PositiveArtsFuseAmong the subgenres of popular fiction, the most difficult to write may well be the rock and roll novel. It offers a unique challenge: how to translate the anarchic burn-down-the-mission energy of the genre to the slower, linear, more cerebral medium of prose ... Their story arcs race along toward a solution, with plot and characterization embracing the anarchistic particulars of the music. Clea Simon’s gritty Hold Me Down stays true to this pattern ... Gal is an appealing protagonist. She has toughness and attitude in spades, yet she is vulnerable too, in ways that we learn via the story’s limited-third-person-POV construction ... Simon knows the punk music milieu well, rendering it with convincing realism no doubt gleaned from her own days as a rock critic. She adds an insightful female context to what is still a male-dominant world ... The book reads fast. Her scenester’s savvy keeps it moving along with short chapters and a knack for supplying crisp details. Character development is a particular strength ... Hold Me Down is not without flaws. In its purest heart, rock and roll is subversive, unruly, and the novel’s limited POV puts restraints on the drama by having much of the action (including the crime and its investigation) occur offstage. Accordingly, much of Gal’s activity in the present — sitting in coffee shops, thinking, making oblique conversation — begins to feel like mental hand-wringing ... On many levels, Hold Me Down is terrific. Its power lies in the vitality of Clea Simon’s prose and her insider savvy.
Mary-Beth Hughes
RaveThe Arts FuseHughes’s deep dive into its characters is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s close study of her Bloomsbury denizens, or J.D. Salinger’s psychological probings of the Glass family. Regarding her resources of art and craft, Hughes is just as masterful ... Hughes doles out details deftly; nothing is incidental ... Hughes is an honest but modulated storyteller ... Hughes’s storytelling strategy can be angular and demanding; she often asks readers to make connections based on very oblique evidence. For those willing to play psychological detective, the rewards are bountiful ... The Ocean House is a collection so varied in its telling, rich in its details, and character-divining that it demands to be reread — and not simply to keep its portraits of lost souls straight (though there is that). Her penetrating glimpses into the depths of these lives make us more deeply aware of our own.
