[REVIEW] Wonderland, by Stacey D’Erasmo

242 pages, $22.00

Review by Carley Moore

I didn’t know it, but I’d been waiting for Stacey D’Erasmo’s fourth novel, Wonderland. I’ve been working on a novel for the last year about a young woman who tries to change her life by running away with a female-led indie music band in 1990, and so I’ve steeped myself in rock n’ roll memoirs and journalistic accounts of bands on tour. Many of the books were male affairs, with the exception of two of my favorites—Pamela DeBarres’s groundbreaking and sexually frank groupie memoir I’m With the Band and Sheila Weller’s well-researched and historically-minded Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carley Simon and the Journey of a Generation. These books gave me a unique glimpse into what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated field, and the complex interplay of power, artistry, and sexuality that is the heart of playing in a band and performing for large audiences of adoring fans.

Still, D’Erasmo’s protagonist, Anna Brundage is a revelation. She’s a female artist who is sexual, in and out of love, and determined to stage a comeback though she has no clear idea how to make that happen. Anna’s fortunes and her fame are not particularly tied to those of the men around her, and yet she works with men, fucks and loves them, and calls a couple of them mentors and muses (such as her father, who is a famous conceptual artist, and Ezra and Billy Q., older, more successful musicians who have helped her career). I love Anna because she’s smart, sexy, and really and truly on her own. She’s not looking for any saviors.

In Wonderland, D’Erasmo asks several important questions of those of us who make art and consume it. What’s it like to be an artist with a day job? What is the relationship between artist and fan? What do love and sex look like on the road and in flux, outside of marriage and motherhood? And lastly, what’s it like to be a semi-famous, maybe washed-up 45 year-old musician on a comeback tour through Europe?

We learn, in an early part of the book, what Anna has been doing for the last seven years to make a living. She admits, “I teach carpentry to girls at a private school on the Upper East Side … so, five days a week, I am faced with a hundred little girls in safety goggles, holding hammers.” D’Erasmo returns to the images of these little girls, hammers poised, waiting for instruction, a reminder of the life where you help others make art-like-things instead of making your own art. Many musicians and artists have day jobs. I think of all of us writers who teach, the babysitter of my daughter’s friend, who is the lead singer of an up-and-coming indie band, the barista filmmakers, and the User-experience actors. If late capitalism teaches us nothing else, it’s that you don’t get to do just one thing. Anna knows she’s at a crossroads—she can make this tour work or she can return to those girls. The stakes are high and we feel it in the sound and rhythm of D’Erasmo’s writing, which is chorus and verse, shredding and fingerpicking, silence and encore.

Here’s Anna onstage when she’s got the crowd:

I plant my feet apart to get a grip on the stage; my skirt and top hold me
tight, upright. My hair stays shellacked into place…It’s like running
downhill: I remember this. He eyes me, smiling. The crowd is red in the
red light, the front row reaches toward us, red hands, red fingers,
upturned red faces.

Here she is losing them:

I surrender to the wreck of the evening. I cut the song off, such as it is,
a stanza early, bow and call out, ‘Good night, Hamburg!’ The others stop
playing abruptly; I hope the audience thinks its modern and ragged, but
basically I hate them, so I don’t really care. Just before I go through the
side door, I turn and throw the woman in a veil a kiss. Fuck you,
Hamburg.”

D’Erasmo captures the music of playing and the rhythm of a tour-time, which is both magical and mundane, full of equal parts glory and failure.

The book also asks us to consider Anna’s legacy and what it means to look back on the lives you got close to living, but didn’t quite. In short chapters, we see Anna’s childhood and her father’s too—the little boy who walked around mine shafts and called them a mountain and a young father who blew up train tracks and called it art. And we see Anna’s first marriage and her deep love affair with Simon, a married man she met on tour. In one the most moving chapters of the book, D’Erasmo imagines Anna and Simon walking in Rome, with the daughter they never had. Anna realizes in this one possible version of her future “that I have nothing whatsoever to worry about, all the wars are over. This is the prosperous peace.”

Each lover is a world, a possible future, and a glimpse into a life. Jim, the sound engineer and junkie, she married and then divorced. Simon, the affair that could have been a second marriage and a baby. The Dane, with the tattoo of “Amor” across his belly, who she fucks in the beginning of the novel. William, the older man and club owner in Berlin. Zach, her tour guitarist and surprising lover.

D’Erasmo imagines these lives, gives these lovers their due, and yet Anna stands on her own stage, holding her own guitar, and making her own music.

***

Carley Moore is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Aufgabe, Brainchild, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Linebreak. Her debut young adult novel, The Stalker Chronicles was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2012. Follow her on Twitter: carleymoore2 or find her blogging at: carleymoorewrites.com