This is a book about inheritances but not the kind you can put in the bank. These are inheritances of the spirit—emotional, temperamental, musical, and they come with a double-edge—the gift and the burden.

The story tracks two generations of 20th century singer-songwriters, toggling between Judie Zingerman’s mid-Sixties Greenwich Village folk-rock adventures and the mid-Nineties, when Judie’s daughter Emma hits the road as an alt-rocker on the verge of big-time success.
In the further-away past, there’s Judie and her sister Sylvia aka the Singer Sisters – smart, talented, maybe a little more hemmed in than they realize, with wild bohemian ambitions. Together and apart, they face every obstacle two young ladies would in what was an overtly misogynistic counterculture—including creative sabotage and theft by the many Peter Pans that circle around them.

Meanwhile, in the closer yet maybe more inscrutable past, daughter Emma is grappling with selfhood, trying to understand her mother’s career-ending crack-up as she wades through a more covertly misogynistic but no less trying landscape—the corporatized world of video shoots, paparazzi, and established “rock royalty,” offspring included. In the process, Emma uncovers a secret about her mom—one which she can use to catapult her career if she dares. The move threatens to drive mother and daughter further apart.
It’s inheritance as a song and song as a rite of passage and it’s a terrific set-up. But for full disclosure, there’s been so much retro-friendly rock lit going on these days that I was braced for something more two-dimensional when I picked up the book, another hippie faerie fantasy from the generation that only saw the parade in documentaries. Over the course of the story, though, Seltzer’s human-sized angles won me over. The two storylines form a powerful braid, juxtaposing the mid-Sixties innocence of Judie (she “conquered smoking like learning a new chord”) with the second-nature cynicism of daughter Emma (“Was she bohemian … or high maintenance?”)

What holds it all together has something to do with the way the story resists that fantasy iconography. On the one hand, Seltzer is obviously versed in the great Village folkie myth, and for those of us raised on Nik Cohn and Guy Pealart’s Rock Dreams, with its glorious image of Dylan, Ginsberg, and Baez palling around Washington Square, it’s hard not to get high on the atmosphere—she paints it all with great, knowing detail. (One hilarious running theme is the constant yen to face-off with Dylan—to best him, beat him, or maybe just stand beside him. The whole gang collectively suffers from what Donald Fagen referred to as “the anxiety of Zimfluence.”)

But on the other hand, Seltzer also seems keenly aware of the way that myth has morphed into something more self-conscious, more sinister, and less satisfying. A true dame of the Nineties, Emma shirks in the face of her own growing fame—the sense of irony won’t scrub off. “In public, she symbolized an ‘empowered’ woman…She had won. She had won it all, and she hated it all.”

Through this mother-daughter reckoning, Seltzer explores what it means to be an artist in and of your time, and some of the best passages are about the act of songwriting, the wrestling of it, the blind alleys and brick walls. Railing at an insipid pop tune that her husband presents her, Judie decries, “Oh that’s terrible…that won’t leave my head for days.”

“Isn’t that what we want in music?” her husband innocently asks.

To which Judie replies, “I prefer when it won’t let you in at first, and you have to knock on the door. But once you go inside, the house is endless.”

Judie and Emma are memorable characters—moral centers in their way—and their exchange feels most urgent here. Like any novel that dares such a wide canvas, there are maybe one too many subplots and some summary pile-ups along the way, but the fundamental message gets through: inheritance morphs in the hands of the receiver.
The novel also has a subtle but formal Jewish-American color to it, in the dignified, old-fashioned tradition of books like Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar and Popkin’s Herman Had Two Daughters, where you can taste the matzo ball soup without making a thing of it. It’s Jewishness as a matter of day-to-day life, and it got me thinking. There’s so much brouhaha these days about the changing fate of the American Jew in the 21st century. Franklin Foer’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” for instance, makes some wild claims, but one thing he posits is irrefutable: American Jews of the 20th century had an astonishing power over the American popular song, rewriting the nation’s musical traditions from Berlin to Dylan and beyond. The Singer Sisters is aware of the double-pressure of that legacy—a mythological Jewish-American inheritance—and, for me, it raised questions about what the future holds.

How will these rock myths survive us? What will “folk music” or even “alt rock” mean to a generation raised on digital bleeps and bloops? And what, for that matter, will family mean? What does the next generation inherit?

Meantime, I’m looking forward to what this writer does next.

Daniel Weizmann is the author of the Pacific Coast Highway Mysteries.
 

 

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