The story is about Yadin Park's musical career or lack of. A talent that went largely unnoticed. Don Lee has done a great job of characterising the music industry and the players found within in. My heart went out to Yadin when a hearing disorder hit home to present an almost insurmountable obstacle. An enjoyable, and very well written novel.

While I enjoyed the characters, their struggles, and even felt close to them at points as they seemed very real to me, the wording drew me away from simply being in the story. At times, it felt as if the author used five words where one would have been sufficient. As a lover of all things related to music, I was drawn to the story by the cover first and then the blurb. I wanted to fall in love with this story and am saddened that I didn't.

Lonesome Lies Before Us has a lot going for it. The story idea is interesting, and I loved the way Lee ties in with the ideas of alt-country music, making the novel mirror a song. As a keen amateur musician myself, I could appreciate Yadin's struggles and understand his predicament. Like most creatives, he's trapped between the desire to pursue his dreams and the realisation that such a life isn't financially viable. I enjoyed reading Yadin and Jeanette's tale, yet I would have liked to connect with them on a deeper level. Throughout, I felt that my care for them, and how their stories would end, was peripheral. For me, this book hovers between 3.5 and 4 stars. I would recommend it for readers of light literary fiction who are also into music and looking for tales in that setting.

full disclosure: i took a fiction writing class with don lee while he taught at emerson college. but i don't think i'm biased, more than anything i was feeling trepidatious about reading this. his class gave me a lot of anxiety that i think remains unresolved. i requested lonesome lies before us because i can't resist fiction written about music, even though i'm not musical at all, i really enjoy how people write about music. in any case, the actual reading of this novel is a pleasure. it's easy to be drawn into yadin's story. it's so easy to read this kind of writing, don lee knows his craft.

but sometimes reading stories like this i wonder, if i read the first 10% and the last 10% will i have missed anything? i'm not sure i would have. contemporary literary fiction often leaves me feeling like this. as if the world were in stasis and where we end up is where we began.

it's not that things don't happen. yadin is a washed out songwriter who has made a decent life for himself out of the ashes of his success. he's got a good job. he's got a girlfriend. he's managing his health. and he's writing music. good music he thinks. and sure he's racing against time to write all the songs he has down. his ménière's disease will take his hearing and with it his songs.

so when he reconnects with his past life, he hovers on the verge of success again, and he has choices to make. what does he really want? fame? fortune? acclaim? could it really be that easy to pick up his life as a celebrity again? doesn't he prefer his life now?

sometimes even if we know the answers we go through the motions of possibilities. but reality, truth is inescapable. yadin finds himself exactly where he needs to be. and if the title of his song, of his album seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy, so be it.

Don Lee’s novels have always resonated with me and towards the end of his latest, I began to understand why. Lee is resolutely plebeian in his writing: he gives his characters, no matter how wealthy or learned, no place to hide from our judgments of them. The business of living is messy, he seems to say, though some might look like they have an easier time of it, it ain’t necessarily so.

Lee also isn’t snooty about genre: there is a touch of romance hidden within the complexities of the married lives he delivers in Lonesome. People aren’t settled, despite their legal status. The intensely personal and minutely calibrated nature of the characters, however, elevate his art above the ordinary. Reading his work is just fun.

One of the things that Lee does exceptionally well in all his books is give us an idea of what exactly people do in their jobs, and what makes each job an opportunity for creativity and excellence. While many authors might hint at hidden depths, say, in cleaning a celebrity’s suite in a five-star hotel or in laying wall-to-wall carpet in a decaying hovel, Lee takes the worker’s eye view and relishes in explanations of how it can be done elegantly. It’s interesting. Readers develop understandings and sympathies where before there were none. (The government should hire Lee to analyze labor equivalencies in the workplace. We would come out with a far flatter and more just wage structure than we have today.)

At heart, this novel is about the creative process and the winding path each person’s dreams take as their lives progress. Yadin was a musician ever since he can remember, writing songs, both lyrics and tunes, that people want to hear. He sang, too, but experienced such severe stage fright that it began to take a toll on his health. He had to quit touring, and his life narrowed to a pinpoint of casual work & sleep as he tried to cope with his illness. One day, chancing one day upon a few lines of spoken poetry, his capacity for song is awoken again.

Poetry and song: the parallels are many. Those readers who relish language will love Lee’s focus on the way words work to draw us in, to inspire and delight us. In addition, there is something terribly exciting and beautiful about capturing the process of creation. Moments of creative flow described on the page are exhilarating for what similarities they bear to one's own experience. We don’t tire reading of someone who has managed to cobble together something unique from scraps; conversely we yearn for more.

Yadin’s mind was busy with “a thread of melody noodling inside his head” as he lay carpet; he would stop to call his landline and leave a message of the tune so he wouldn’t forget. Later, a few words and phrases burbled up from his subconscious which he’d capture on a piece of masking tape with his Sharpie.

Life is complex, and Lee relishes that complexity, carefully unpicking the tangled threads that got us from happy days of infatuation to a limping marriage, paradoxically featuring both not enough sex and too many children. His characters are irredeemably flawed, all of them, though they are talented enough that others may look to them to lead the way. Their failures are heartbreaking, and are perhaps as much like us individually as any characters in any book.

If I have any criticism of this novel, it is Lee’s two strong female characters. Each is carefully drawn and multi-dimensional, Jeanette being Yadin’s long-time companion and the daughter of his boss. The slow reveal of her character’s history is fascinating in its surprises but one has the sense at the end that here is a woman struggling to free herself from a constricting web of her own making. I personally thought she was capable enough (at her age) to have made a more proactive choice than the one Lee chose for her. In the end, she was not an appealing partner for Yadin.

Mallory, the celebrity folksinger, is familiar to the extent that we feel we may have met her before—her type, certainly. Mallory wanted authenticity in her art and had to settle for less to get by, but she was always looking for that real experience again. She had most of what she needed most of the time, but she was aging out of the business of love songs. Lee may have made her harder, less sympathetic, and less vulnerable than strictly necessary. I bought it all until the end when I thought she would have (at her age) made a different choice.

This novel of sophisticated adult dilemmas gives us confused folks who make one choice as young adults and different choices in the fullness of years. Yadin was completely sure, in his later years, what he wanted. Lee did not tie his novel up neatly but showed us the messy lives of people making choices we don't like. If aspects of this novel had romance-genre undertones, the overtones were richer and deeper and far more complex.

Another GR reviewer made the terrific suggestion that this novel would make a great indie film, and he is completely right. In the hands of the right actors, this is a star-making vehicle. All that unrequited or misdirected love can play out as music.

An interview with Don Lee by Terry Hong on the Bookslut blog shows us how Lee agonizes over the publication process of novel-writing, a phenomenon which is examined more closely in this novel when Yadin writes a couple songs and then agonizes over their method of release. Paste Quarterly has an exclusive book trailer featuring an exclusive Will Johnson track of the title song.

Pace is a bit slow, but the poetic prose makes up for the lag. The characters are vivid and the setting is very descriptive. The range of emotions that Lee conveys is executed well, not to overwhelm but to hit all the right notes at just the right time.