Keynote
Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, Record Palace is an eccentric debut novel about jazz, art, race, and identity.
Book Title
Record Palace
Cover Image
- “Wheeler’s lyrical voice remains inescapable. We’re treated to an intriguing, jagged syntax that reads like a manual transmission sliding into gear.”—Boston Phoenix
Body
In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago's Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: Record Palace: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie.
Cindy, a lean, lonely white girl, has come to Chicago to study art history--to be anywhere but where she came from--tract housing in Thousand Oaks, California, mock-stucco buildings, "a tetherball hole in the ten-foot driveway . . . incessant sun and incessant sunniness of every blonde girl."
Record Palace, littered with cans of malt liquor and remnants of past meals, also has boxes upon boxes of records--all jazz. And it has Acie, "big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a thin black U-tank taut across Sumo folds. Maybe a hundred bins were blocked by the wall of him." Cindy knows she doesn't belong, and this is why she stays.
Cindy's determination leads to a tentative friendship with Acie, and she becomes a familiar, if not fully understood, presence in the store. But it is through her chance meeting with Acie's son that she becomes embroiled in an unusual crime.
With prose that resembles the syncopated rhythms of jazz, Susan Wheeler--an award-winning poet--offers a stunning portrait of a women searching for an identity in a city on the cusp of social and political change.
Cindy, a lean, lonely white girl, has come to Chicago to study art history--to be anywhere but where she came from--tract housing in Thousand Oaks, California, mock-stucco buildings, "a tetherball hole in the ten-foot driveway . . . incessant sun and incessant sunniness of every blonde girl."
Record Palace, littered with cans of malt liquor and remnants of past meals, also has boxes upon boxes of records--all jazz. And it has Acie, "big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a thin black U-tank taut across Sumo folds. Maybe a hundred bins were blocked by the wall of him." Cindy knows she doesn't belong, and this is why she stays.
Cindy's determination leads to a tentative friendship with Acie, and she becomes a familiar, if not fully understood, presence in the store. But it is through her chance meeting with Acie's son that she becomes embroiled in an unusual crime.
With prose that resembles the syncopated rhythms of jazz, Susan Wheeler--an award-winning poet--offers a stunning portrait of a women searching for an identity in a city on the cusp of social and political change.
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About the Author
Credit: Jeffrey Goldman
Praise
- “Wheeler’s feel for subtle variations in vernacular…shine in this knotty but mesmerizing little novel.”—Publishers Weekly
- “[A] skyrocket first fiction, a straight-ahead novel noir set in the music world of Jane Byrne’s Chicago teetering into the 1980s.”—Antioch Review
- “ Wheeler is an award-winning poet…and it shows. The text is nuanced, with a syncopated, improvisational feel.”—Library Journal
- “Wheeler’s seductively atmospheric first novel traces a nervy young woman’s odyssey to selfhood, evokes acute loneliness, measures out noirish suspense, interjects sly humor, and pays unabashed tribute to Chicago circa 1980, out-there jazz, and the compelling music of language.”—Booklist
