From Library Journal
Set on the road, in forlorn honky-tonks and eventually in Carnegie Hall and a Nashville recording studio, this novel from the author of Fatal Light (LJ 5/15/97) documents the career of country musician Sapper Reeves and the Still Creek Boys. Sapper's banjo melodies are haunting, and his original lyrics inspired, but for years his achievements are minimal. He loves nothing more than his wife and son, but his constant touring tears the family apart. Only after his career seems shattered and his son is almost destroyed by combat in Vietnam does Sapper finally attain success with his music and and a better family life. Narrated mainly in brief vignettes, the story is sparse but engaging. Like many country songs, it displays aching loneliness and bitter failure but also the redemptive power of love and fidelity to one's dreams. Currey's terseness averts sentimentality but still offers homey wisdom and celebrates abiding human values. Recommended for most collections.?Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
As Sapper Reeves drives home in the night from Nashville to Maxwell, West Virginia, after recording his latest album, he recalls his abortive early career, some of the demoralized times when he wasn't playing and lived separately from his wife, Riva, and son, Bobby, and the gnawing pain inflicted by Bobby's maiming in the Vietnam War, which occurred just as Sapper was getting a second chance in music. Currey parcels out Sapper's memories in little chapters that quietly, vividly conjure weather, terrain, and buildings as well as the people Sapper and the other two Still Creek Boys (Sapper's original "combo") encounter on their desperately modest performance tours through the 1950s upper South. Despite these descriptive beauties and the appeal of Sapper's self-possessed persona, the book is hampered by a vocabulary more literary than seems credible in a narrator who never mentions reading anything, by clots of vague prose poetry, and by a disconcerting reticence about music. But how many other country-music novels are there?
Ray Olson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
A sentimental, heart-wrenching tale from novelist and story- writer Currey (The Wars of Heaven, 1990, Fatal Light, 1988, etc.) offers brief glimpses of a banjo player's path--though tragic--to fame and self-respect. A coal miner's son born poor but proud enough to take up the banjo to ease the worry of his widowed mother, Sapper Reeves is cut from the rough, durable broadcloth of American legend. At the opening of the novel, Reeves, in his 70s, takes a break from writing the songs for what will prove to be his capstone album and drives back to his hometown of Maxwell, West Virginia, reflecting on the origins of the Steel Creek Boys, a trio he formed in 1947 with his boyhood chum Estin Wyrell and the handsome, self-assured Leonard James. With Leonard on guitar and Wyrell on fiddle, the three left their jobs, wives, and infants to go in search of success, but found mostly misery, disappointment, and loneliness while performing at high-school socials and dingy roadhouses. The joys of playing country music are never enough to overcome the disappointments, as the trio are cheated by dishonest club owners, exploited by radio stations, and insulted by drunks. After a hostile audience beats them up and smashes their instruments, Reeves slips for several years into an alcoholic funk, losing the affections of his trusting wife, Riva, but not of his young son, Bob, who later joins the Marines, goes off to fight in Vietnam, and returns home physically and spiritually crippled. Reeves's early experience with failure helps him cope with his son's despair. Then an unexpected gift of a banjo from Wyrell, and Riva's cautious return, bring Reeves back to his music at a time when a younger generation is looking for heroes. More bitter than sweet, and frequently fogged by self-conscious Faulknerisms, but finally saved by a convincing depiction of the hard lives of its characters and the stubborn persistence of their modest hopes in the midst of loss. --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Currey has an unerring eye for detail, for the everyday wonders of life."
Edvins Beitiks, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Lost Highway is a book to linger over, full of passages worth re-reading, moments flashing with life, and, like a good country song, filled with spaces where we see our lives reflected."
The Boston Globe
"This enthralling narrative spanning a half—century in the life of a country musician traces the years and miles that divide father and son, husband and wife: the same years that, ironically, will serve to reconcile them in the end. Lost Highway takes us someplace better than we could have planned for ourselves—our task is to grow enough to recognize it. The book's hero Sapper Reeves calls his songs 'small legends of the miles.' Lost Highway, too, is a legend of the miles—and no small one."
The Seattle Times
"Outstanding...Currey strums the language in Lost Highway, capturing with haunting poignance the nuances of hillbilly dialects, rough-edged roadhouses, and the deafening silences of estrangement. And Currey never falls into cliche: his powerfully wrought images serve as a barrier to sentimentality in a novel that travels down long emotional backroads and hills of desperation, where endurance rides shotgun for melancholy...this exceptional paean to American music echoes with the full, smoky vocals of Currey's lyricism."
Kansas City Star
"This novel by the much—praised Currey is as eloquently piercing and deeply American as a classic folk ballad...told in haunting prose that allows Lost Highway to emerge on the page like music itself."
Publisher's Weekly
"When Richard Currey writes fiction, he speaks the truth. The poetry of his language, his wisdom, his compassion, sets us free. His journeys into the human heart are tiny miracles ... and when we finish Lost Highway we do so with a mysterious sense of revelation. The final chapters of this novel stir the heart and mind in ways only the best fiction can achieve."
Dallas Morning News
"Richard Currey's Fatal Light, one of the best novels written about the Vietnam War, revealed the same unerring eye for detail and the everyday wonders of life that Currey brings to his second novel Lost Highway... Currey's writing has a dignity and a studied understatement that is missing in most contemporary novels."
San Francisco Chronicle
"Richard Currey is one of those gems whose writing, like Venus in the night sky, seems to shine brighter than others. The more you read Lost Highway, the more his writing takes on a mesmerizing glow..."
Albuquerque Journal
Book Description
Lost Highway tells the story of Sapper Reeves, a gifted country musician and songwriter working the rainy backroads and forlorn taverns of the southern mountains in the years after World War II. Leaving his wife and son behind in his small West Virginia hometown, he is able to make only a paltry living with his music, and finds that his talent is as underappreciated as the country he and his band travel through. Eventually Sapper reaches a crisis of faith, one that reverberates from the ragged hope of the Eisenhower era to the anguish of Vietnam, where his son serves as a Marine. A nuanced and poetic first-person narrative, Lost Highway is at once the story of a brilliant musician's struggle for self-respect and artistic integrity and a textured portrait of an American family - a father's complex love for his son, a combat veteran's endurance and dignity, and a redeeming love affair that crosses half a century.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
Richard Currey's Lost Highway has attracted a legion of admirers since its initial publication in 1997. The book depicts the epic struggle of an ordinary person living his dreams and following his passion. Lost Highway is the story of Sapper Reeves, a gifted country musician from the small town of Maxwell, West Virginia. Sapper’s story covers the events of more than half a century, from his birth in a poor coal mining town through his travels on the back roads of Appalachia in search of recognition and respect. Along the way, Sapper’s embattled love for his wife and struggle to come to terms with his combat-wounded son form the basis of his artistic and personal redemption.
About the Author
Richard Currey was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He served from 1968 to 1972 in the U.S. Navy, and afterwards attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1980 he published his first book, Crossing Over: A Vietnam Journal, which went on to earn a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Currey’s international breakthrough came with his first novel, Fatal Light, short-listed for the 1988 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel. A winner of the Vietnam Veterans of America's Excellence in the Arts Award, Fatal Light was published in twelve languages. Lost Highway, his most recent novel, has been hailed as a definitive work of Appalachian fiction.
