Wonderland: Award-Winning Literary Fiction – A Woman Indie Rock Star's Path to Fame

by Stacey D'Erasmo

An NPR Best Book of 2014
A Time Top Ten Fiction Book of 2014
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A BBC Top Ten Book of 2014

"Exquisite...As inspiring in its way as Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids ." — Los Angeles Times
 
“Briskly addictive . . . Told in the voice of a female rock Ulysses.” — O, the Oprah Magazine
 
“Marvelous . . . D’Erasmo conjures up the seedy, sexy spectacle of life on the road with amazing vividness, and fills in the inner life of a woman who has one last chance to get her voice heard.” —Lev Grossman, Time
 
Anna Brundage is a rock star. She was an overnight indie sensation, but lost her fame just as fast as she found it. Now forty-four, she pours everything into a comeback, selling her famous father’s art to finance an album and a European tour. A riveting look at the life of a musician and the moving story of a woman’s unconventional path, Wonderland is a glimpse of how it feels when a wish just might come true.
 
“Anna made me think of Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, mixed with a little bit of Janis.” — Paste
 
“Richly interior . . . What makes Anna such a powerful narrator is her seductive desire to keep her options open.” — Washington Post

Genres: Fiction, Music, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Adult, Mystery

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year); and A Seahorse Year (a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year and a Lambda Literary Award winner). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Ploughshares. She is currently an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book about an indie rocker taking a second chance at greatness. However i found it too meandering, at times pretentious, but mostly sparse in the telling of what could have been a compelling story. Its too short. You never get at the heart of what drives her. You feel like it may be her boho upbringing and her connection to her famours artist father but she never sheds enough light on the past - just tiny glimpses. In a lot ways I feel the same way about this heroine as I did Cress in the last book I reviewed ("Off Course"). She's introspective in a spoiled, almost entitled way. Her work ethic isn't great nor is her focus. She's often daydreaming of the past (in a hazy, through-the-looking-glass kind of way)or sleeping around with random strangers and bandmates. I mean no wonder she's not successful. But..some of the writing is truely fantasic. I love the "little girls with the little hammers" imagery throughout and the way she describes Simon as dense ("He was not heavy, not oversized in any way, but dense, as if his molecules were packed more closely together than those of other people"). Like i said I wanted to like it. I just think there could have been more to it.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stacey D'Erasmo is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. She is dependably - though not predictably (thank god!) - good. Actually, very good. Wonderland is about the difficulties of making art and of artists making a life. The characters are flawed. The relationships are messy. Things are left unfinished. In other words, D'Erasmo knows how to give us a piece of someone else's life, perhaps not in all its particularity, but with enough well chosen and beautifully written details to make us fall in love with them. As a poet, I feel acutely the difficulty Anna has describing what it is she wants - she needs - to achieve in her art and how her relationships both fuel and impede this process. D'Erasmo is especially deft at describing intimacy (she's written a small 'how-to' book on that subjects for writers - highly recommended!). It's both refreshing and touching when a writer can honestly show how adults sometimes stumble into sex - how the tender animal inside us seeks basic connection even at the cost of safety or integrity. Every sex scene in this book was utterly believable and they were all very very different. I think that's evidence of a rare gift. All in all, a gorgeous book - moving, interesting, true.

[Larry H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I received an advance readers copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

Anna Brundage is a rock musician. While she never was an enormous star, her band's first album made an impact in the music world, and people still talk about it. The second album didn't do so well, and by the third album, she had thrown her chance away, lost in a haze of drugs, insecurity, and a lack of dedication. Her tempestuous affair with a married man she met on one of her tours ended badly, and she couldn't make her marriage work.

Anna now lives in a small apartment in New York City, teaching shop class to young girls at a private school. But she dreams of making it back into the music world. She recognizes that she has one more chance, and she'll do anything she can to make this time last. She sells a priceless piece of her famed artist father's work to fund one more album and a European tour. She's ready to pull out all of the stops.


As her band travels through Europe, Anna finds herself falling into the same old routines—sleeping with random men, practicing erratically, and doubting her own talents. She knows she has the music in her blood and in her brain, but she doesn't always know how to find it, and for the first time, she isn't sure if music is enough to sustain her. At the same time, she must deal with her unresolved feelings about the demise of both her affair and her marriage, wonderinng whether she has squandered her chance at true happiness.

While Anna is trying to make this chance count, to make audiences take notice, she must also confront her bohemian childhood, raised by two nonconformist artists. Wonderland follows Anna on and off stage, both in the current time and flashing back to her previous tours and her previous relationships. Can she find what she needs to succeed this time? Is this success what she really wants, or just what she thinks she wants? Is she willing to give it her all, or will she sabotage her chances again?

I'm a big fan of Stacey D'Erasmo's writing (I particularly loved her book A Seahorse Year), and was completely mesmerized by her prose and her imagery in Wonderland. Anna is a powerful presence, a flawed character who makes you feel for her and shake your head at her actions. You feel just as uncertain as to what you want for her life.

The book is a little disjointed as it moves back and forth through Anna's various tours and relationships, and it's not always easy to figure out what is happening when. And one chapter toward the very end confused me, because I wasn't sure whether this was a flashback, a dream, or a flash forward. But D'Erasmo's storytelling ability compels you to keep reading, and Anna is a character you won't soon forget. There have been many other books written about musicians on the cusp between being utterly washed up and one last breakthrough, but this is a particularly well-told one.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

The reviews for this one were huge. "Told in the voice of a female rock Ulysses!" says O Magazine (which, by the way, "female rock Ulysses" is my new aspiration in life). Lev Grossman, my main squeeze of a reviewer, called it a "seedy, sexy spectacle of life on the road." SOLD! GIMME! INSTANTLY DOWNLOADED!

But it was just meh. Like, really meh. I appreciated the honesty with which the author depicted being an adult with a history of youthful artistic achievement from which you have never since been able to live up to, even in your own mind. I was really on board with that idea, especially since female artists are rarely given their fictional due. But the problem is the story didn't really delve deep into this idea like I would have hoped, but rather spent the entire book skimming over the surface of a multitude of experiences. What I was left with at the end felt like a collage made from old rock 'n roll magazines: two-dimensional, haphazardly pasted together, and unable to create any one whole thing.

[Danielle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Anna is a forty-four year old rock star, who had a big hit at one point but whose career then fizzled out. She is now trying to make a comeback. This story chronicles her time past and present trying to make her career as a rock star work while entertaining hit and miss relationships on the road and getting caught up in drugs and drinking.

I like music a lot so I thought this might be an interesting book to read, but it really wasn't. It was boring, and I didn't really care about what happened to Anna at all. Had I not read through my other books while I was on the plane I wouldn't have bothered finishing this one. I give it a 2 out of 10.

[Catherine (The Gilmore Guide to Books) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In fact, I was in wonderland then, but only in some hazy amber of memory. At the time, I wasn’t anywhere. I was reaching for the train as it disappeared, flash of silver, around a curve. Now I’m trying to go back to a place I’ve never been.

Anna is a rock star. Not the classic variety but the indie variety. On her way to the top, with a record deal in hand and three albums to her name, she stepped off the ladder and went silent, but now she’s back, in Europe launching a new tour. Wonderland is Stacey D’Erasmo’s look at the journey, from its beginnings when the adrenaline and newness fuel the music to the decidedly unglamorous weeks of exhaustion, aimless hook-ups, bad food and ennui that infiltrate the passion, leaving only a painful sense of dislocation as day and night blend and everything begins to look the same.

Anna was introduced to the arts at an early age by her parents. Her father creates massive sculptures by taking large structures and cutting them apart, leaving them where they stand. It meant a childhood of travel and excitement but little stability. This artistic sensibility translated itself into music for Anna and meant that her emotional connection with her father deepened even as they saw less and less of each other.

I have had the conviction for quite some time that if I could do in music what my father did in space by sawing the train in half, then I could solve the mystery of my life.

The rest of this review can be read at The Gilmore Guide to Books: http://gilmoreguidetobooks.com/2014/0...

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished Stacey D’Erasmo’s Wonderland, which follows one-time indie darling Anna Brundage on her hopeful comeback tour. The novel zigzags from the present tour to her past and back again, especially her artist father and the long but slowly weakening shadow he casts as artist and inspiration. The book’s most wonderful passages are all about music, how it feels to play it, to soar in it, to struggle for it and sometimes to fail at reproducing that elusive shimmer you first heard in the brain. It’s the details hat burrowed into me as I read: Anna and her band on stage, the languorous but bold sex scenes, the album titles D’Erasmo came up with for Anna that are so well chosen they show me Anna’s whole career. I keep wanting to see the album covers for Whale and Bang Bang, and really they should have been made just to become the book’s cover. (Paperback editors, take note!) The novel even comes right out and says that Bang Bang was a disaster, but I refuse to believe it because I’m pretty sure I can hear this music in my head now. It is possible I have become over invested in this, but D’Erasmo is such a potent, intoxicating writer, who makes artistic creation feel so tactile and many-chambered, that seriously, how can you blame me?

[Mona Lisa]

From BBC "The 10 best books 2014":

"It's hard not to think of the irreplaceable Patti Smith when reading this profound and impressionistic novel, in which a rock star’s comeback tour becomes a meditation on performance, ambition, loves lost and found, the passage of time and the sparks that create art. As indie rocker Anna Brundage hits the road again in the Christiania district of Copenhagen, she is haunted by memories of past triumphs: “Music is quicksilver, gossamer; careers are measured in butterfly lifetimes.” She’s back in wonderland again, balanced precariously, aware of her power onstage, afraid she won’t be able to catch up. “Once you step away, you’ll always be at least a breath away,” D’Erasmo writes. Wonderland pulses with the magnetic beat of second chances. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)"

[Sandra Lambert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I so appreciate a book that pulls off the perfect ending - and this one does.

[Nikki Stafford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book in a used bookstore, and had never heard of it before (I'd picked it up because I'll grab anything that I think might be associated with Alice in Wonderland). And while it didn't have anything to do with the childhood favourite, the title is still well chosen. Anna is an indie rock star who had a big hit in the early 2000s, and was a hit with all the underground kids. She put out two more albums before disappearing from the limelight. Now she's 42 and is hitting the road again to have one last kick at the can, like The Pixies reuniting and playing rock music for an aging crowd, as well as new fans. But on the road her mind swirls down the rabbit hole of her memories, as she remembers events of tours past, her childhood and the difficulties and joys of being raised by an avant-garde artist father, and as she reminisces on relationships on the road, in between tours, and where exactly she fits in the world anymore. If she feels most comfortable on a stage with a guitar strapped to her, what will happen to her life if she gives up this one? This book was not what I expected, but I loved it.

[Juniper · Rating 2 out of 5]

i just don't know about this one...i do know that if books could reproduce this book would be the lovechild of jennifer egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and rachel kushner's The Flamethrowers.

BUT...i was 'meh' on egan's, and loved kushner's. d'erasmo was more egan than kushner. 'wonderland' had great potential, but i don't feel like d'erasmo really got there with her book.

this novel was kinda clunky, and felt disjointed. generally i enjoy stories that move about in time (not scifi time travel sort of thing, rather - in fiction when we get flashbacks from a character and when an author weaves a character's past into the present), but 'wonderland', for me, didn't handle this well - hence my comment about things feeling disjointed or clunky. the main character - anna - isn't great at self-awareness, and doesn't really go too deep in trying to figure herself out - though she seemingly wants to get there and figure herself out; other characters just weren't very well-developed either. so it all created a bit of a disconnect for me. i never got truly invested in the story - though i read closely and kept hoping for a turning point during the read.

i did read an ARC for this book - and there were some editing issues, so i hope that gets worked out before being released.

[Melinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solidly crafted literary work from a female rockers perspective. Innovative and ingenious. D'Erasmo submerges the reader into the depths of Anna's tour, music and comeback. An artsy edge with a gritty grainy past and present of a middle aged rocker hoping for a second chance. The reader feels a true sense of the challenges females face in the music industry, especially from the mature age of Anna.

"Music is quicksilver, gossamer; careers are measured in butterfly lifetimes. My butterfly life ended seven years ago in Rome. No one gives a shit about what I do anymore. I'm on a tiny label, albeit a tiny one with some cachet, but I paid for Wonderland myself. I begin to feel queasy. What have I started? I eye the sentimental porcelain figurine, singing so witlessly. Why did Boone agree to take me on? Am I a novelty act?"

D'Erasmo blends smart prose with a poetic splash in combination with a serrated artsy peak. She is bold in her narrative and gives the reader a raw and untamed ripe character. D'Erasmo has carved her place and is to be noticed. Extremely well shaped novel.

[Kendra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anna Brundage, the 44 year old daughter of two artists, grew up in a bohemian life style all over the world. It is not completely surprising then, that she develops her own brand of creativity in music, and her life seems to retain that bohemian quality. Aside from her small apartment in New York, her erstwhile job teaching young girls to build things, her sister's much more settled life, and her now remarried mother, Anna seems to have few ties to the world most of us know. Seven years earlier, Anna achieved some degree of success in the music world, the crashed just as quickly. Now she's back, making music all over the globe, searching for that perfect note, the right feeling to her music, and falling easily into bed with strangers. Still, she thinks about the little bit of stability she has had in her life, and wonders in which of those worlds she really fits or wants to fit. In bringing this story together, the author takes us back and forth in time. Effectively done, beautifully written, intriguing characters. Thank you to the author and the publisher for allowing me to read the advance copy of this book. It comes out in May, 2014.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is the opposite of rock and roll. The formal and stylistic choices in language might lend themselves to a novel about a viola player or the Brodsky Quartet, not a semi-rock band or whatever they call themselves. The bit about songwriting - the note beyond the note, the note not heard - seems condescending.

The main character seems like a hologram. No, not Jem and the Holograms, that would actually be cool. You can barely catch the form, and maybe some interest, but no, here she goes sleeping with some guy again. And she plays guitar? At one point, mid-song, she supposedly picks up a guitar to solo. Who does that? Who picks it up mid-song? Unless it's a uke-effin-lele! And that is not rock and roll!

And there was a definite lack of humor thru-out the whole book. There were many brooding artists and over-it musicians and a manager. Who even HAS a manager go on tour with them these days? Ugh.

I better stop before I get an ulcer.

[Anabella Shay Xo(RomanceBookWormXoXo) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It made you wonder what all was going on inside the heroine's mind. Like where she was headed and what her thoughts were all about.
It's a fairly quick read if you have plenty of time on your hands. I hope to see more from this same author.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stacey D’Erasmo’s new novel WONDERLAND is about second chances at life and at love. It examines the life of Anna Brundage. Anna is a 44 year old rock star that hasn’t had a hit in a decade. She sells a piece of her father’s famous art to finance her comeback tour across Europe. The novel floats back and forth in time as interesting characters float in and out of Anna’s life. Along the way Anna has several unconventional encounters with men and ultimately finds a second chance at love. D’Erasmo’s writing is gorgeous and has a very authentic sense about it. You feel like you are on the bus with the band.

[Jolene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here we get a fictional autobiography of sorts about Anna Brundage. We learn about her hippie childhood and her rock star lifestyle. She ends up having to choose between touring the world or giving up music as her primary career and settling into teaching wood shop to schoolgirls. D'Erasmo's writing style is similar to that of Rachel Kushner. The characters might be off in far-flung destinations and high most of the time, but they also seem very familiar--and I think that's a testament to how well D'Erasmo lets us into their inner thoughts even if the character is only making a short appearance.

[Peter Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Granted, I'm a longtime fan of Stacey D'Erasmo. One of the things I like best about her work is that it's so unpredictable, book to book. What is known: the intelligence, the sharpness of the language. Here she does the impossible, capturing music with words, and also writing about the invisible sources and energies upon which an artist draws. Anna B. is a character like no other, full of yearning, unapologetic. And I admire how this story captures so much time--its structure is magnificent at showing dimension and depth, the way the past overlaps the present--but doesn't try to sum itself up. The ending felt natural and just right to me.

[Barry Wightman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her quietly electric new novel Wonderland, Stacey D’Erasmo explores that vast, forever green territory - the mystery of art. And in Anna Brundage, D’Erasmo has created a powerful presence, a “too-tall red-headed woman with bangs who rides her bike to school from the East Village.” The child of an infamously artistic father, progeny of the counter-culture, now forty-four, Anna has been trying, without much success, to follow-up her much-acclaimed first record of 2002, “Whale.” Wonderland is about finding a way back, finding the door to that land of artistic wonder. But she’s tangled up in blue. And we’re right there with her.

[Bridgitte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really beautiful writing and thoughtfulness to scenes. It's also interesting and lovely to read about an aging female protagonist.

"For Berlin I wear black stockings, and my hair has been done up by a tiny man with muttonchops: it is pomaded into a 1940s twist. Thick, shiny red lipstick. The overall effect is of a theatrical decadence that isn't really sexy; it only references sex, references decadence. Real sex is curled up, dusty, within its citations, like a figure from Pompeii."

[Xe Sands · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man, D'Erasmo has quite a voice. This is going to be the most delicious challenge to narrate.

Having read, then lived through this book backwards, sideways and upside down while voicing it...all I can say is, Holy Mary Mother of...

D'Erasmo has an exquisite style. I hope that readers will truly open to Anna's journey and just let it carry them along, without trying to analyze it or force it into compliance along the way.

Trust me, it will be worth it.

[Jodi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Women writing about rock & roll is just about my favorite thing on the planet. It’s one of my eternal quests, to find and read all the books written by women about rock and roll, and if that book happens to be a novel? All my pleasure centers start to tingle. So it’s kind of disappointing that Stacey D’Erasmo’s Wonderland, didn’t leave me sated and dreamy-eyed with love. Read more.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well done novel about a 40 something female rock singer back on the comeback trail on a tour of Europe I this decade. Erasmo weaves back and forth across time. Her descriptions of touring and playing music struck this non musician as accurate, a great little travelogue of Europe liked this better then the Michael Cunningham novel and look forward to reading more of her work.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise -- aging indie rocker uses her life savings to mount one last world tour -- is kind of great, and for the most part, it was fun to read about a world I know nothing about. Unfortunately, this world was also pretty boring a lot of the time, and involved a lot of sex with unattractive-sounding old guys.

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ehh...I didn't really understand the point of this book. There wasn't really a story and I couldn't understand the main character's motivation. For the most part, a waste of time. 1.5 stars just because it wasn't awful.

[Courtney Maum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Reviewed it for my "Celebrity Book Review" column on Electric Literature, here: http://electricliterature.com/celebri...

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not for impatient readers! It's a non-linear and puzzling and mysterious and intriguing and many-layered and intricate tale. Ultimately, interesting, in the best sense of the word.

[Sinclair · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love love love D'Erasmo's writing, but I was a bit bored with the characters and the way this book dragged on. I skimmed the last 1/3.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the silliness of Daisy and the Six, I wanted to read a really good rock n roll novel and remembered I had this on my shelf. (I started reading it in a bookstore in Seattle and got hooked.) Wonderland is profound and poetic. You get the minutiae of the tour, the hotel rooms, the rented houses, the cocaine-fueled recording sessions, the sleeping around, the drinking and drinking—"I drink my drink as if what I want is a drink between breakfast and lunch."—but it's never presented in some prissy, oh my God, rock stars are all drug addicts! kind of way. It's more the matter-of-fact description of the way life can flow, ragged, then woozy, ecstatic, then melancholy, sometimes all at the same time when you're on the road, away from home for months, years. There are friendships that feel like family, primal love fests that feel like soul connections, then ending in a pouf as suddenly as they began. And always Anna, a rock star who's thrown every cent she has (and then some) into a comeback tour—her last chance to see if her music has what it takes to sustain her—thinks back on the moments of her life. She remembers the other tours, the recording sessions that made her famous, the ones that felt like magic, then landed her in the land of the has-been. She remember her artist dad, famous for cutting an actual train in half, whose obsessions turned her childhood into a gypsy Bohemia; the sister who chose a very different path; the absent musician husband; the love of her life who still tugs at her heart and mind; the one-night-stands with tattoos or cool apartments in Berlin she'll never forget; the glimmering details that hover, haunting her or becoming inspiration for her art. Some makes perfect sense, some suggests a thread you wish you could follow, all of it gorgeously written, dripping with meaning, promise, and longing, as Anna tries to figure out who she is and what her future days and legacy will be.

[Janice · Rating 3 out of 5]

"When I kiss him, he puts his arms above his head, looking me in the eye. The scent of him wafts up. He has a small, old scar just above his left eyebrow. His expression is cool, appraising -- partly as if he expects this, but also as if he might believe that the world is like this, it can kiss you or kill you at any second, and you must never turn away from either possibility."

"My hair, like my mother's, was red and thick, pirate's hair, which she cut short all over my head. In my coat I looked like a sky-blue stalk with an exploding red flower stuck on top: surreal, scrawled, perturbed."

"Our father loved us, both our parents loved us, but there might be such a thing as too much visual pleasure. It leaves you with an appetite for something the world doesn't necessarily have to offer -- you know the door is there somewhere, it's a perceptual plane, but it might open if you press on the air just here, if you tilt sideways to a particular degree and close one eye, if you go down that alley, if you follow that sound, if you sleep too much or don't sleep at all, if you give up this lover or take that one, if you spend all the money, if you hoard the money, if you make a sacrifice, if you wait, if you rush forward as blindly as possible, if you come to a full stop, dumbstruck. If you push harder. If you give up pushing. Our parents spent all their time visualizing things that didn't, at the end of the day, exist. Tearing holes in the world. What were we supposed to think?"

"The sunlight on any wall, for instance the wall of a cruddy motel room in a fifth-rate city, at four in the afternoon, is beautiful, unquestionably. Lemon, butter, daisy, illuminated eggshell, seraphic, gilded, color of a dick's wing or a Tuscan hillside