Fictional folk singers have generally been the butt of the joke, holy fools or total idiots: Think of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” when John Belushi’s Bluto brutally smashes the guitar of the young man whose only offense is singing “I gave my love a cherry…,” the sincere saps of “A Mighty Wind” or the Coen brothers’ prickly, unattractive Llewyn Davis. With the glorious late-career renaissance of Joni Mitchell and the eye-opening recent Joan Baez documentary “I Am a Noise,” however, perhaps the time is right for Jodie Rattler, the protagonist of Jane Smiley’s new novel, “Lucky.”
Born in 1949, Rattler grows up in St. Louis with her mother (“the problem was that my father was married to someone else”) and a large extended family where half-hour singalongs follow dinner. Her “luck” begins with a talismanic $86 roll of $2 bills she wins at age 6 at the racetrack with her Uncle Drew. Through a combination of talent and happenstance, she becomes a jobbing singer-songwriter while still at Penn State.
The lives of Jodie’s real-life influences — Joni, Joan, Judy, Janis and their contemporaries — were fraught with incident, from drug abuse and unwanted children to secret marriages and suicide. Rattler’s problem, beyond introversion, is of a different dimension: money (too much). Her debut Elektra single — and songwriters of the Spotify era may want to look away now — earns her three royalty checks totaling roughly $215,000, which, invested by her uncle, is worth a cool half million by 1974.
Jodie, who “didn’t need the success,” becomes her own directionless trust fund kid. There is a 1974 solo album, the admirably named “Fair Isle,” that doesn’t seem to sell, and by the age of 30, she wants “to use my performances to get to places I hadn’t been before, to explore.” Less of a vocation, then, and more an opportunity for sightseeing? The song titles and their accompanying lyrics are well observed (though it’s odd that none of them seem to have choruses) but as often happens in fiction, the band names — the Scats, the Ceiling Fan Fliers and the Garter Belts — aren’t.
Jodie finds and loses love, has, by her count, 23 compensatory affairs and returns home to look after her aging family, but doesn’t have enough drive to sustain a career. Her life in music is an impossible fantasia that requires no manager or agent, functions without interviews and radio appearances, and — least likely of all — features band rehearsals that start at 8 in the morning.
“Lucky” also presents surprising misinformation about, among other things, the British 20-pence piece (minted here a decade too early), toad-in-the-hole (which isn’t “neatly housed in a puffy pastry,” or any pastry) and the availability of birth control to unmarried women in the U.K. after the 1967 Family Planning Act; she only had to ask a doctor.
There is an undercurrent of anxiety in the book that I thought presaged a twist (the trauma that underpins Jodie’s lack of vim, for example) but this shoe hovers without dropping. Our narrator has proved herself a rather linear and fussy thinker — somewhat disappointingly, given her freewheeling spirit and laissez-faire attitude to her career — yet just when the reader is hoping for a satisfying fade, the epilogue takes a wild left swerve. It’s as if Smiley has awakened from a trance and sought to distance herself from everything that’s gone before with a little bad-faith bargain-basement postmodernism (though this does have the fringe benefit of providing some cover for the musical bum notes).
Earlier, Jodie admits that even audience applause is not much of a pleasure “because when you finish your set, you are thinking about the mistakes you made and what you might have done better,” adding, “Maybe this is true for all musicians.” I don’t think it is. But perhaps a novelist might think so.
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