The Karaoke Singer's Guide To Self-Defense, by Tim Kinsella
(Featherproof Books)
The Karaoke Singer's Guide To Self-Defense is the first literary effort from Tim Kinsella, a man far better known for his nearly 20-year career as an indie rock musician. In addition to spending much of the past 15 years fronting the quirky Chicago-based group Joan Of Arc, of which Kinsella is the only constant member, he's also known for his membership in pioneering emo band Cap'n Jazz, and his stints in short-lived projects like Friend/Enemy, Make Believe, and more. The fact that Kinsella is only now, at the age of 37, publishing his first novel, indicates one of two things: either he's been focusing so intently on his music career for the past couple of decades that he's neglected to give any public indication of his equally significant abilities in the literary arena; or, alternately, that he's only recently begun to write, but was able to get his first full-length effort published due to previous acclaim for his other endeavors. As a longtime fan of Kinsella's music, I went into this novel hoping that it would provide evidence for the former being true. Unfortunately for me, The Karaoke Singer's Guide To Self-Defense made a much better case for the latter.
The plot of this novel is complex, with many different threads running through it, but at its heart, it's the story of three siblings, all now in their 30s, coming together again at the funeral of their grandmother. Their mother had them at a young age, and their grandmother did more of the work to raise them than either of their parents did. Therefore, losing her is a significant event in all of their lives, and it greatly affects the already fraught emotional undercurrents of their reunion. Mel, the middle sibling, only sister, and the only one who is still living in the town where all of them grew up, works at a notorious local strip club, The Legendary Shhh... The club's longtime owner, Rich, recently passed away, leaving the club in the care of his boorish son Norman, who has made a lot of changes at the club, some of which have made Mel's life significantly harder. Meanwhile, the oldest brother, Kent, has the most conventionally put-together life of the three of them, with a management job and a family. However, he is, if anything, even more tightly wound than his two younger siblings. Will, the youngest, is in a twelve-step program--not for alcoholism or drug addiction, but for an addiction to fighting. It's his pugnacious past that resulted in his current, frighteningly scarred visage, as well as the fact that he no longer lives in town--years earlier, after a particularly brutal incident, he was given the choice of moving away or serving jail time. Will's return to the town he was legally barred from is a turning point of the book's plot, as is Mel's conflict with Norman at the strip club.
The problem is that the distillation of the novel's plot that I've just given you is far clearer and more coherent than what you'd get by reading the book itself. Germane details are delivered haphazardly and without calling attention to themselves. Kinsella's narrative style basically involves no exposition--he tells you what's happening in the moment that he's narrating, but never tells you the context for the character interactions that are occurring. You have to figure that stuff out yourself, and it can be very hard to do. Some of the things that you need to know in order to make sense of even the book's earliest chapters are only explained in tossed-off half-sentences on pg. 172 or whatever. Contextualization is made even more difficult by Kinsella's habit of jumping back and forth in time between scenes. He not only moves between things that happen earlier and later in the week during which the book takes place, but sometimes will jump years into the past in order to tell the story of some earlier interaction that was important to what's taking place now. These attempts at exposition would be a relief if they weren't so clumsily handled; if the flashbacks were told in their entirety, and then the narrative returned to present day and carried on, it'd be fine, but instead, Kinsella will spend huge sections of a chapter jumping back and forth between the flashback and the present day, giving no indication of which timeline each individual scene is part of. Again, you have to figure this out for yourself, and I had multiple occasions during the reading of this novel in which I would be halfway through a current scene before I realized that I'd completely misinterpreted the timeline in which it was taking place.
Worst of all was Kinsella's completely unnecessary and unexplained introduction into the plot of multiple extraneous viewpoint characters. Deciding to have significant scenes related from the point of view of Mel's roommate Gus, or from that of strip club owner Norman, at least makes sense within the book's overall storyline. But the book, which is divided into five parts, spends the entirety of parts two and four on characters named Jesse and Wallace, who have nothing to do with the rest of the story. These two characters could have been removed from this novel and given their own novel, which would have solved two problems--the first being the fact that neither of their stories is told completely enough to avoid leaving the reader with a lot of unanswered questions, and the second being the fact that they honestly have no reason to be in this particular novel in the first place. There's another extraneous character, a teenaged girl named Sarah Ann, whose storyline at least tangentially related to the book's main plot. However, she too has no real bearing on the rest of the story, and could have been reduced to a barely mentioned background character with no effect on the novel as a whole.
By spending so much time on the novel's weaknesses, I feel like I'm being harsher on Kinsella than his work here really merits. He has an interesting and idiosyncratic narrative voice, creates believable, multi-dimensional characters, and tells a story here that is entertaining despite flaws in its delivery. However, the good qualities he demonstrates here are in very raw form. The Karaoke Singer's Guide To Self-Defense should probably have been a practice novel that was never seen outside of his writing workshops. At the very least, it should have been significantly refined and improved before it was ever published. I have no doubt that, were Kinsella not a previously well-known artist, it would have been. However, his pre-existing fame allowed him to find a publisher for the very first full-length novel he ever completed, and one who would publish it as is, rather than suggesting the significant changes that it needs in order to make it a first-rate work of fiction. The result is a profound letdown for anyone who'd buy this book not just to say that they owned Tim Kinsella from Cap'n Jazz's novel but because they actually wanted to read a good book. It's an interesting failure, at least, and one that is not without redeeming qualities. But for those out there who want not just to see Tim Kinsella write but to see Tim Kinsella write well, my advice would be to give him a decade or so, and see what he's coming up with then.