INTO YOUR BLUES

Moodie tells a tale of a blue devil at the root of men’s undoing in this time-jumping novel.

Ethan is a middle-aged alcoholic and chess whiz who lives with his mother. He lost a lucrative job in finance due to embezzlement charges, and now he’ll do just about anything to make a buck. His current gig is organizing fundraisers, which combines his desire to rake in cash with a philanthropic streak that extends to the bartenders and punk kids that work with him. He soon finds himself entangled with a cop named Blue, who encourages some of his worst instincts. Meanwhile, Beckett just got laid off from the same company that once employed Ethan. A frustrated musician, he and a friend take the opportunity to embark on “the world’s longest pub crawl, playing to anyone who would let us…hopefully at the end, we could cut a record based on our experiences.” The series of gigs quickly becomes an odyssey worthy of a folk song, complete with recurring run-ins with a mysterious temptress called Lady Blue. A generation later, Ethan’s godson Ryder and Beckett’s daughter RJ attempt to break into the entertainment business, where they, too, encounter Blue. Moodie’s prose is energetic and accessible, as when Beckett describes Ethan: “We called him ‘Ethan the Ethernet’ because his brain seemed wired into everything….If the guy from Leaving Las Vegas somehow had a bizarre love child with the dude from GoodwillHunting, it would be Ethan.” As the action of the novel moves increasingly into the future, the story becomes more speculative and more frenetic in tone. Each of the individual sections are generally entertaining on their own. However, they do not cohere into a clear, overarching plot. Its fractured narrative and its deep love of music are reminiscent of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad(2011), although this work has much more limited ambitions.

A fun but meandering novel about the vagaries of human motivation.