Boarded windows

Take for instance, the names, Wade and Wanda, or his two mothers, the biological Martha Dickson and the adoptive Marleen Deskin. Does it matter? And brilliantly, I might add.

Boarded Windows and the ancillary CD are ingenious mergers of fact and fiction, best exemplified in the following quotation where Wade, via the narrator, i.

Hicks are all, in essence, using the same technique to compromise truth: "It was hard to know, when Wade was telling the truth, and I think one of his tricks was to make some truths sound like lies, so that if you discovered enough of his seeming lies to be after all true, you might start to think that everything he said was true. But this book is not merely a postmodern exercise in notions of truth, nor is it merely funny and intelligent; it is fundamentally a sincere and heartbreaking tale of loneliness, a man who comes to realize that the windows to his life, home, and family, are inherently boarded up.

Jun 03, Kwoomac rated it really liked it Shelves: , capital-d-dysfunctional , contemporary-lit , music , reviewed , playlist , worst-mother-ever. The author writes a melancholy love story of a man in search of family. The story starts with the unnamed narrator introducing Wade Salem, a charasmatic, drug dealing musician, who was once involved with the narrator's mother. As a boy, the narrator liked to think of Wade as kind of a stepfather.

He disappeared after living with the boy and his mother for about a year and a half when the narrator was seven or eight. He resurfaces, in need of a place to crash, on the cusp of the narrator's 21st b The author writes a melancholy love story of a man in search of family.

He resurfaces, in need of a place to crash, on the cusp of the narrator's 21st birthday. The story is told in the 1st person as the narrator reflects on his boyhood, his relationship with Wade, his unconventional adoption, and the conflicting stories he's heard about his biological mother.

The narrator is a lonely man caught up in a neverending search for the truth about his parentage. He's unable to find the truth because none of the stories he's been told match up and huge chunks of information are missing or forgotten.

This sense of something unfinished and unattainable add to the pathos of the story. I like that the narrator doesn't have a name as he searches for his identity. Here's one passage I loved since it so clearly laid bare the narrator's sense of self. It's almost painful to read. My sincere and quietly witty response went unanswered. My emails are often failures: too formal or too self-consciously chatty, too aloof, too earnest, too grave, too jokey, too self-assured, too pathetic, too open to misreadings, too closed to nuance.

Or there's nothing wrong with the tone of my emails. Perhaps they're so frequently unanswered for other reasons. I've often loitered in my "sent" box. He is most definitely too earnest. Music is a main character in the book. Both the narrator and Wade, as well as many of the peripheral characters, are serious music lovers.

The author includes a soundtrack, which can be downloaded. The songs are written and sung by the author Dylan Hicks, but they are attributed to a fictional character in the story, musician Bolling Greene. A nice touch. Hicks sounds like a folky Tom Petty with a smidge of Randy Newman. There are tons of references to other musicians and songs throughout the book.

So fun. I loved it. Jan 26, Tricia rated it it was amazing. What determines your identity -- your passions, where you live, your job, who you're having sex with, or is it always where and from whom you came from? The main character in Boarded Windows is trying to figure it out, and it's fascinating to be a spectator in this process. From the minute we meet Wade Salem, the narrator's de facto stepfather who's all of a sudden back in this kid's life, we get a sense that the answers to the narrator's questions about his tumultuous upbringing - what was his What determines your identity -- your passions, where you live, your job, who you're having sex with, or is it always where and from whom you came from?

From the minute we meet Wade Salem, the narrator's de facto stepfather who's all of a sudden back in this kid's life, we get a sense that the answers to the narrator's questions about his tumultuous upbringing - what was his mother really like, who is his real father -- will not have straightforward answers.

These characters and their friends seem to exist in a world where music, art, culture, sex, and drugs are the keys to a good story, to finding a good way to pass the time, to making life beautiful. Dylan Hicks is a writer and musician. His first novel, Boarded Windows, was published in , along with a companion album of original songs, Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greene.

He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and their son, Jackson. It is rife with humans desperate for connection, for finding their place in this enigmatic world. References high and low, familiar and obscure abound in this eloquent and unusual story of not-quite innocence lost. Hicks uses his intimate knowledge of American music to give us a precise portrait of Wade Salem, a self-taught, fast-talking half-genius.

He was apparently seventy years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his ageing. His hair and long, full beard were white, his grey, lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems.

In figure he was tall and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders - a burden bearer. I never saw him; these particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I got the man's story when I was a lad. He had known him when living near by in that early day. One day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should remember.

I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence.

That closes the final chapter of this true story - excepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which every well-informed boy thereabout knew haunted the spot.

But there is an earlier chapter - that supplied by my grandfather. When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his axe to hew out a farm - the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support - he was young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he came he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I should share it!

Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life; for what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit to a lot like that? One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious.

There was no physician within miles, no neighbour; nor was she in a condition to be left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness arid so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason. From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather.

When convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others which he did correctly were done over and over. Murlock is found dead at his cabin, apparently of natural causes. Now, only the narrator knows the tale. Murlock and his young bride head west and carve a homestead out of the forest. One day, he returns from hunting to find his wife in a delirium of fever.

Doctors are far away, so he tries to help her, but she fades away and all signs of life depart. Quietly he prepares her body for burial.

Without tears and unaccustomed to tragedy , Murlock places her on a table, thinking his grief will pour forth when he puts her in the grave the next day. Exhausted, he sits at the table where she lies and lays his head down to sleep.

Through the window, he hears an unearthly wail, like that of a child lost in the forest. Then he hears it again, this time nearer.