Your Silent Face: A New Review
August 2, 2023
Tim Lane
It's been just over two years since I released Your Silent Face in paperback. Check out this new review written by an incredibly memorable friend from high school. Share it with one of your friends! Thanks.
5.0 out of 5 stars Humorous and poignant coming-of-age novel
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2023
Tim Lane's "Your Silent Face" is a highly readable coming-of-age novel set in his famously beleaguered hometown of Flint, Michigan in the mid-1980s. The reader is immediately immersed in the stream-of-consciousness perspective of Tim’s protagonist, Stuart Page, whose main preoccupations during his summer break from university – the music of Joy Division, finding and consuming alcohol, hanging with friends, and figuring out women -- are interrupted by the daily exigencies of being the first in his close-knit family to attend university, his father’s endangered union job, and the gaping hole left by his beloved grandfather’s sudden death.
Lane’s conversational prose, by turns hilarious and poignant, carries the reader through Stuart’s work days, bar nights, and prodigious hangovers. Although the story could have been set anywhere, Flint’s infamy as the epicenter of Reagan-era, rustbelt economic malaise gives it extra salience and resonance. While Lane’s Stuart is a semi-autobiographical protagonist, there’s no mistaking the oppressive reality of his hometown's epic deindustrialization.
Sarah Riegle Lemelin