One of my favourite editing projects in recent memory, Jamie Fitzpatrick’s amazing second novel, The End of Music (Breakwater Books), launched a whole year ago and I was buried in other work at the time and didn’t say a word about the book here. This, I realize, is a little bit of an if-a-tree-falls situation given the traffic on this particular website but it mattered to me that I hadn’t talked about Jamie’s book. I worked on his first novel, You Could Believe in Nothing (Nimbus, 2011), several years ago and bits of it still rattle through my head, which I think is saying a lot given how many other books for work and books for fun it has to compete with in there. In his Twitter profile the author calls this new one “a novel about old grudges and new dreams and big bands in small towns,” which I like a lot as a tidy summing up of a novel that revels in messes and ambiguities.
Part of the pleasure of working on subsequent books with the same writer is seeing what stands out as their style or set of preoccupations even when the characters and time period and subject matter are quite separate between books (as they are in this case). If he has a “thing” I would say it is the simultaneous takedown and defence of nostalgia and sentimentality. There’s a steady undercutting that somehow leaves the source of those feelings intact and forgivable.
Reviews and goings on are still going on for The End of Music. First, it’s one of four finalists for next year’s Newfoundland & Labrador Public Libraries’ NLReads series, in the good company of Sharon Bala’s The Boat People, Trudy Morgan-Cole’s Most Anything You Please and Lisa Moore’s Something for Everyone. There will be a showdown of sorts in February.
Then, when I cleared my backlog of magazines from the coffee table the other day and belatedly opened the latest issue of The Malahat, I found this not only positive but quite in-depth review written by Brandon McFarlane. He calls The End of Music “an accomplished experimental novel that plays with melodic irony” and that “complicates many of the ‘old themes’ of Atlantic Canadian writing” (which I happen to know is one of Jamie’s projects. His first novel includes the line “That’s not what Newfoundland is for.”) You can check out the whole review here.
