Shotgun lovesongs

Review by New York Times Review

SOMETIME AFTER CHARLES DICKENS and before Jonathan Franzen, the heart on the shirt sleeve seems to have gone out of style in the literary world, replaced by irony, satirical remove and a more subdued, presumably cleareyed, emotional palette. But once in a while, it's nice to get your eyes wet and your heart beating rapidly to a nostalgic tune. Nickolas Butler's "Shotgun Lovesongs" is a good old-fashioned novel, a sure-footed and unabashedly sentimental first effort that deserves to be among the standouts in this year's field of fiction debuts. The book follows a group of childhood friends from the town of Little Wing, Wis., as circumstances and revelations force them to navigate their changing relationships. Like all good ensembles, Butler's cast brings together a dynamic array of characters, all of them moving in divergent directions - though yearning for roughly the same moral center - as they rewrite their adult narratives amid emotional, financial and historical turbulence. Lee Sutton is Little Wing's most famous native son. A successful folk-rock musician (seemingly inspired by the real-life singer-songwriter Justin Vernon, of the indie-rock favorite Bon Iver), Lee has assumed mythic status for his exploits and generosity despite visiting his hometown only occasionally. "His songs were our anthems," the narrator explains in the opening pages. "They were our bullhorns and microphones and jukebox poems." (Book titles, too, he might have added, since Butler's novel shares its slightly awkward name with Lee's breakthrough album.) "We adored him," the narrator continues; "our wives adored him." Lee, however, is not the only local kid to make good in the wider world. On the heels of a successful finance career in Chicago, Kip returns to Little Wing in a sentimental attempt to reinvent the old feed mill, the town's largest edifice and once its lifeblood. "Think about all that space," he says. "Offices. Light industry. Restaurants, pubs, cafes." But even his friends think Kip's plan is ill conceived: "You think people will want to have dinner inside the old mill?" Salt-of-the-earth Hank is the novel's most sympathetic character, and perhaps the one who most clearly reflects the reality of Little Wing, or for that matter heartland America. Hank's life is a far cry from that of his best friend, Lee. While Lee has spent much of his adulthood jetsetting around the globe, Hank has devoted himself with loyal servitude almost exclusively to his wife, his children and his family's marginally profitable old dairy farm. He never leaves Little Wing, never achieves fame or fortune and never strives for new horizons - yet he possesses everything wholesome to which Lee aspires. As personal histories collide and secrets are revealed, the characters, too, reveal themselves to a satisfying degree. Butler creates empathy for his cast the tried-and-true way: through action and reaction. His language generally serves both the story and the characters well, tending toward the plain-spoken and the declarative, though on occasion it chokes on its own exuberance - Butler can stretch too far in an attempt to find the poetic in the banal, or succumb to overwrought sentiment, as when he describes the rose petals cupped in Lee's palm at one of four weddings in the book: "They felt about as fragile as my feelings, those petals, something that could be blown away by the smallest gust of wind." Though clearly the story's catalyst, Lee - whose homecomings never fail to elicit repercussions, and around whom the other characters' fates are always somehow circling - doesn't quite earn his emotional frailty. He may, in fact, be the least interesting member of the bunch. The real star of "Shotgun Lovesongs" is Hank's wife (and high school sweetheart), Beth, who provides the novel's most substantial female voice. Both insider and outsider to Little Wing's buddy culture, Beth offers our clearest glimpses into the hearts of the men around her. While Butler writes with a refreshing lack of conceit, he occasionally indulges a self-conscious tendency to imbue objects with a larger significance. What is an "American sky," anyway? This preoccupation with hitting an American note rings time and again, with varying degrees of success. Late in the story, Lee observes: "America, I think, is about poor people playing music and poor people sharing food and poor people dancing, even when everything else in their lives is so desperate and so dismal that it doesn't seem that there should be any room for any music, any extra food or any extra energy for dancing. And people can say that I'm wrong, that we're a puritanical people, an evangelical people, a selfish people, but I don't believe that. I don't want to believe that." All this literary pretense is unnecessary, because Butler has written an unmistakably American novel - and a good one. We don't need "American skies" to tell us that. We need no more than the yearning of Butler's conflicted characters and the considerable charms of his well-drawn setting in this bighearted, winning book. Indeed, we need no more than to smell the pickled eggs and cheap beer of Butler's Little Wing, or to hear the hoarse croaking of Bob Seger from the jukebox in the corner of the V.F.W., to know that we're in America. JONATHAN EVISON is the author of the novels "All About Lulu," "West of Here" and "The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 6, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

The hearty Midwest, which thrums and beats through tiny Little Wing, Wisconsin an Anytown, USA, if there ever was one assumes the whole soul of Butler's fetching debut, if only to end up proving how unassuming it is. Chapters are voiced alternately by five longtime friends: there are Henry and Beth, married and tethered to their farm and kids; gold-hearted Ronny, babied by the others after a spell of rough living as a rodeo king; Kip, who's restoring Little Wing's decrepit old mill after pulling down millions in Chicago; and Lee, the newly successful musician whose haunting first album lends the novel its name. In bars and under stars, through this small group of those who've never left, those who regret leaving, and those who wish they had the town in their rearview mirror, Butler examines just what it means to be from a place and if sharing that from-some-place is more a reason to stay in touch, or a reason not to. Readers can feel the winter cold on the other side of the neon sign and hear the peanut shells crunching underfoot.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Butler uses multiple narrators to tell the story of a group of friends, born and raised in Little Wing, Wis., in this affecting but precious debut novel. The book opens with Hank, who became a farmer and stayed in the small town to raise a family with his wife Beth. Lee, the indie rocker who made it big but regularly comes back to Little Wing, has his say, along with Kip, who traded commodities in Chicago but has moved back. And Ronnie is a little "slow," damaged by rodeo riding. Their voices and their memories create a rich, overlapping narrative that is, at bottom, a love letter to the Midwest and its small, mostly forgotten towns. The characters are in that restless period of their early 30s: Hank and Beth have a family, but both long for something different (including more money); Lee gets married and divorced and wrestles with fame (the title of the book refers to a bestselling album of his); Kip is trying to write the next chapter of his life. The author romanticizes the landscape and the notion of community-as if such ideals were limited to small town, agrarian dreams. More seriously, his characters are too similar-all of them too lyrical and too insightful. Butler's prose is often beautiful, and the narrative churns along well, but the book just isn't convincing enough to get the reader to buy all the way in. First printing: 150,000 copies. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Leland (Lee) Sutton left his tiny Wisconsin town when he became a famous rocker but returns when the pressures of fame and an unsuccessful marriage are too much for him. Butler's debut novel uses multiple narrators and a nonchronological structure to tell the story of Lee and his circle of friends; best friend Henry (Hank), a farmer with a hidden talent for painting; Hank's wife, Beth, who had a brief, secret romance with Lee; outwardly arrogant but inwardly insecure stock trader Kip; and lost soul Ronny, a former rodeo rider and recovering alcoholic. VERDICT While not ignoring the economic hardships of contemporary rural life, Butler stacks the deck a bit in favor of small-town values vs. big city shallowness. Overall, though, this is a warm and absorbing depiction of male friendship. Lee and Hank's compassion toward Ronny is particularly touching, and Beth, the sole female narrator, is as nuanced and believable a character as her male counterparts. With the author's connection to indie musician Bon Iver and a movie deal already in the works, expect interest and demand. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/13.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A debut novel that delves so deeply into the small-town heartland that readers will accept its flaws as part of its charm. "Write what you know" is the first dictum directed toward aspiring fiction writers, and there's no doubt that Butler knows his fictional Little Wing inside out. It's a Wisconsin farm town not far from Eau Claire, where the author was raised, and it holds a central place in the hearts of those who came of age thereparticularly the four men who were boyhood friends and who narrate the novel's alternating chapters, along with the fifth, a woman who was the childhood sweetheart of at least two of them. Beth and Henry are the married couple who remained to farm in Little Wing and, despite their financial struggles, are in some ways the envy of the others. Lee, who is Henry's best friend, has become "America's most famous flannel-wearing indie troubadour," an artist so successful he hobnobs with those that others know mainly from celebrity magazines. But he only feels at home in Little Wing, where he found his voice and wrote the songs on the album that catapulted him to fame (and gives the novel its title). Kip made millions for others and did well for himself as a broker in Chicago but has returned to Little Wing to restore its mill as a commercial center and to show off the beautiful woman who will be his wife. Ronny left town as a rodeo rider and an alcoholic and has returned to recover after a brain-damaging mishap. There are four weddings in the novel, a few separations, a bunch of drunken adventures and confessions, and a fairly preposterous ending. But there is also a profound empathy for the characters and the small-town dynamic that the reader will likely share, an appreciation for what "America was, or could be." Despite some soap-opera machinations and occasional literary overreach, the novel will strike a responsive chord in any reader who has found his life reflected in a Bob Seger song.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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SHOTGUN LOVESONGS, Ch. 1WE INVITED HIM TO ALL of our weddings; he was famous. We addressed the invitations to his record company's skyscraper in New York City so that the gaudy, gilded envelopes could be forwarded to him on tourin Beirut, Helsinki, Tokyo. Places beyond our ken or our limited means. He sent back presents in battered cardboard boxes festooned with foreign stampsbirthday gifts of fine scarves or perfume for our wives, small delicate toys or trinkets upon the births of our children: rattles from Johannesburg, wooden nesting dolls from Moscow, little silk booties from Taipei. He would call us sometimes, the connection scratchy and echoing, a chorus of young women giggling in the background, his voice never sounding as happy as we expected it to.Months would pass before we saw his face again, and then, he would arrive home, bearded and haggard, his eyes tired but happily relieved. We could tell that Lee was glad to see us, to be back in our company. We always gave him time to recover before our lives resumed together, we knew he needed time to dry out and regain his balance. We let him sleep and sleep. Our wives brought him casseroles and lasagnas, bowls of salad and freshly baked pies.He liked to ride a tractor around his sprawling property. We assumed he liked feeling the hot daylight, the sun and fresh air on his pale face. The slow speed of that old John Deere, so reliable and patient. The earth rolling backward beneath him. There were no crops on his land of course, but he rode the tractor through the fallow fields of prairie grasses and wildflowers, a cigarette between his lips, or a joint. He was always smiling on that tractor, his hair all flyaway and light blond and in the sunlight it was like the fluff of a seeding dandelion.He had taken another name for the stage but we never called him by that name. We called him Leland, or just plain Lee, because that was his name. He lived in an old schoolhouse away from things, away from our town, Little Wing, and maybe five miles out into the countryside. The name on his mailbox read: L SUTTON. He had built a recording studio in the small, ancient gymnasium, padding the walls with foam and thick carpeting. There were platinum records up on the walls. Photographs of him with famous actresses and actors, politicians, chefs, writers. His gravel driveway was long and potted with holes, but even this was not enough to deter some of the young women who sought him out. They came from around the world. They were always beautiful.Lee's success had not surprised us. He had simply never given up on his music. While the rest of us were in college or the army or stuck on our family farms, he had holed up in a derelict chicken coop and played his battered guitar in the all-around silence of deepest winter. He sang in an eerie falsetto, and sometimes around the campfire it would make you weep in the unreliable shadows thrown by those orange-yellow flames and white-black smoke. He was the best among us.He wrote songs about our place on earth: the everywhere fields of corn, the third-growth forests, the humpbacked hills and grooved-out draws. The knife-sharp cold, the too-short days, the snow, the snow, the snow. His songs were our anthemsthey were our bullhorns and microphones and jukebox poems. We adored him; our wives adored him. We knew all the words to the songs and sometimes we were in the songs.***Kip was going to be married in October inside a barn he'd renovated for the occasion. The barn stood on a farm of horses, the land there delineated by barbed-wire fences. The barn was adjacent to a small country cemetery where it was entirely possible to count every lichen-encrusted tombstone and know how many departed were lying in repose under that thick sod. A census, so to speak. Everyone was invited to the wedding. Lee had even cut short the leg of an Australian tour in order to attend, though to all of us, Kip and Lee seemed the least close among our friends. Kip, as far as I knew, didnt even own any of Lee's albums, and whenever we saw Kip driving around town it was inevitably with a Bluetooth lodged in his ear, his mouth working as if he were still out on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange.Kip had just returned to Wisconsin after about nine years of trading commodities in Chicago. It was as if the world had just gotten small again. For years, decades, our whole lives, really we'd listened to the farm reports in our trucks on the AM radio. Sometimes you'd even hear Kip's voice during those broadcasts as he was interviewed from his office down in Chicago, that familiar self-assured baritone narrating fluctuations in numbers that dictated whether or not we could afford orthodontia for our children, winter vacations, or new boots, telling us things we didnt exactly understand and yet already knew. Our own futures were sown into those reports of milk and corn prices, wheat and soy. Hog-bellies and cattle. Far from our farms and mills, Kip had made good, manipulating the fruits of our labor. We respected him just the same. He was fiercely intelligent, for one thing, his eyes burned in their sockets as he listened intently to us complain about seed salesmen, pesticides, fertilizer pricing, our machines, the fickle weather. He kept a farmer's almanac in his back pocket, understood our obsession with rain. Had he not gone away, he might have been a prodigious farmer himself. The almanac, he once told me, was almost entirely obsolete, but he liked to carry it around. "Nostalgia," he explained.After he returned, Kip bought the boarded-up feed mill downtown. The tallest structure in town, its six-story grain silos had always loomed over us, casting long shadows like a sundial for our days. Very early in our childhoods it had been a bustling place where corn was taken to be held for passing trains, where farmers came to buy their fuel in bulk, their seed, other supplies, but by the late eighties it had fallen into disrepair, the owner having tried to sell in a time when no one was buying. It was only a few months before the high-schoolers began throwing stones through the windows, decorating the grain silos with graffiti. Most of our lives it was just a dark citadel beside a set of railroad tracks that had grown rusty and overgrown with milkweed, ragweed, fireweed. The floors had been thick with pigeon shit and bat guano, and there was a lake of standing water in the old stone basement. In the silos, rats and mice ran rampant, eating the leftover grainsometimes we broke inside to shoot them with .22s, the small-caliber bullets occasionally ricocheting against the towering walls of the silos. We used flashlights to find their beady little eyes and once, Ronny stole one of his mother's signal flares from the trunk of her car, dropping it down into the silo, where it glowed hot pink against the sulfurous darkness, as we shot away.Within ten months Kip had restored most of the mill. He paid local craftsmen to do the work, overseeing every detail; he beat everyone to the site each morning and was not above wielding a hammer or going to his knees, as needed, to smooth out the grout, or what have you. We guessed at the kind of money he must have thrown at the building: hundreds of thousands for sure; maybe millions.At the post office or the IGA, he talked excitedly about his plans. "All that space," he'd say. "Think about all that space. We could do anything with that space. Offices. Light industry. Restaurants, pubs, cafs. I want a coffee shop in there, I know that much." We tried our best to dream along with him. As young children, we had briefly known the mill as a place where our mothers bought us overalls, thick socks, and galoshes. It had been a place that smelled of dog food and corn dust and new leather and the halitosis and the cheap cologne of old men. But those memories were further away."You think people will want to have dinner inside the old mill?" we asked him."Think outside the box, man, he crooned. Thats the kind of thinking thats killed this town. Think big."Near the new electronic cash register was the original till. Kip had saved that, too. He liked to lean against the old machine, his elbows on its polished surface while one of his employees rang up customers at the newer register. He had mounted four flat-screen televisions near the registers where it was easy to monitor the distant stock markets, Doppler radar, and real-time politics, talking to his customers out the sides of his mouth, eyes still trained up on the news. Sometimes, he never even looked at their faces. But he had resurrected the mill. Old men came there to park their rusted trucks in the gravel lot and drink wan coffee as they leaned against their still warm vehicles, engines ticking down, and they talked and spat brown juices into the gravel rock and dust. They liked the new action that had accumulated around the mill. The delivery trucks, sales representatives, construction crews. They liked talking to us, to young farmersto me and the Giroux twins, who were often there, poking fun at Kip as he stared at all those brand-new plasma television screens, doing his best to ignore us.Lee had actually written a song about the old mill before its revival. That was the mill we remembered, the one, I guess, that was real to us.*** Excerpted from Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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