The Butler Did It: A Review of Your Silent Face
October 10, 2020
Tim Lane
My friend, Bill Butler, read Your Silent Face and enjoyed it. When he tried to post a review on Amazon, it was rejected. I guess it was NSFW??? Ha! Here’s the uncensored review! I really enjoyed reading Bill’s take on the novel, and I’d love to read what you think. Rate and review on Amazon, Goodreads or send it to me.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Stuart Page, working class and Catholic, is on the edge of becoming an adult in this novel set in 1980s Flint. Tim Lane, a Flint native and poet, tells the story in a series of episodes that jump around in time. The best parts of this book are Lane’s descriptions of what it felt like to grow up in Flint after the good jobs left town. Stuart is sensitive and smart. He tags buildings with Krylon, but he also inscribes his poems with a Sharpie on a wall in a parking lot. Stuart’s best friend, Nigel, is a chess master, as well as a quoter of Surrealist poetry, and a good dancer who moves through the world with an unfailing cool. Although Stuart and Nigel are budding intellectuals, they spend much of their time drinking, navigating the simmering violence of the East Side, and bird-dogging chicks. These guys get laid a lot… I think. Stuart is one of the legions of horny young people conditioned by a Catholic upbringing to feel guilty about sex outside holy matrimony. Stuart refers to the sex he has with desirable Flint girls as “mashed potatoes,” which conjures an image of up-and-down movement that ends in something not quite orgasmic.
Nigel lives with his mother, Brenda, (one of several MILFs in Stuart’s imagination) in an East-Side house virtually wall-papered with the maps that used to come with the National Geographic. The map-covered walls are a constant reminder that there is a world outside Flint, presumably better, and a foreshadowing of the escapes to be made by people in Stuart’s circle. Nigel is something of a screen upon which Stuart projects his fantasies of how best to live. It appeals to Stuart that Nigel seems slightly smarter, is good looking (Stuart remarks at one point that he and Nigel look alike), and can produce inscrutable but still poetic speech that seems to plumb the depths where Stuart would go. The Stuart-Nigel relationship is a mystery underlying Your Silent Face.
The narrative is immersed in consumer culture. Lane specifies the brand names of cars, booze, shoes and clothes, colognes. At first, I was reminded of Ellis’s name-checking of brands in American Psycho, but Lane isn’t critical of these products for their role in the superficiality and deadness of American consumerist culture. His adolescent characters identify with the brands. Music is a central part of the characters’ lives in this book, especially Stuart’s. The kind of music you like is the kind of person you are, according to Stuart, who is a complicated amalgam that includes Morrissey, Thompson Twins, Tears for Fears, and at least a dozen others. Stuart and his friends live in this familiar world of corporate consumerism partly because they don’t know anything else, and also because they think it’s fun. Contrast the teenagers' limited and corporatized experience with the experience of East-side adults, who live in the world of bills, ailing elderly parents, and children to rear. Glenn, Stuart’s father, regularly sits in his living room, staring silently at the crabapple tree in the backyard, embodying exhausted resignation supported by a quiet masculine competency. When shit happens, he handles it as best he can.
Stuart says that Flint is the murder and unemployment capital of the US, and he means the part of Flint on his side of The Wall. In his encounters with the rich people of Flint, Stuart can only see caricature. Stuart has nothing but contempt for one of his girlfriend’s “posh” parents, and Lane’s/Stuart’s use of the word “club,” as in country club, has all of its meaning as a separator of those who belong and those who don’t. Stuart visits his college roommates at a Grosse Point home and is served pina coladas and "hors d'oeuvres" by the mother, poolside. Class consciousness feels like it’s applied with a trowel in these scenes, but it makes for good reading. In perhaps the best scene of the book, Stuart makes a quick exit from Cammie's party at her rich parents’ house, where everyone is friendly and polite, and heads for an East-side "party," where there is some kind of gang bang going on upstairs, violent skinheads circle like sharks, and the basketball court is hard-packed dirt.
Your Silent Face has a huge cast of characters, and I can see Lane developing any number of them for future books.
Bill Butler
Tim Lane, author of Your Silent Face