DNF. I was so excited to read this book because I loved Daisy Jones and the Six and The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes, but I couldn't get into this one. The writing was so formal and stilted that I didn't buy people were giving spoken interviews. Just a few pages in and I already couldn't tell Adrianne's parents apart because they sounded like the same stiff person. Gotta have more than that to make me commit to reading an entire book.

Take a Walk on the Geffel Side
Review of the W.W. Norton Company hardcover edition (September 2020)

All the stars for this one. David Hajdu’s fictional non-fiction account of the life of musician Adrianne Geffel is set in the experimental avant-garde loft music world of New York City in the 1970’s and 1980’s and includes cameo appearances by real-life composers and musicians such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. The fictional pianist Geffel explodes onto this scene playing her emotionally charged music which she hears in her head constantly and which compels her to enact it on the keyboard. When she had been investigated in her early years for this condition the neurologists had described it a psychosynesthesia, a version of synesthesia that transfers thought into sound.

That all may sound flighty and esoteric, but the main point of this book is that it is hugely funny and revealing about people and with its playful satire about the postmodern art world whether it is plastic or sound art. The anonymous biographer is reconstructing Geffel’s life by interviewing her family, friends and associates. Many of these interviewees reveal more about themselves than anything about Geffel in their self-serving answers to the writer’s questions.

And in the end it is really a love story against all the odds. What can be better than that?

While writing this review I discovered that an audiobook version has also been produced, which is narrated by veteran reader Hillary Huber (Elena Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Novels etc.). I’m already eager to “re-read” for that alone.

To the best of my knowledge, this is Hajdu’s first novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed his non-fiction music biographies [b:Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn|112503|Lush Life A Biography of Billy Strayhorn|David Hajdu|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382758783l/112503._SX50_.jpg|1579139] (1996) and [b:Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña|253698|Positively 4th Street The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña|David Hajdu|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388263678l/253698._SY75_.jpg|946942] (2001) in my pre-Goodreads reading days.

Trivia and Links
While reading Adrianne Geffel, I imagined her more experimental atonal music would sound like something by avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. A time appropriate (1970s) recording of Cecil Taylor is Indent (1973).

After I finished reading, I searched for more information on Adrianne Geffel and discovered that author Hajdu had curated an Adrianne Geffel playlist for the Large Hearted Boy blog, which actually included a piece by Cecil Taylor.

Adrianne Geffel’s minimalist cover design got it into LitHub’s Top 10 Best Book Covers of September 2020 list.

I'm a big fan of Hajdu's non-fiction, but this is the first of his fiction I've read and I was kind of non-plussed. The remit here is that Hajdu is assembling an oral history of this outsider artist/ piano player in the eighties, but in practice it's mostly Hajdu creating outlandish characters and letting them speak. Occasionally these are funny asides, and sometimes they are pretty dull. Hajdu in this novel is a lot less skilled as a journalist than the real writer, letting people go on and on as he struggles, at times, to tell his story. At other times, he's setting up his subjects-- the art world, or small town music teachers, etc-- for some obvious ribbing

I think these asides and fictional interviews don't quite coalesce, either into a compelling portrait of Geffel, his titular subject, or into why she was a compelling figure. I get it that she's not real, but, well, if she's two dimensional and she's not important, why write the book? At the end of this, I don't think I felt like the book had cleared the hurdle in either case. It's occasionally diverting reading.

What a beautiful story. I hated every single man who was involved in it. Hopefully Adry is living peacefully somewhere with Barb, married and not forced to deal with men who choose to go by Biran.
And I hope he, for what it’s worth, gets the shit beaten out of him on a daily basis.
4.5

A swing and a rather large miss from David Hadju on Adrianne Geffel, a fictional oral history of a mysterious, mercurial avant-garde musical icon of pre-Giuliani NYC. The idea is there, sure, and Hadju's prodigious output of nonfiction music writing suggests that he would have a strong grip on the historical knowledge to be able to develop this into something rather knowledgeable. The issue is that he has very little nuance in his character development, so none of these talking heads feel particularly textured or even varied-- they are all airheads of more or less insidious natures. It's fine to have such an obvious villain, the music industry is surely full of them, but there's just so little beyond the broad strokes of characters here. I was very disappointed by this! 1.5 stars.

an odd one, to be sure. someone said “daisy jones and the six but smarter.” yes!

Prepub. Due out Sept 22, 2020. An interesting character study and a meditation on the way the commercial side of art and the can take something beautiful and unique and twist it without regard for the artist, particularly when the artist is one as fragile as Geffel. Also asks a lot of questions: What if your art is only considered valuable if it makes you miserable? Does happiness = bad art? Is exploitation inevitable when you try to monetize art? Recommended for fans of Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad or Reid's Daisy Jones and the Six.