The Elegant Variation: That Summertime Sound, by Matthew Specktor.

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December 08, 2009

That Summertime Sound, by Matthew Specktor.

The best book you are not reading because it's been widely ignored is Matthew Specktor's That Summertime Sound. How does a book this intimate and honest and real get overlooked? It's depressing to think about.

The book's about obsession and miscues and friendship. Also loyalty and betrayal and all the things that disappoint you when you're 20. It's about a young man who spends a summer in Columbus, Ohio to stalk his favorite band.

I stood by the window. At four o’clock, the girls across the street had gone home, and this heat-dazed stretch of Indianola—a corridor of brick tenements and warehouses, a neighborhood that was neither fully residential nor commercial—stood mostly vacant. I watched an old woman totter under the weight of her grocery bag as she came out of the liquor store across the street; watched two boys walk, not-quite hand-in-hand, carrying skateboards as they bumped and jostled one another with their shoulders. Ducking their heads a little as they walked, like monks in the humidity. Ordinary life. In here it was factory-hot: a Chinese laundry. And I understood nothing, not even if this band I loved was, by any objective measure, really any good at all.

Jonathan Lethem says, "That Summertime Sound isn't so much a book as it is a door, hinged in memory, and swinging wide to every tenderhearted throb of lust and longing and precocious regret still there where you left it, at the periphery of adulthood." Then he goes on and on and compares Matthew to Graham Greene, which is a very good comparison.

Matthew Specktor is interviewed here.

Posted at 08:54 PM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink

Comments

Another book to add to my ever growing 'to read' list. I (sometimes) find that those books which are overlooked, which you discover, can be the best books you read. Sometimes hype can be a real turn off.

Posted by: Alice | December 09, 2009 at 12:19 PM

Can I suggest one reason this book might have been overlooked? It was published by powerHouse, a very fine company better known for its photography and art titles. It doesn't fit the expectations reviewers have because its not from a first or second tier fiction publisher. That keeps it from getting in the door, and that explains why it is where it is now. I work at an independent bookstore in New York City and of the ten copies we ordered of this title, we sold one, and that was to me.

Posted by: Michael | December 09, 2009 at 03:41 PM

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December 08, 2009