Publishers Weekly
03/25/2019
In 1965, high school junior Jeff Cole, the hero of this ambitious if predictable novel from Shiner (Heroes and Villains), is transferred to a new school in Dallas, where he meets fellow student Alex Montoya, who becomes a lifelong friend. The two share a passion for music, which, unsurprisingly, isn’t supported by Cole’s emotionally distant father, Steve. Cole’s path to becoming a professional guitar player is further hampered when he loses part of one finger in an accident. Of course, he overcomes that obstacle, and friction with an increasingly unsympathetic Steve eventually prompts him to move away from home for good. Alex, who’s part of the same band, assists in this move. The ups and downs of Cole’s love life and career follow familiar patterns, and the major events in U.S. history between 1965 and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 serve as background noise rather than actually affecting Cole, Alex, and the other characters. Readers should be prepared for passages of technical musical detail (“C, then A. Just a barred A moving down the neck. Hold that last A”). Serious students of rock music will best appreciate this outing. (May)
From the Publisher
A story of the sixties that is generous but unflinching, sweeping but intimate, fictional but true. For everyone who's wondered how we got from there to here and also where we might go next. Hugely ambitious, simply beautiful” —Karen Joy Fowler
“A powerful piece of work... The prose is terrific, and the sense of time and place is first rate. A brilliant requiem for our generation and all our dreams'” —George R.R. Martin
“A history of a generation seen through the lens of music – but it's not just about music, but politics, sex, money, personal responsibility, idealism and corruption, youth and age” —John Kessel
“A page-turning tour de force. Anyone with a passion for rock and roll storytelling at its very best must not deny themselves the opportunity to read this tale. A masterpiece” —Iain Matthews
“In Outside the Gates of Eden Lewis Shiner displays the panoramic historical consciousness of a Pynchon or DeLillo, and yet every page is suffused with a humble and scrupulous humanity, scrubbed of abstractions or grandiosity – you simply live with his people and know them and love them” —Jonathan Lethem
“An engrossing and realistic novel about such important matters as the passage of time, the disappointment of hope and the role of music in society” —TLS
“From Woodstock to the age of Trump, this sprawling, ambitious novel straddles half a century... It is a seductive, effortless read and Shiner's brio as a storyteller never flags'” —Mail on Sunday
“Absolutely bloody fantastic... Hugely uplifting, terribly sad, totally brilliant'” —Weekend Sport
“A poignant and powerful swansong to the end of the twentieth century, to the demise of the wide-eyed, often drug-fuelled, innocence of the Summer of Love and Woodstock; an elegy to ideals and dreams lost. This is one of those rare books that fills me with awe and envy in equal measure” —Matthew Harffy
Kirkus Reviews
2019-03-03
Sprawling generational novel that takes the flower children of the beautiful 1960s through their paces and deposits them in the ugly world of the Trump-ian teens.
All things, including the title of novelist/music writer Shiner's (Dark Tangos, 2011, etc.) latest, begin and end with Bob Dylan, author of lyrics that "were the secret handshake, the tap on the shoulder, the beckoning hand from the alleyway." Jeff Cole, dutiful child of the middle class, is on a scholarship at a fancy-lad school in New York, where he meets a young Mexican, "good-looking and confident," named Alex Montoya, his family blessed with a vastly larger bank account. "Once you get past a certain point," Alex shrugs, "being rich is a full-time job all by itself." Alex knows all there is to know about music and Cole, nothing—so, there in 1965, Alex takes it on himself to induct Cole by means of, yes, "Highway 61 Revisited," or, as he calls it, "Lesson One." Cole learns—and does he. Soon he's playing before adoring crowds, scoring big with the ladies, hitting the road for the Golden Gate and acid sessions with the Dead and the Doors and the Airplane among "runaways, acid-heads and straights, the seekers, the believers, the gawkers, all responding to a desire that didn't have a name yet." Over hundreds of winningly spun pages, Alex, Cole, and a host of supporting players seek that desire, finding themselves variously here at Woodstock, there on a Virginia commune, there at Berkeley and the Sunset Strip, then later seeking meaning in middle-class, tenured lives of scaled-down dreams that grow large again once the 2016 election cycle looms and the good old days look better and better. Though the book is a touch too long, it holds its energy without flagging, and every note sounds true.
If James Michener were hipper on music—and everyone from Dylan to Country Joe to Jerry and Janis shows up in Shiner's pages—he might have written this instead of The Drifters. Reality-tinged nostalgia for those who were there—or wish they were.
