Rick Bass's fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his memoir, Why I Came West, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Nashville Chrome
by Rick Bass
eBook
-
ISBN-13:
9780547523903
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication date: 09/14/2010
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 272
- File size: 910 KB
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A “splendid” novel based on the rise and fall of the Browns, Arkansas siblings who became country music legends, by an award-winning author (Dallas Morning News).
Late in 1959, the Brown siblings—Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed—were enjoying unprecedented international success, rivaled only by their longtime friend Elvis Presley. They had a bona fide mega hit on their hands, which topped both the country and pop charts and gave rise to the polished sound of the multibillion dollar country music industry we know today. Mesmerized by the Browns’ haunting harmonies, the Beatles even tried to learn their secret. Their unique harmony, however, was only achievable through shared blood, and the trio’s perfect pitch was honed by a childhood spent listening for the elusive pulse and tone of an impeccably tempered blade at their parent’s Arkansas sawmill.
But the Browns’ celebrity couldn’t survive the world changing around them, and the bonds of family began to fray along with the fame. Heartbreakingly, the novel jumps between the Browns’ promising past and the present, which finds Maxine—once supremely confident and ravenous in her pursuit of applause—ailing and alone. As her world increasingly narrows, her hunger for just one more chance to secure her legacy only grows, as does her need for human connection.
Lyrical and nuanced, Nashville Chrome hits all the right grace notes with its vivid evocation of an era in American music, while at its heart it is a wrenching meditation on the complexities of fame and of one family—forgotten yet utterly unforgettable when reclaimed by Bass—who experienced them firsthand.
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“Rick Bass deftly weaves the true and fictional into a wonderful novel of the rise and fall of one of country music’s greatest acts—the Browns. It’s as lyrical, plaintive, and true as the best country music, which is exactly what the Browns made. Nashville Chrome is a great celebration of the Browns, and above all, a terrific read.”
—Thomas Cobb author of Crazy Heart and Shavetail
Based on the career arc of a 1950s singing trio, this mythic novel is sadder than most country songs and stranger than any.
A book that defies categorization, and that reads more like cultural criticism than fictionalized biography, this narrative about the "bondage of fame" represents a radical departure for Bass (The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana,2009, etc.). Where the author writes often about the natural world in both his fiction and nonfiction, here he treats the Browns, a sibling country group remembered mainly for "The Three Bells," as if they were fate's playthings: "It had to be a freak of nature, a phenomenon, a mutation of history," he proclaims of their harmonies. "As if some higher order had decided to use them as puppets—to hold them hostage to the powerful gifts whose time it was to emerge." The narrative tone is often so portentously oracular and deliriously hyperbolic that the reader wonders whether there's some irony intended, particularly when the grasp of the facts seems tenuous. Yet the descent of Maxine Brown into alcoholism and anonymity is ultimately tragic, as the narrative alternates between her bitter memories "after nearly fifty years of being forgotten" and the formative years of the Browns, whose sound "healed some deep wound within whoever heard it, whatever the wound." Supporting players include Elvis Presley (for whom Bonnie Brown was his one true love, according to this account), Jim Reeves and Chet Atkins, though this is a novel less about individual characters than about "the heartbreak of immortality and the bitterness of pursuing it," and how "the most constant thing in the world is change." At the mercy of fate's furies, the three Browns arrive at very different destinies, leaving Maxine to wonder whether "her life has been a huge mistake, a huge tragedy of waste and squander."
An odd yet oddly affecting book.