Following five books of poetry, Greg Hewett (Blindsight; darkacre) astonishes with a transcendent first novel about friendship, desire, music, loss, and love in its many forms. No Names is rough-edged, glittering, and brilliant as it spans decades and lives, traveling from a fictional American refinery town to Europe's capitals, from Copenhagen to a place known simply as the Island, and back again.
Solitary teenager Mike's world expands when he meets easy, outgoing Pete, with whom he shares a love of literature and especially music, and a nearly instant firm bond. Music, for Mike, is all bound up with sex and violence and epiphany. The two guitarists form a punk band in the late 1970s, and with their two bandmates take off on a rocketing tour of the United States and then Europe that ends in enigma and tragedy.
In 1993, another angst-ridden teen from the same gritty, class-divided hometown discovers a dusty record in his mother's attic and goes looking for a mostly forgotten punk band. Isaac pursues the mystery of the No Names until he unearths Mike on a remote island in the Faroes. Mike, Pete, and Isaac, among others, form permutations and re-combinations of friendship, affection, artistic inspiration, love, and desire.
Hewett brings a poet's ear for language to a complexly layered story that treats sex, drugs, and rock & roll as simultaneously hard-grained and gorgeous. His evocations of music and the power of the muse are tantalizing and apt, as are his lines about the strain of finding oneself, of love and lust and pain. Hewett's first novel is scintillating and absolutely unforgettable. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia