Glimpses

Ray Shackleford repairs stereos in Austin, Texas, and he is approaching forty. His marriage to Elizabeth is failing, his hopes of playing rock guitar are long gone, and his estranged father has just died in a scuba diving accident off Cozumel. Then, sitting in his shop daydreaming about Get Back, the Beatles album that was never finished, Ray finds that he can imagine music that was never recorded, in perfect detail, and make it come out of his speakers. He tapes a Beatles version of "The Long and Winding Road" that never existed and takes it to Graham Hudson, a Los Angeles producer of oldies, who is convinced.

With Hudson's money behind him, Ray goes further. He finds himself back in the 1960s, helping the Doors finish Celebration of the Lizard and Brian Wilson finish Smile, and at last he tries for Jimi Hendrix's unfinished First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Meanwhile his life at home comes apart. He drinks, he begins an affair with a woman he meets in Mexico, and he and Elizabeth split up. Hendrix is the one he cannot save: however many times Ray tries, Hendrix dies. After that failure Ray gives up the music and sets about rebuilding an ordinary life.

Shiner tells the story in Ray's own voice, and the book is quieter and more inward than its premise. The recording sessions are recreated with a fan's exact love for the records, but the weight of the novel is on Ray's grief for his father and his marriage. Readers who want a rollicking trip through the sixties may find Ray a trying narrator; the blogger Joe Kenney, reviewing it on Glorious Trash, wished more of the book had stayed in the past. Publishers Weekly praised its "painfully perfect evocations of the yearning, anomie and need that wrack Ray." It suits readers who grew up on these records, and anyone who has wondered what a lost album would have sounded like.