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.