This bond forms the spine of Dana Spiotta's fluidly intelligent new novel, "Stone Arabia." She builds it around Denise and Nik Kranis, a pair of cool Southern California kids now closing in on the gloom of their 50s.
In this spiky and elaborately structured story, there are multiple peak scenes, including three pages spent on a drunken apartment-pool party right after Denise, the younger sibling, turns 30. Her daughter Ada is 8, lying by the pool, reading and eating potato chips. Nik and Denise's then-boyfriend quarrel. The fight escalates, and the boyfriend slams his fist into Nik's face.
"I felt something rise in my chest and wave through my body," Denise recalls. "The intense autonomic discharge of frantic energy. . . . Then I had this thought. This ugliness means something, this pointless ugliness in front of my child. Were we shameless, was that it? That must not have been it, because I felt a hot, deep shame. There were tears from shame. It wasn't that we were shameless, it was that we were careless. In that moment we had closed the distance between carefree and careless. Somehow, as we grew older, we lost our liberated, irresistible claim on being carefree."
This short passage occurs midbook, long after Spiotta has closed the distance between her characters and the reader. Nik and Denise are not merely recognizable, they seem acutely real, thanks to a keen interiority that reminded me of Rivka Galchen's disturbingly smart 2008 novel "Atmospheric Disturbances."
Both are sly books; both tumble their readers through a kaleidoscope of devices. As a youngster, Nik almost made it as a glam-punk-rock L.A. musician. In the book's second paragraph, we learn that he is an obsessive self-archivist in music, in comix, in a multi-volumed alternative diary. "Self-curate or disappear," is his first remark.
Now, three decades later, Ada wants to make a documentary of her "so eccentric, so hardworking, so unapologetic" uncle, also a dive bartender and alcoholic. The audience for his work has dwindled to a handful. Only Denise remains avid, holding herself like a votive candle to her brother's talent.
"Stone Arabia" has a marvelous savviness. It swims through media -- photos, zines, YouTube, liner notes, television news, Q&As, documentaries and throwaway movie-star insights -- like most novels swim through weather. The title's meaning is a counterpunch that shouldn't be given away.
The reader needs a high tolerance for surface self-absorption, an ease with postmodern storytelling tics. A splinter of "Abu Ghraib" referencing doesn't quite fit.
Still, "Stone Arabia" is a profound and moving portrayal of siblings -- a rarity in adult literature. Perhaps we must go back to John Barth's 1960 novel "The Sot-Weed Factor" to find a brother-sister rendering as seriously, originally fine.
In a private joke to please her, Nik pens a squib in Denise's voice, noting, "Written words demand the deep attention that spoken words just aren't entitled to. Writers get to pull something solid out of our relentless, everyday production of verbal mucilage."