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: "It's like I'm busting out of the prison of myself and giving to the world whatever part of me that's worth anything." 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 will pursue the mystery of the No Names until he unearths Mike on a remote island in the Faroes, where the haunted older man has been living as a hermit since the band's 1978 dissolution: "a mythical musician who, for a time, dwelt here and filled the place with songs." Mike is supported by a Danish classical pianist named Daniel who had briefly been a friend to the band. On the island, Mike describes to Daniel "a state of ecstasy, or ekstasis--that is, becoming entranced, being brought out of oneself" by the aurora borealis, but these lines could as easily describe their relationship with music, or with one another. Mike, Pete, Daniel, 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. By the time No Names flashes forward to 2018, readers will be spellbound, and as much in love with the novel's protagonists as they are variously entangled with one another. Hewett's first novel is scintillating and absolutely unforgettable. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: This dazzling first novel applies poetry to the overawing power of art, friendship, and the ways in which many forms of love blend into one.