Review of 'The Singer Sisters'

There's a meta-genre of fiction epitomized in different but overlapping ways by Eddie and the Cruisers, Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap, and Daisy Jones and the Six -- the first and the third adapted to the screen from novels -- that helps us understand what those who make music that lights up our nights are doing, feeling, and thinking when they're off-stage and not in the studio. Sarah Seltzer's The Singer Singers, a debut novel to be published this August, not only fits well in that narrative family, but in some ways exceeds it. I'd expect to see it adapted on some kind of screen before too long.

The Singer Sisters actually tells us two stories, deftly interwoven. One is a moving snapshot of the folk, folk-rock, and alt rock music scenes, and therein the larger music venue in which these potent genres of music played in the last third of the 20th century. The other is a tableau of upper middle class Jewish culture, in New York City, Boston, and beyond, in the same period of time.

The Singers -- aka the Zingleman sisters -- strive to succeed across two tempestuous generations along with other fictional singers and writers, against a backdrop of real superstars that even non-devotees of folk and folk-rock will instantly recognize. The characters worry about "stealing from Dylan". One of the singers concludes that "Joan Baez was right and Dylan wrong, that kindness mattered more than genius" (I would say that both are crucial). There's a quote from Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain" -- "see the silver bird on high" -- and a mention of Phil Ochs (not a superstar but shoulda been). And there are fictitious characters that the cognoscenti will surely know all too well, like the rock critic who uses his way with words to unfairly lambaste brilliant work (as the real rock critic in fact did to Phil Ochs -- not to mention Paul McCartney). Meanwhile, the Singer songs are not only spoken of by the characters, but Seltzer actually delivers more than a dozen sets and snippets of original lyrics, demonstrating a considerable talent not only as a novelist but a lyricist, and leaving the reader yearning to hear them put to music, fulfilled in actual voice, guitar, and song. The novel is a veritable songbook, and in addition to a movie or a limited TV series, The Singer Sisters also has the makings of a Broadway musical with a bunch of memorable tunes.

The Zingleman sisters are Jewish, and their Yiddishkeit both bumps into other cultures like the Irish and permeates the novel, not only in cream sodas and chicken soup with matzo balls, but their parents Anna and Hyman's wise view that they'd rather see their children fed with goishe food at Howard Johnson's than go hungry without it. In this sense, The Singer Sisters has a real kinship with Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, and I hope the novel is recognized as the compelling portrait of Jewish culture in America that it is. This is especially important, given the rising wave of anti-Semitism that's afflicting our country and the world.

In case it's not obvious, The Singer Sisters is very much a woman's novel, explored in sisterhood, motherhood, and daughterhood, with love, heartbreak, pain, exultation, and close-ups of the way women navigate the world in matters large and small and in-between, with a panoply of uniquely female emotion in every chapter. But men might well get a necessary education from this novel too, and I heartily recommend it to any human being.

Pre-order The Singer Sisters here.