Quiet riot

>>Ibi Kaslik follows up Skinny with
The Angel Riots, a novel about an
up-and-coming Montreal rock band

by JULIET WATERS

As any editor at any publishing house will tell you, slush piles overflow with the tragic remains of manuscripts submitted by writers who answered the siren call of the rock ’n’ roll novel. So many try, and even the best fail. (See You Don’t Love Me, Yet by Jonathan Lethem.) The reason for this is mysterious, but I’ll do my best to explain.

Rock ’n’ roll movies work because music and film thrive on spectacle. Novels don’t. They work better at a lower pitch. Mixing the two usually works as well as playing two adjacent keys on a piano. Unless you really know what you’re doing, the results can be irritating.

That Ibi Kaslik’s The Angel Riots is actually readable proves that it can be done, but one needs to follow a couple of rules. If you’re writing about a successful band write about bassists, horn players, drummers or fiddlers—keep your distance from the lead singers and guitarists. Readers tend to feel more comfortable with the passive players.

I prefer the second option: write about spectacularly unsuccessful bands. This allows more room to write about fucked up narcissists and painfully small audiences. (See Hard Core Logo by Michael Turner.) It’s also less likely that any of your successful musician friends will read themselves into it. But it makes sense that Kaslik would go for option one. She was a good enough friend of Broken Social Scene to inspire the song “Ibi Dreams of Pavement.” No matter who she writes about, this novel will be read as dirt on that scene.

By focusing on the stories of two relatively minor members of a Montreal musical co-op on its way to Arcade Fire levels of success, however, Kaslik has more room to fictionalize. And the predictable group dynamics become background (yes, believe it or not, the band falls apart due to a mixture of drugs, relationship politics and differing levels of maturity). This allows Kaslik to foreground the more complex, less predictable lives of individuals.

The novel opens from the point of view of Jim, an 18-year-old girl violinist with a boy’s name, who faces a lot of difficult choices as a good musician. She’s come to Montreal, ostensibly to study, though a murky booze-hazed car crash from her Prairie past is enough to convince us of the rock ’n’ roll future that awaits her.

Rize, the second narrator, is the more seasoned of the two, but in other ways, he’s more fragile. Verdun raised, he’s been touring since he was 15, but his life as a horn-player seems to have grown more out of his inability to fit into normal society than a love of music.

Kaslik is a talented, nuanced writer and for the most part her two narrators are worth the energy it takes to overlook some of the things that don’t feel quite right about them. She continues, unfortunately, to maintain an addiction to superfluous grandiose plot twists. To serve the plot demands of a schizophrenic twin brother, a sleazy businessman and serendipitous piles of cash, Kaslik has to give her characters storylines that fit them like bad clothes.

I suppose a musician with some kind of undiagnosed learning disability could actually be the boyfriend of an RCMP officer, but Jim’s back-story as the messed up daughter of overachieving farmers seems a bit of a stretch.

I like Mrs. Henderson, the chain-smoking Suzuki Method teacher, and maybe in Saskatoon Suzuki teachers work out of the Music Conservatory; but I’m guessing Kaslik knows about as much about this as I do.

Nevertheless, the voice is strong and interesting and that’s what counts in the end. Will The Angel Riots make The New York Times bestseller list, like her debut novel, Skinny? Probably not. But it’s certainly good enough to maintain her status as an emerging Canadian writer.

The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik,
Penguin Canada, pb, 275pp, $22