Mix wit and whimsy with hard emotional truth is not the easiest of literary alchemies but Barry Divola manages it near-flawlessly with his debut novel, Driving Stevie Fracasso.
Promising one of those revelatory road trip adventures where fun is had but epiphanies, both existential and familial are thick on the bitumised ground, 2001-set Driving Stevie Fracasso, is brilliantly, hilariously, movingly engaging, the kind of novel that has you laughing and then crying and not quite sure how you moved from one state to the other.
Which is, in the world of reading where you simply want to be wrapped in the story and have no wish to see the moving parts (true of all storytelling really, no matter the medium) a very good thing indeed.
Following the story of music journalist Rick McLennan who arrives in New York City as an eager young man bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to take on the world only to find that life isn’t as sustainably thrilling as he thought, Driving Stevie Fracasso is one of those books which tells it exactly like it is but still manages to be comedically charming along the way.
Life is, Divola admits, confusing, messy and not at all as triumphantly straightforward as we think it’s going to be when we’re young.
In those heady halcyon days of youth, whether we running from something like a broken family or to something like a loftily-envisaged career or both in Rick’s case, life seems to have not a flaw in it, a glowing bastion of promising what-ifs that looks unable to ever disappoint.
“Maybe Stevie wanted to be lost.
Maybe that’s why he was living like a hermit in Austin. The guy didn’t want to be found. Not by his obsessive fans like Nelson. Not by some guy wanting to publish a book about the one thing he ever did in his life. And definitely not by his brother, who he hadn’t seen for three decades.” (P. 173)
But disappoint it does, and as Rick discovers it’s all too easy to fall into a pit of unenergised ennui than to keep fighting back and seeing your new, wiser self, fresh with appreciation for life’s willful contrariness, can take you.
Caught up in a chasm of disillusionment and never-quite articulated despair, Rick manages to lose his job, his girlfriend and his apartment in one less-than-stellar day, his only option to drive to Austin, Texas, pick up famed cult musician Stevie Fracasso (responsible with his short-lived band Driven to Distraction for a seminal early 1980s album) and drive back to New York where Fracasso has his first gig in years and Rick has a deadline to write a biography on the musician.
It’s all sounds relatively simple, right?
Well, no, not really, and this is where this rewardingly funny, clever and insightful novel really takes off.
For Stevie Fracasso is Rick’s long-estranged brother whom he hasn’t seen since they were 18 and 11 respectively and Rick was whisked to Australia with his problematic mother and his stepfather while Stevie went to New York to pursue a music career, and the two men haven’t spoken in almost three decades.
That’s a lot of water under the proverbial but Rick doesn’t have that many options left (read: almost none) and so off to Austin he goes, hopefully to save his career and maybe reconnect with family.
Of course, nothing in life is ever that simple, not even when you are far too cheek-by-jowl to existential oblivion for comfort, and Driving Stevie Fracasso glories in the complexities of reuniting with someone you should be technically close to but in reality, don’t really know at all.
As the two men dance around each other on the road, squashed into a bruised and battered 1985 Nissan Stanza, and at various stops along the way, some of which come with some weighty, gobsmackingly surprising revelations, they have to grapple with how life seems to willfully subvert any and all expectations like some sort of mischievously capricious god, and leave you wondering what went wrong.
Stevie seems to be more sanguine about it than Rick, but the truth is, no one emerges from a thousand rounds with living unscathed, and part of the great enjoyment of Driving Stevie Fracasso is watching how the layers start coming off and the two brothers find a way back to each other, though nowhere as easily or seamlessly as you might think.
Driving Stevie Fracasso is, after all, a book that might be funny and quirky but which is also winningly honest about life, and so while you laugh at the shenanigans to which the brothers often accidentally, sometimes deliberately, get up to, you’re sobered by how authentically the novel represents and talks about the messy business of family and living.
“How could the story of me and Stevie end? And how could the story of Jane and me end? Both were full of confusion and fuck-ups and regrets. Maybe if by some miracle I played this right, I would be able to create a new story, one that would sing and chime, like the harmonics of two guitar strings ringing out in perfect unison.” (P. 297)
Overwhelmingly though Driving Stevie Fracasso trumpets the beguiling and often true idea that there are ways back from estrangement, from disillusionment and from a sense of disoconnectedness to yourself and to what matters to you.
It does it quietly but powerfully, with Divola using an engaging mix of humour and honesty to convey the idea that what we feel like is the end of the road, which for Rick is both a literal and figurative thing in this novel, may not be the end of everything at all.
In fact, it might be the start of something altogether good and different even if the getting there is way more confronting and difficult that anyone expected.
Driving Stevie Fracasso is a rare and special thing – weighty and substantial with some really impacting things to say about the human condition, it is also gleefully irreverent, light, bright and breezy, a mix of the emotionally resonant and the humourously quirky replete with memorable, fully-realised characters, an eye on social issues and history and a big heart that never lets you forget life can do you over severely and then some but which offers hope that maybe redemption and new starts are possible, and perhaps, unexpected dog ownership, too.