What do you think?
Rate this book
Boarded Windows
"Do yourself a favor and read this smart, tender book. The characters will haunt you with their longing and inspire you with their sweet, caustic wit. Dylan Hicks knows his music and his prose is a song in itself." —Sam Lipsyte "A continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American the con man." —Greil Marcus Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He's also a complicated father figure to this novel's narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes both clearer and more confusing through Wade's stories, jokes, and lectures. Through the eyes of a keenly observant, underemployed record collector, Wade emerges as a sly, disruptive force, at once seductive and maddening. Shifting between flashbacks from the seventies and nineties, Boarded Windows is a postmodern orphan story that explores the fallibility of memory and the weight of our social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks' debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America's boomer counterculture. Dylan Hicks is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice , The New York Times , Star Tribune , City Pages , and Rain Taxi , and he has released three CDs under his own name. A fourth, Sings Bolling Greene , is a soundtrack to this novel and will be released in May 2012. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife Nina Hale and his son Jackson. This is his first novel.
240 pages, Paperback
First published April 18, 2012
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 19, 2013
Reviewed for the Brooklyn Rail:
Boarded Windows, by Dylan Hicks, Coffee House Press, May 2012
Michael Makowski
Here Comes a Regular
Nabokov once said that to call a story true was an insult to both truth and art. He was discussing the genesis of literature beginning with the boy who cried wolf, i.e. the difference between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, and that between the two is the art of literature. In the words of this late Cornell professor, “every great writer is a great deceiver.” This paraphrastic tidbit of literary ephemera bubbled up when reading Boarded Windows, the debut memoir-esque novel by the Minneapolis musician and writer Dylan Hicks.
The author’s unnamed and orphaned middle-aged narrator recalls a day in October of ’91, two months before his 21st birthday. He was working at a record store and spending his evenings stoned, when he received an unexpected visit from his deadbeat, supposed “father,” Wade Salem, a roving musician who asked to crash with him and his girlfriend, Wanda. Told from a tenuous present that is almost as nebulous as the past, the story is a memory of memories, or as the narrator suggests, embroidered embroidery in the search for truth about his parents, his adoptive mother and Wade. “My story,” the narrator explains, “is drawn from other stories,” the conflicting stories of Wade and his adoptive mother, Marleen. It is also one of the most tender if not saddest tales I’ve come across this year
What drives the book—and by the way, it is worth your hard earned clams, a must read—is the narrator’s ache for a family and home, and ultimately his obsession with his missing father, the somewhat idealized feelings and memories of Wade Salem, who turned out to be a callous disappointment that he still longs for. This makes for some delicious heartache, as the reader gets to “know” the infuriating, but irresistible Wade—an aesthete drug dealer who cuts pizza with scissors and likes to say things like, “Can I borrow ten bucks?” and religiously dismisses the relevance of fact, most notably with regards to the veracity of the model’s red pubic hair in Courbet’s The Origin of the World: “You have to remember that Le Réalisme wasn’t a fussbudget documentarian’s fidelity to prosaic reality but a prophet’s allegiance to essential truth.”
Memoir, by nature, is a reproduction of one’s life, a mirror of what was; and in the case of our nameless narrator, his is a mirror of mirrors because his “true” origin is unknowable to him, as he eventually finds out from the unreliable raconteur, teller of tall tales, Wade Salem. But of course, our narrator is also unreliable. By seven pages in, our depressed narrator who “hasn’t cried in over a decade,” and doesn’t “hear the music in the same flooding way” he used to, confesses:
"That’s more than I remember from that night. It was nearly twenty years ago. What was it Wade said? It was something like: “I’ve done a shit load of skinny-dipping in the River Lethe, taken in many mouthfuls.” He liked to blend the demotic and the fancy, liked to be imagined naked."
This is the same narrator who professes to have been an inarticulate fool with unsophisticated reading habits, yet twenty years later, he uses words like macrocephalic , amnestic and physiognomic . What’s interesting about this is not that he increased his lexicon, but that the language both mirrors Wade’s and conflates with it, thereby undermining the narrator’s search for historical truth and keeping the reader guessing. Take for instance, the names, Wade and Wanda, or his two mothers, the biological Martha Dickson and the adoptive Marleen Deskin. Who is the “real” mother? Does it matter? If this book were announcing itself as fiction (which it is) this would seem like heavy-handed coincidence (and maybe it is) but this book is not pretending at fiction, it’s posing as nonfiction. And brilliantly, I might add. This mirroring continues to the narrator and the musician/author, Dylan Hicks, who offers a free album with a purchase of his book, with the conceit that Hicks is covering the songs of country singer Bolling Greene who is, by the way, a fabrication, and one of the narrator’s favorite songwriters. Boarded Windows and the ancillary CD are ingenious mergers of fact and fiction, best exemplified in the following quotation where Wade, via the narrator, i.e. Hicks are all, in essence, using the same technique to compromise truth:
"It was hard to know, when Wade was telling the truth, and I think one of his tricks was to make some truths sound like lies, so that if you discovered enough of his seeming lies to be after all true, you might start to think that everything he said was true."
Wade is the regular in the bar spinning yarns that passage between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale. But this book is not merely a postmodern exercise in notions of truth, nor is it merely funny and intelligent; it is fundamentally a sincere and heartbreaking tale of loneliness, a man who comes to realize that the windows to his life, home, and family, are inherently boarded up.
Boarded Windows, by Dylan Hicks, Coffee House Press, May 2012
Michael Makowski
Here Comes a Regular
Nabokov once said that to call a story true was an insult to both truth and art. He was discussing the genesis of literature beginning with the boy who cried wolf, i.e. the difference between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, and that between the two is the art of literature. In the words of this late Cornell professor, “every great writer is a great deceiver.” This paraphrastic tidbit of literary ephemera bubbled up when reading Boarded Windows, the debut memoir-esque novel by the Minneapolis musician and writer Dylan Hicks.
The author’s unnamed and orphaned middle-aged narrator recalls a day in October of ’91, two months before his 21st birthday. He was working at a record store and spending his evenings stoned, when he received an unexpected visit from his deadbeat, supposed “father,” Wade Salem, a roving musician who asked to crash with him and his girlfriend, Wanda. Told from a tenuous present that is almost as nebulous as the past, the story is a memory of memories, or as the narrator suggests, embroidered embroidery in the search for truth about his parents, his adoptive mother and Wade. “My story,” the narrator explains, “is drawn from other stories,” the conflicting stories of Wade and his adoptive mother, Marleen. It is also one of the most tender if not saddest tales I’ve come across this year
What drives the book—and by the way, it is worth your hard earned clams, a must read—is the narrator’s ache for a family and home, and ultimately his obsession with his missing father, the somewhat idealized feelings and memories of Wade Salem, who turned out to be a callous disappointment that he still longs for. This makes for some delicious heartache, as the reader gets to “know” the infuriating, but irresistible Wade—an aesthete drug dealer who cuts pizza with scissors and likes to say things like, “Can I borrow ten bucks?” and religiously dismisses the relevance of fact, most notably with regards to the veracity of the model’s red pubic hair in Courbet’s The Origin of the World: “You have to remember that Le Réalisme wasn’t a fussbudget documentarian’s fidelity to prosaic reality but a prophet’s allegiance to essential truth.”
Memoir, by nature, is a reproduction of one’s life, a mirror of what was; and in the case of our nameless narrator, his is a mirror of mirrors because his “true” origin is unknowable to him, as he eventually finds out from the unreliable raconteur, teller of tall tales, Wade Salem. But of course, our narrator is also unreliable. By seven pages in, our depressed narrator who “hasn’t cried in over a decade,” and doesn’t “hear the music in the same flooding way” he used to, confesses:
"That’s more than I remember from that night. It was nearly twenty years ago. What was it Wade said? It was something like: “I’ve done a shit load of skinny-dipping in the River Lethe, taken in many mouthfuls.” He liked to blend the demotic and the fancy, liked to be imagined naked."
This is the same narrator who professes to have been an inarticulate fool with unsophisticated reading habits, yet twenty years later, he uses words like macrocephalic , amnestic and physiognomic . What’s interesting about this is not that he increased his lexicon, but that the language both mirrors Wade’s and conflates with it, thereby undermining the narrator’s search for historical truth and keeping the reader guessing. Take for instance, the names, Wade and Wanda, or his two mothers, the biological Martha Dickson and the adoptive Marleen Deskin. Who is the “real” mother? Does it matter? If this book were announcing itself as fiction (which it is) this would seem like heavy-handed coincidence (and maybe it is) but this book is not pretending at fiction, it’s posing as nonfiction. And brilliantly, I might add. This mirroring continues to the narrator and the musician/author, Dylan Hicks, who offers a free album with a purchase of his book, with the conceit that Hicks is covering the songs of country singer Bolling Greene who is, by the way, a fabrication, and one of the narrator’s favorite songwriters. Boarded Windows and the ancillary CD are ingenious mergers of fact and fiction, best exemplified in the following quotation where Wade, via the narrator, i.e. Hicks are all, in essence, using the same technique to compromise truth:
"It was hard to know, when Wade was telling the truth, and I think one of his tricks was to make some truths sound like lies, so that if you discovered enough of his seeming lies to be after all true, you might start to think that everything he said was true."
Wade is the regular in the bar spinning yarns that passage between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale. But this book is not merely a postmodern exercise in notions of truth, nor is it merely funny and intelligent; it is fundamentally a sincere and heartbreaking tale of loneliness, a man who comes to realize that the windows to his life, home, and family, are inherently boarded up.
December 1, 2012
The author writes a melancholy love story of a man in search of family. The story starts with the unnamed narrator introducing Wade Salem, a charasmatic, drug dealing musician, who was once involved with the narrator's mother. As a boy, the narrator liked to think of Wade as kind of a stepfather. He disappeared after living with the boy and his mother for about a year and a half when the narrator was seven or eight. He resurfaces, in need of a place to crash, on the cusp of the narrator's 21st birthday.
The story is told in the 1st person as the narrator reflects on his boyhood, his relationship with Wade, his unconventional adoption, and the conflicting stories he's heard about his biological mother.
The narrator is a lonely man caught up in a neverending search for the truth about his parentage. He's unable to find the truth because none of the stories he's been told match up and huge chunks of information are missing or forgotten. This sense of something unfinished and unattainable add to the pathos of the story. I like that the narrator doesn't have a name as he searches for his identity.
Here's one passage I loved since it so clearly laid bare the narrator's sense of self. It's almost painful to read. My sincere and quietly witty response went unanswered. My emails are often failures: too formal or too self-consciously chatty, too aloof, too earnest, too grave, too jokey, too self-assured, too pathetic, too open to misreadings, too closed to nuance. Or there's nothing wrong with the tone of my emails. Perhaps they're so frequently unanswered for other reasons. I've often loitered in my "sent" box. rereading a dangling email three or four times, and consistently I spot nothing repellent in its neutral, sometimes modestly clever subject lines, nothing estranging in the notes themelves. He is most definitely too earnest.
Music is a main character in the book. Both the narrator and Wade, as well as many of the peripheral characters, are serious music lovers.The author includes a soundtrack, which can be downloaded. The songs are written and sung by the author Dylan Hicks, but they are attributed to a fictional character in the story, musician Bolling Greene. A nice touch. Hicks sounds like a folky Tom Petty with a smidge of Randy Newman. There are tons of references to other musicians and songs throughout the book. So fun.I loved it.
o
The story is told in the 1st person as the narrator reflects on his boyhood, his relationship with Wade, his unconventional adoption, and the conflicting stories he's heard about his biological mother.
The narrator is a lonely man caught up in a neverending search for the truth about his parentage. He's unable to find the truth because none of the stories he's been told match up and huge chunks of information are missing or forgotten. This sense of something unfinished and unattainable add to the pathos of the story. I like that the narrator doesn't have a name as he searches for his identity.
Here's one passage I loved since it so clearly laid bare the narrator's sense of self. It's almost painful to read. My sincere and quietly witty response went unanswered. My emails are often failures: too formal or too self-consciously chatty, too aloof, too earnest, too grave, too jokey, too self-assured, too pathetic, too open to misreadings, too closed to nuance. Or there's nothing wrong with the tone of my emails. Perhaps they're so frequently unanswered for other reasons. I've often loitered in my "sent" box. rereading a dangling email three or four times, and consistently I spot nothing repellent in its neutral, sometimes modestly clever subject lines, nothing estranging in the notes themelves. He is most definitely too earnest.
Music is a main character in the book. Both the narrator and Wade, as well as many of the peripheral characters, are serious music lovers.The author includes a soundtrack, which can be downloaded. The songs are written and sung by the author Dylan Hicks, but they are attributed to a fictional character in the story, musician Bolling Greene. A nice touch. Hicks sounds like a folky Tom Petty with a smidge of Randy Newman. There are tons of references to other musicians and songs throughout the book. So fun.I loved it.
o
January 26, 2012
What determines your identity -- your passions, where you live, your job, who you're having sex with, or is it always where and from whom you came from? The main character in Boarded Windows is trying to figure it out, and it's fascinating to be a spectator in this process. From the minute we meet Wade Salem, the narrator's de facto stepfather who's all of a sudden back in this kid's life, we get a sense that the answers to the narrator's questions about his tumultuous upbringing - what was his mother really like, who is his real father -- will not have straightforward answers. These characters and their friends seem to exist in a world where music, art, culture, sex, and drugs are the keys to a good story, to finding a good way to pass the time, to making life beautiful. Through the narrator's search for his roots, we see the longing that lurks under, and seeps through, these cultural trappings. This is a very smart novel, and Hicks's best achievement is the taut and emotionally complex relationship between Wade and the narrator, one of the most memorable in recent literary history.
May 10, 2012
Much of the sentence-by-sentence writing here is great and reveals a dry wit. However, the novel is utterly lacking in plot. Were I not a former record store employee, a current musician, the same age as the narrator, and had my mom not also lived with a drug dealer during my childhood, I'm not sure what I would have gotten out of this slice-of-life account of what happens when a recent college grad's mom's ex-boyfriend crashes on his and his girlfriend's couch for a few months. The crashee, Wade, is a rich and vivid character, and all the settings are intricately drawn. Yes, there's a lot here that's done well. However, it is the antithesis of, say, a thriller, wherein the writing is terrible, but the action keep the pages flipping of their own accord. Some people will enjoy this book immensely, I'm sure. Just be prepared for a lot of scenes where characters sit around, get high, and shoot the (often pretentious) breeze.
August 18, 2012
Wade Salem is a drifty, drug-dealing, storytelling, sometime musician. He’s fascinating, if you can experience him from a distance. He’s not the man you’d want as your father-figure, which is the case for the unnamed narrator in Dylan Hicks’ novel Boarded Windows.
Our poor unnamed narrator is slogging through life. He’s got a job as an assistant manager at a near-by corporate music chain. He’s got a live-in girlfriend, Wanda, he seems to dig. Things ain’t too shabby. They ain’t so good either. Then Wade Salem lands back in his life on a few months before Narrator’s twenty-first birthday. Narrator hasn’t seen Wade since his childhood in North Dakota where Wade up and left on Bolling Greene’s tour bus one night and never returned.
Read more
Our poor unnamed narrator is slogging through life. He’s got a job as an assistant manager at a near-by corporate music chain. He’s got a live-in girlfriend, Wanda, he seems to dig. Things ain’t too shabby. They ain’t so good either. Then Wade Salem lands back in his life on a few months before Narrator’s twenty-first birthday. Narrator hasn’t seen Wade since his childhood in North Dakota where Wade up and left on Bolling Greene’s tour bus one night and never returned.
Read more
July 23, 2012
I really loved this novel so much. Dylan had written some great prose throughout the book. He jetts you in the time and place of when this novel had taken place, the 90’s. I really loved the soul searching story of a man trying to find his identity. I guess I could relate to the author story, not his specific journey but on how all kids (now adults) with broken families deal with learning about your past so you can move forward. The other reason why I enjoyed this book it’s set in Minneapolis. The city I have chosen to live my life. I have been to many of the places that Dylan has written in the book at the time most of the novel takes place and it was nice to revisit those places that no longer exist. Nicely done Mr. Hicks.
October 14, 2012
I wanted to love this book, but I was frustrated by it. The writing is clever and interesting, but I found the characters didn't change or develop much over the course of the story. The character names were all similar and that made it confusing at times (Martha, Marleen,Maryanne, Maggie, Wanda, Wade, Rowan). Dylan Hicks is clearly talented and I'll give his next book a try if he writes another, but this one just wasn't for me.
June 7, 2013
I wish I could say I loved this book. I love music and I live in Minneapolis, but there was too much here that was unfamiliar. Dylan Hicks, while talented, didn't give me a reason to care about his characters...so I didn't. You might be thoroughly captured by this story, but I wasn't. I gave up on this book. I wish Goodreads had an "abandoned" button.
July 6, 2012
My affection for this quirky novel with its very self-conscious narrator really increased the more I read. I was sorry to see it go by the end. Give it a try!
January 31, 2016
A Book Club book by a local author and musician. Autobiographical perhaps? Not really my cup of tea.
June 1, 2014
the kind of ironic humor that I find a little grating. book felt unfocused at times. But he has a good grasp of language
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews