“Ghost Notes” by Art Edwards – a review

Want to know my secret vice?

I read the bridge advice columns in newspapers.

Don’t misunderstand – I don’t play bridge. I’ve never played. My closest friend for thirty-five years now (except for my wife, of course) does play bridge, and he’s tried to explain the game to me from time to time, but when I read the advice columns in the paper, I have no idea what they’re saying. None at all. “North threw an ace to dummy’s spades, then cashed all his hearts. He ruffed the club and …” He did what to the who? It’s like a foreign language.

Reading Ghost Notes left me with the same feeling.

There’s a lot about music that I don’t understand. I know what I like and what I don’t like, and beyond that I let it all slide. Out of six children, four of them have been heavily involved with music, and they sit around when time and space weave their paths back together for a while, and they talk that foreign language like it makes sense. I guess they get it from their mother.

The jam sessions and sets and gigs in this book, by shining light in a direction I can’t follow, gave it a depth and a life it might not have had otherwise, bringing back those feelings again.

But reading this novel left me with something else, too.

Something I do understand, something I’ve experienced again and again and again within the pages of books. That total weightlessness, that floating, the buoyancy of all great writing. Make no mistake: this is great writing. Every wrong turn a character made left me wanting to shout into the book, to tell him “No, not that way! Don’t do that thing! Do the other!” Every person in this book was someone you know, someone who lives right down the street from you, someone you used to work with. And every one of them was someone you’d never met.

So go meet them. Read this book.

Ghost Notes, by Art Edwards (@artedwardsIII)

Defunct Press, 2008, 212 pages