Too many plates spinning: Nobodies Album Review

Nobodies Album
Caroline Parkhurst
On sale June 2010

Two coworkers, who are huge Caroline Parkhurst fans recommended I check out her new book, The Nobodies Album. I’m a sucker for a great opening sentence, and boy does this book have one.
“There are some stories no one wants to hear.” Bang – instantly intrigued.
However, this book happens to be filled with a few stories that no one needs to read.

We are introduced to our narrator, Octavia Frost, who is on a flight to her editor in New York to drop off a final draft of her next book. It's an ambitious project in which she takes excerpts and final chapters from all her books, and reconfigures the endings. Almost immediately after arriving in the city, she sees a billboard sized headline in Times Square that her famous rock star son, Milo, has just been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Bennita Moffet. Though they have been estranged for many years, Octavia boards the next plane to California to try to see her son.

It’s hard for me to say a book is bad, when the writing is so good. This is one of those cases, because Parkhurst is a descriptive, beautiful writer. She enables the reader to really understand Octavia, and her motivations for choosing to write about the tragedy that struck her family, which lead to the dissolution of her relationship with Milo. There are two major flaws I found, that prevent me from loving the Nobodies Album.

My first problem is with the vignettes sprinkled through the book, from Octavia’s rewritten stories collection. Though they are intended to drop clues to help the reader figure out how Octavia’s husband and daughter were killed years ago, they instead feel very random and rambling. It seemed to me that they are Parkhurst’s own notes that she was never able to develop into fully fleshed out stories. The idea was better than the execution – it’s hard to make the real author separate from her writer character.

Once the reader is taken back to the main story of Milo the murdering musician, the finale is less than dazzling. Avoiding any spoilers, I'll just say that the crime is solved in a most unsatisfying manner. There was a grand buildup, and a tiny whimper of a resolution.

It makes for a good, quick beach read, which is why I decided to keep reading, and put down The Fountainhead until I got out of vacation mode, and could give it my complete attention.