Twelve Bar Blues

by Patrick Neate

Overview

The raucous novel that won the prestigious Whitbread Novel Award, Twelve Bar Blues is a virtuoso epic tale of fate and family, jazz and juju that spans three continents and two centuries to tell a story of enduring roots and indelible love. At its heart is Lick Holden, a talented but tormented young musician who sets the jazz scene of early-twentieth-century New Orleans on fire with the passionate tones of his coronet. But Lick's true passion is for his beautiful lost stepsister Sylvie, for whom he searches for among the streets, music halls, and bordellos of the South. Their story reverberates through the decades into the life of Sylvia Di Napoli, a black English former prostitute turned singer who travels from London to New York and Chicago in 1999 in search of the answer to the mystery of her family's roots. Funny and poignant, Twelve Bar Blues is a dynamic novel with all the emotional energy and breakneck tempo of a red-hot Big Easy jazz band that will hook you — like a favorite tune — until the very last page.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802140562
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/11/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Patrick Neate is the author of four previous novels: Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko, which won a Betty Trask Award, Twelve Bar Blues, which won the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, The London Pigeon Wars, and City of Tiny Lights and Jerusalem. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

Neate's novel (winner of the Whitbread) poses the question: Can an English writer pen the great American jazz novel? In the 18th-century African kingdom of Zimindo, a Zimindian named Zike is abducted by complicated magical/erotic means and eventually ends up on the slave market in New Orleans. There Zike disappears from history. A descendant, however, blows his way, if not into history, at least into legend. Fortis "Lick" Holden from Mount Marter, La., is a cornet player of the same generation as Louis Armstrong. Lick learns his licks in reform school. His mentor, Professor Hoop, keys him into the secret of the whole musician, which entails using all four parts of the body. Lick progresses from his chops to his head to his heart, but he doesn't get the fourth part down the groin until he meets back up with his adopted sister, Sylvie, who is pale enough to pass for white. After Lick returns from New Orleans to his native town, he discovers Sylvie living as the quadroon mistress of a white plantation owner. Lick's affair with her spells disaster in the racially charged atmosphere of the South, but Sylvie escapes to New York City, passes for white and marries an Italian man. Her skin color skips a generation, but expresses itself luxuriously in her granddaughter, Sylvia Di Napoli, who thereby arouses the wrath of her racist father. The novel waltzes between Lick's woes and Sylvie's genealogical quest, with a subplot involving the return to Africa of another of Zike's descendants, Coretta Pink, aka "Olurunbunmi Durowoju." Neate's story is shot through with salient observations about jazz culture, although in the end it doesn't grab the brass ring: the great American jazz novel is yet to be written. Agent, Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This is the story of the African diaspora set to a raunchy jazz beat as recorded by a sincere white music critic. The novel interweaves three shifting settings and periods. The first is an African tale circa 1790, in which slavery (amid much folksy talk involving sex and Father Sun and Cousin Moon) rears its ugly head. The second features jazz cornet virtuoso "Lick" Holden, whose early life in New Orleans closely mirrors that of Louis Armstrong, who makes a cameo. The final, present-day story involves a Pam Greer look-alike who bills herself as a "prostitute (retired) and a singer (unemployed)." She is London-born but returns to the United States in search of her roots, along the way picking up a very young Brit and an African chieftain. In his U.S. debut, a surprise winner of the 2002 Whitbread Award, Neate swiftly moves his rollicking stories to their tidy resolution. How well this smooth amalgam of Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Burroughs will translate on these more politically correct shores is anybody's guess. For larger fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/02.] Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Jazz, history, and love across a hundred years and several continents, in a US debut by British music journalist Neate, winner of the 2002 Whitbread Award. The origins of jazz are in dispute, but one thing is pretty much agreed on: If it wasn't born in New Orleans, it damn well grew up there. Just like Lick Holden. Lick started out life at the dawn of the 20th century in Cooltown, one of the many black districts in the Crescent City, and he soaked up music from his earliest days. Working as an ice boy making deliveries to the Storyville saloons, Lick got to know some of the greatest black musicians of the day and got one of them, a local character called the Professor, to give him cornet lessons. Soon he was peddling music rather than ice to the habitués of Storyville's brothels and bars, and eventually he became known as one of the great horn men of his day. Throughout his career, he was in love with Sylvie Black, his stepsister, with whom he had a brief affair before she ran off and disappeared from his life. Obsessively, futilely, Lick searches for Sylvie in bars and clubs from New York to the Gulf of Mexico, gradually squandering his talent as a musician and turning to a life of petty crime, until he is murdered in the 1920s. Interspersed with the chapters of Lick's history are accounts of the efforts of one Sylvia Di Napoli, a black singer from London, to trace her ancestry-a search that brings her to America and eventually New Orleans. As we watch the progress of two narrative lines, it's clear they'll intersect at some point-but the pleasure of the tale isn't one of revelations so much as portraiture, the re-creation of a lost world of music, lust, and fame. A bit too crowded andbusy but, still, a fine depiction, in vivid and indelible colors, of a bygone age.

Kirkus Reviews