Order BROKEN GLASS WALTZES here
"Whose robe is that in there?"
"Mark's?," she said. "My husband"
"Right," I said. "Well, Jean, it's been fun, but guys get shot for this kind of shit. So I guess I'd better get out of here."
This cover. Look it at, it hurts me just to do so. Despite its over-the-top nature, there is something oddly convincing about these severed fingers. In its own way, it's telling of BROKEN GLASS WALTZES' true nature, which is not as obvious as it seems. The end of the hair metal era (88-93, approximately) is an intriguing backdrop for a crime novel as culture went through major changes during that short time window. Warren Moore's debut novel embodies this bizarre half-era where so many dreams died. It's about love, desire, human need, baseball and a little about heavy metal too.
Kenny Rockford turns into Robbie Rock at night, when he hops on the stage of a local bar, and burns the house down with his heavy metal cover band The Selekt. His ratio of girls he meets, fucks and forgets/gigs played is about 1.0. Except for Jean. She's different. She lures Kenny into her apartment and dances the great mambo with him in a manner he never quite danced it before. But the problem with Jean (that could've been another great title for the novel) is that she's married to a guy named Mark. Unlike Kenny, she doesn't care about that, she wants to see him again. And again. You know how girls are? Jean's not just every girl. She's got something wrong with her head.
I did not expect BROKEN GLASS WALTZES to be like that at all. I thought it would be jacked-up and flamboyant. Instead, I got an intimate, fatalistic, asphyxiating, Shakespearean story of love and frailty. So you shouldn't take the heavy metal backdrop at face-value here. It's highly metaphorical. Jean has a highly metaphorical value also. She is that idealized eighties bad girl that gradually slips away as reality kicks in. That's what Warren Moore does so well in this novel. Pulling the veil of theatricality inch-by-inch to reveal the cold, hard truth. It doesn't only apply to the music, but also to the "theater of relationships". Nobody really is who they pretend to be when you first meet them. It works because his approach to this idea isn't one-dimensional.
I mean, I always seem to get the birds with broken wings. The ones with fathers who are drunks, the ones who used to be fat and aren't anymore and have something to prove, the ones who want to change you into someone who wouldn't have attracted them in the first place, the one who want to fuck you so they can piss off their folks during an argument about the weed under their mattress. They all come to me, and I drill them, and I see them again or I don't. Equal opportunity - me and the Statue of Liberty.
Jean was a magnificent creation, but it's the deliberate structure Warren Moore employed that gave her such power over the story. Moore keeps key components of who she is hidden until it's the least convenient moment to learn it. I liked Kenny too. Loved the contrast between his faux high-profile job and his real-life habits like watching baseball, for example. It kept true to what Moore tried to say with the novel.The novel is more tension than action, but Moore understands the mechanic of tension very well. I was a little bit disappointed about two-thirds in, because he kind-of self-sabotages the mechanics of his own novel through a really cliché scene, but it doesn't steer too far from what it could have been because Moore keeps is about the characters and I both liked Jean and Kenny.
Cohesiveness of discourse is a big thing for me. In that regards, BROKEN GLASS WALTZES is wrapped up tight. It is the metaphorical rocky shore where the speed boat of hair metal comes to crash and blow up in a ball of flames. It's a little underwhelming at times, the realistic scenes with Kenny can drag on for their own sake and it takes a few easy exits, but Warren Moore built two strong characters and a difficult, byzantine and oh-so-contemporary relationship, I enjoyed it a lot. It's clearly a first novel, but it's a good one. BROKEN GLASS WALTZES is both an intricate character study and an violent, obsessive love story that's not really about love. I take a perverse pleasure in those.