Glimpses

Ray Shackleford repairs stereo equipment in Austin, is drinking too much, and has a marriage he is failing to hold on to. His father, a diver who spent his life salvaging things from underwater, has just died in the Gulf. Then Ray discovers that when he plays the music in his head and lets the tape run, what comes out of the machine is real: the albums that were never finished. Brian Wilson's Smile, complete. The Doors' Celebration of the Lizard. Hendrix's First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Each session takes him back into the room where the record fell apart, and he stands there among people he has idolised since he was a boy, watching them come to pieces for reasons that begin to look uncomfortably familiar. Shiner writes the sixties without nostalgia and the recording studio with an obsessive's accuracy, and the novel's real business is not rock history but a middle-aged man's reckoning with his father, his drinking and his own habit of preferring an imagined version of things to the one in front of him. It is a book about salvage, and about what cannot be brought up.