“Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta’s moving and
intrepid third novel, is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to
create—in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture. In the
sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no
getting to know each other,” says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother, Nik,
now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late
seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music,
always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the
work, but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate
and acute audience, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family’s first
defense against the world’s fragility. Friends die, their mother’s memory and
mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunts
Denise. When her daughter, Ada,
decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities seem to escalate. Dana
Spiotta has established herself as a “singularly powerful and provocative
writer” (The Boston Globe) whose work is fiercely original. Stone
Arabia—riveting, unnerving, and strangely beautiful—reexamines what it means to
be an artist and redefines the ties that bind.”
