The Sweet Life of a Musician

ANYTHING GOES

A Novel

By Madison Smartt Bell

Pantheon

308 pages, $24

Jesse, at 20, is already a four-year veteran bass player in a bush-league band. “Anything Goes” is his laconic account of one turning-point season on the road, as the plus-or-minus four-man group follows the sun on an East Coast track from Nashville to Key West, Fla., and come summer, north to Vermont, serving up eclectic, home-brewed sets of rock-blues-country-pop in back-street dives.

Anything Goes just happens to be this band’s name, cited straight-faced, with nary a nod to Cole Porter until the novel’s sweet end.

Nashville-raised, blue-collar Jesse is on the slight-but-athletic side, pretty-faced, cool as icy mint tea and fairly irresistible to the awfully young and available girls he tries, at least on guilt-stricken mornings after, not to take entirely for granted. Like his kind of music, Jesse seems to exist mainly in and for the present. The future’s on hold: “I knew plenty of guys who played in bands that from the way they talked and acted had just as soon be swinging a nine-pound hammer.... Only I didn’t have no other ideas either.”

As for the past, he gives no last name, nor details of his motherless childhood, apart from some ugly recollections of his father’s brutal beatings. This absence leaves a reader to puzzle over how Jesse came by the unusual “voice” of this novel, a language that combines hick grammar with a vocabulary that keeps words like “ochre” and “deferential” within easy reach. It’s a beguiling blend, reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s lyrically gifted protagonists, uncommon in life.

Jesse’s youth--his fervent coolness and wonder at the still-fresh world--is entirely convincing. In presenting Jesse, critically acclaimed author Madison Smartt Bell (“Master of the Crossroads”) has artfully effaced himself.

Structurally, “Anything Goes” builds episodically, as a picaresque journey, with an added boost from concept rather than through much knotting and twisting of plot. “Anything Goes” touches all the traditional bases of the coming-of-age subgenre. For openers, there is the hero’s jaded cluelessness: The first chapter is titled “Never Mind.” It’s a guy’s world, in which women are lovely or witchy ciphers, and the real, complex relationships are those that bind buddies. There is discipleship to be served under a peevish guru, eventually to be recognized as an ersatz father: the band’s founder, Perry, a self-disciplined philosopher of rock who limits binging on his home-farmed dope to off-road breaks.

Another classic element is the hero’s struggle and self-extrication from Oedipal flypaper. For Jesse, already no stranger to the urge to patricide, a tempting Older Woman turns up in the form of a honey-voiced new singer. There’s something about enigmatic Estelle, gap-toothed, swaying hips, baby and all, who turns out to be the band’s salvation and his ne’er-do-well father’s main squeeze. After further setbacks and tests comes the hero’s epiphany of self-worth, and ultimately the heady experience of a guy standing tall on his own two feet.

There are vivid delights along the road. What could have been curdled to high melodrama is wryly underplayed. Keeping things simple, the band calls all the roadhouses they play “the Black Cat.” In Myrtle Beach, “The Black Cat closed for Thanksgiving Day.... Friday night we were back in action but it was slow ... less people and the ones that were there all kind of groggy, like overfed snakes.” Later a girl turned up, “executing a sort of a white-chick belly dance.... She had on a white dress shirt with the tails lashed tight and high over a belly that pretty well cried out personal trainer.” In the end, however, it’s all about the music. What Jesse, Perry, Estelle and the boys love, or don’t, and why; and how the music is made, chord by chord, bridge to riff to mood.

“Lonely Avenue.” “Blue.” “Roomful of Tears.” Each of the chapter titles turns out to be also the title of a song, either a tune covered by the band, or an original composition. And not a fictional original, though introduced through and embedded in a novel, but a real tune off a downloadable set of tracks. Directions for getting to the “Anything Goes” album (music by Bell, lyrics by Wyn Cooper) are right up front in the acknowledgments. Or, as Cole Porter rhymed it: “ ... writing prose ... Anything goes!”