No Names

This elegant debut novel from poet Hewett (Blindsight) blends a young man’s quest to unravel the mystery of his paternity with the story of an obscure 1970s punk band. Mike Adamcyzk and Pete Lac meet in high school in 1973 and form the Ramones-influenced No Names. They release one album, Invisible City, in 1978 before disbanding. Now, in 1993, Mike lives on one of the isolated Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, having spent the past 15 years in solitude. Over the course of the nonlinear narrative, Hewett explores the depth of Mike and Pete’s friendship and tortured, mostly unrequited romance, and the devastating reasons for Mike’s seclusion. In a parallel narrative also set in the ’90s, 18-year-old Isaac Burns comes across Invisible City while searching for in his mother’s attic for his birth certificate and becomes obsessed with locating the group’s surviving members. That journey takes him to Europe, where he has a fateful meeting with Daniel Beck, an internationally renowned classical pianist who owns the island where Mike has been living. Hewett poignantly conveys the band members’ passion, both for each other and for their music, as well as their music’s powerful effect on Isaac, to whose ear Pete’s guitar can “slice through walls.” It’s well worth a spin. (Apr.)