Nashville Chrome

NASHVILLE CHROME may be a good book, but it doesn't shine as an audiobook despite--or perhaps because of--being a novel about sound itself. A fictionalized account of the Browns, a country music group whose fame rivaled Elvis Presley's, the story offers few opportunities for Debra Monk to ply her skills as a performer. Inconsequential scenes are drawn out while important moments are underdeveloped or absent. Furthermore, the sparse dialogue does little to lift Monk's work above a simple reading. The audio medium tends to amplify both a printed book's strengths and its shortcomings, and this book's flaws, when held up to the ear, are difficult to ignore. L.B.F. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 26, 2010
In his grand return to fiction, Bass (Why I Came West) summons—with a lyrical style befitting his best nature writing—Arkansas and backwoods trio the Browns, the true-life country music trailblazers who pioneered the 1950s sound from which the novel takes its title. Now half-blind and living in obscurity in west Memphis, the group's oldest sibling, Maxine, ruminates on the trio's fateful rise and subsequent fall from grace, and her struggle to recover fame. (Or is it recover from it?) Maxine sets out to have a documentary made and relives on the page a yearning that perhaps only a song or accomplished novel could intone. We revisit her childhood in the woods; live through brother Jim Ed's and father Floyd's bloody struggles in the wood mill; witness sister Bonnie's love affair with a young Elvis; and experience Maxine's reverie in front of "a standing ovation more powerful than any drug." Like the sound Chet Atkins pulls from the Browns in the studio, the narrative has a pitch-perfect chorus of longing and regret, with an undertone that connects and heals.