of Sapper Reeves to emerge on the page like music itself. (May)