Record Palace

by Susan Wheeler

Book Overview

Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, Record Palace is an eccentric debut novel about jazz, art, race, and identity. In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago's Loop, telling myself I... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555974201
• ISBN13: 9781555974206
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 7.2"

Customer Reviews

Brilliantly voiced, profoundly felt, sweeping in its effect

Susan Wheeler's first novel is one of the best American fictions of recent years -- yet it's been criminally neglected. Though I've already had many good things to say in print about RECORD PALACE, I must also praise it electronically, in order to do something about so dismaying an injustice. The plot works us through a timeless drama of the sick made well by the encounter with those still worse. The neglected Califiornia girl Cyndi arrives in Chicago to study art, as the '70s turn to the '80s; however, she expends most of her mental energy on jazz -- when not wasting it in alcohol. These two avocations seem at first equally unhealthy, because Cyndi depends on such a skin-of-the-teeth source for her jazz, a seedy North Loop store called RECORD PALACE. But the Palace does carry sublime and hard-to-locate music, among its tottering stacks of records. More importantly, the place is presided over by the girl's improbable eventual savior, Acie. 60ish, sleeping on a mattress in the back room, Acie is bloated and missing an eye, otherwise ailing, and above all burdened with brains and spunk far beyond his status. He's an astonishing character for a white poet (Wheeler has won a number of awards for her verse) to have come up with, and often he's rendered via his own voice, a great poetic bop voice, full of razor wit while also meditative. The plot concerns some forged art, a couple of hopeless love affairs, and above all a fractured African-American family coming part of the way back together. In this reconciliation the later mayor Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, plays a small put important role. The whole of Chicago, in fact, figures in the drama. In the final pages, after Cyndi's and Acie's smaller drama is done with -- they're never lovers, incidentally; Wheeler has a far better imagination than that -- with Washington's election in '83, "the spirit of the city, in sidewalks, in the stores, shifted overnight, wholly, perceptibly..." Few novels risk a portrait of such a varied and divided community, and fewer still bring off that panaorama while also remaining true to the least flutter of hurt feelings or the subtle ascent of a Coltrane solo. Yet such is the accomplishment RECORD PALACE, in which a poet fulfills the novelist's highest ambitions: "so much of a brawny city, so many lives coming together, pivoting in this beat."