Record Palace

by Susan Wheeler

Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, Record Palace is an eccentric debut novel about jazz, art, race, and identity.

In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago’s Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: Record Palace: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie.

Cindy, a lean, lonely white girl, has come to Chicago to study art history, to be anywhere but where she came from—tract housing in Thousand Oaks, California; mock-stucco buildings; “incessant sun and incessant sunniness of every blonde girl.”

Record Palace, littered with cans of malt liquor and remnants of past meals, also has boxes upon boxes of records—all jazz. And it has Acie, “big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a thin black U-tank taut across Sumo folds.” Cindy knows she doesn’t belong, and this is why she stays.

Cindy’s determination leads to a tentative friendship with Acie, and she becomes a familiar, if not fully understood, presence in the store. But it is through her chance meeting with Acie’s son that she becomes embroiled in an unusual crime.

With prose that resembles the syncopated rhythms of jazz, Susan Wheeler offers a stunning portrait of a woman searching for an identity.

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

About the author

Poet and writer Susan Wheeler earned a BA at Bennington College and did graduate work in Art History at the University of Chicago. Her first poetry collection, Bag o' Diamonds (1993), won the Norma Faber First Book Award. The Village Voice Literary Supplement described that book as displaying “limber intelligence and visual wit... with influences including John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and the Language poets;” the reviewer noted that Wheeler “risks echoing everybody while sounding like no one.” Wheeler's work is noted for its sonic and lyric intensity, surrealist imagery, use of pop culture, pastiche, and non seuqitur, as well as its playful relationship to received form. According to literary critic Majorie Perloff, “Wheeler is that rare thing among poets, a genuine cultural critic; her poems use image and allusion with such exactitude that we see the things around us — from pop tarts to polyvinylled toilet seats —as if for the first time.” Other collections include Smokes (1998), selected by Robert Hass for the Four Way Book Prize and a featured selection of the Poetry Book of the Month Club; Source Codes (2001); Ledger (2005), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize; Assorted Poems (2009); and Meme (2012), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her novel, Record Palace (2005) won high praise for its atmospheric portrayal of Chicago and deft blending of coming-of-age narrative with noir.

Wheeler has won numerous awards and honors for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received the Boston Review Poetry Award, the Robert D. Richardson Award for Non-Fiction from the Denver Quarterly, and a Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught in writing programs at the New School, New York University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Columbia University. Wheeler is currently Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Reviews

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Wheeler read as part of my Visiting Author's Series on 6/3/2005. This is a version of my spoken introduction for her:

I love how Susan Wheeler creates such clear, identifiable, believable voices for the main characters, despite the fact that one of main characters, Acie, is literally larger than life. That the two main characters, Acie & Cindy, could not be more different is one of the main “points” of the story. But if that were all “Record Palace” was: a tale of two opposites--it would be a failure.

Without overbearing their differences, Susan Wheeler reveals her characters slowly, gradually, with the reader coming to know them--especially Cindy--as she slowly comes to know more about herself. There’s such a lovely sense of opening in the story; what, in lesser hands, I think, would be cornily obvious coincidences coming home to roost remain exquisite mysteries here.

And the language!! “The want of a drink, mosquito at my ear!” Just leaving out the “a” in front of “mosquito” moves a simple sentence into a revealed state of mind. How she elegantly captures in his thoughts the disgust Acie feels toward his family; you can see the taciturn shake of his head in paragraph after paragraph. She writes of a simple, city snowstorm scene: “a car rolling down State sounding like someone slowly ripping velvet.” And as a reader, you say “Exactly.”

When Cindy, coming down from a drunk, goes to a jazz club with Acie, Susan Wheeler writes “I was alert now, my high cleared, killed by cold, pretzels with the chasers. And then: I, fine.” Again--perfect. And there are dozens of other examples, all testament to Susan’s background as a poet--the economy of language, the explosiveness of the description…all contributing to making “Record Palace” an effortless read.

“Record Palace” is a book where at the end the temptation is to go back and start over--like with the great jazz records referenced throughout--you want to give it another spin, to recapture the initial, magical experience.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing less than a latter-day American masterpiece. RECORD PALACE roots around a deeply serious concern: the pernicious issues of the American racial divide and how it might be overcome. Yet the novel's alive with the humor of people who spend too much time either in with massive tomes on the visual arts or with their collection of rare post-bebop jazz. Wheeler's ripe and exquisite prose conveys somehow the rainbow-surprise of mid-American free jazz (the title refers to a Chicago record store, already in collapse in the late 1970s) and the wet pressure an incipient booze-addiction, and the prod and sap of adolescent love.

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

While in the end I did enjoy the story that was told, the jazz rhythm of the poetry/prose in this novel was very difficult to read and not enjoyable. I wouldn't recommend this book, but as I said the story itself did turn out to be engaging. It'd probably make a decent movie, but the words just didn't do it justice...not to me anyways.