Some debut novels confidently announce a fresh, fully realized voice. Others are a little uneven and wear their amateurishness obviously. I’m afraid Greg Hewett’s debut No Names belongs to the latter. It’s a competent-enough dual story, the first following Isaac, a young man in 1994 who sets out to find his punk music idol, and the second following the band’s success in the 1970s told by its lead musician Mike.
The stories eventually collide when Isaac connects with Mike’s old friend Daniel, and the two travel to an island where Mike has lived as a hermit for years. Though reluctant at first, Mike eventually warms up to Isaac. The drama unfolds as their new relationship pushes suppressed memories and feelings to the surface.
Unfortunately, one can never get too invested reading Hewett’s characters. It’s difficult to appreciate a story when it’s delivered in prose peppered by lazy or bad writing. Many of the novel’s problems should be obvious to a beginner writer’s workshop. Imagine my surprise and disappointment to learn this book’s author is a creative writing professor.
Often it seemed Hewett was uninspired, writing the bare minimum to push along a story larger than he wanted or expected. The prose is vague, repetitive, and overly reliant on hyperbole. When it’s raining on the island Isaac narrates, “It’s raining harder than I’ve ever seen." Mike sees a woman laugh, “She breaks out laughing, tossing her head back, and I swear I’ve never anything so beautiful."
Mike delivers bad news to Pete’s mother, “Her eyes flash and it’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen. The most terrible, and yet, the look contains not a trace of malice, or at least I pray it doesn’t." In this dull approach Hewett creates a boy-who-cried wolf problem for himself. When everything is stretched to the extreme there’s no sense of perspective; moments that actually call for big emotions have a tampered impact. The book stays at a heightened but monotonous pitch, like how loud plane engines lull passengers to sleep.
There are examples of repetitive writing all throughout. Many sensations, for example, happen “all at the same time.” Isaac describes his musical hero, “Mike looks happy and sad and maybe a little shell-shocked all at the same time." When Mike swims through dangerous water and washes up on shore, “I felt panicked and drowsy and confused all at the same time."
The problem isn’t just that these lazy choices make the story boring (though they definitely do make it boring), but they also ruin the character’s legitimacy. No Names features characters with special skills and talents. We have, according the novel’s universe, two of the best punk rockers that ever lived, a world famous concert pianist, and a guy who’s like really good at math. And yet, because the writing is so flat, these characters never appear to be experts at anything.
I’m not saying a writer must possess the same talents as his characters—that would be impossible. But if she takes on characters with great abilities, she must find ways to make their talents plausible. Whether that’s accomplished through meticulous research or good ol’ imagination doesn’t really matter. The reader just has to believe it.
When the author fails to achieve this you get vague, nonsensical passages from “experts.” For example when Mike and Pete play music Mike thinks, “We wrap each other up in chords and riffs. I slam him with a variation on the melody and he slams me right back. We rip some chords that lift us far out and away from melancholy." This a long-winded and not altogether interesting way to articulate, “We played well and enjoyed playing together.” It may seem flashy, but reading it over you realize it doesn't reveal much at all.
People who have real insight into a craft or skillset have things to say about their work. They express ideas a lay person wouldn’t expect, reveal insights. But never did I see the characters express anything more than the vaguest, most cliched thoughts about music or anything else they claimed to understand.
And so any scene meant to provoke a reader’s awe or admiration for a character was more likely to provoke groans. Like when Mike’s music-aficionado bandmate Bobby talks about their genre, “Real punk, he insists, shows what’s ugly as beautiful and what’s beautiful as ugly." Barf.
Maybe just for its story beats some people might enjoy No Names. There are romantic friends-to-lovers themes everywhere. Setting a story in the 1970s and 90s might be enough to generate warm nostalgic feelings. But on a page-by-page line-by-line basis the book offends with its laziness. As I reader I felt myself asking, “Why should I put in the effort if you’re not going to?”
No Names is avaikable at most bookstores and through the Coffee House Press site.