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The Lightning Bottles
Marissa Stapley
Simon and Schuster
It’s the novel that Marissa Stapley long wanted to write — a story that lifts the lid off the music scene of the 1990s.
But she had more on her mind than simply delivering a potent evocation of what she considers to be a watershed moment in our history — “the last era we had of a really definable culture before the internet.”
Her new novel, The Lightning Bottles, definitely serves up the glory and the grunge, the triumph and the tragedy, the fame and the folly. But it also takes a cutting look at sexism and the marginalization of women in the music industry.
She does so within the framework of a story that moves backward and forward in time while being anchored to a central mystery. What has happened to Elijah Hart, one half of a remarkable rock ‘n roll duo whose songs have catapulted it to international fame — and later to soul-shrivelling disaster.
Elijah, a drug-addled wreck, has abruptly vanished. Fandom, in a full-blown display of hothouse hysteria, needs to conjure up a villain to explain his disappearance, and it finds one in somebody it already hates — Elijah’s wife and performing partner, Jane.
Stapley, a seasoned novelist who also writes romantic fiction under the pen name of Julia McKay, says that The Lightning Bottles had been simmering in her mind for years.
“I had its characters with me for a very long time before I figured out what to do with them,” she says by phone from her home in Toronto. “I’d always wanted to write about what I thought was a culturally significant time.”
She also believed there were still tough questions to be asked about the penalties that fame can exact from the type of intense, mutually dependent relationship that leaves Jane and Elijah empowered — but also imperilled. The result is a book that she hopes will leave readers clamouring for answers. Where is Elijah? What happened to these two shining lights of the music world? How did they get to this place — this place of disaster, both personal and professional? Can they get together again?
“It’s Jane’s story and it was really important to me to tell it and allow her to be in the spotlight,” Stapley says firmly. The reason for this is perfectly understandable. Elijah may possess “the voice of a fallen angel” but Jane is the one who wrote the songs that brought the two of them fame. She is the duo’s creative genius — a fact that the culture of the times, preferring mythology to truth, refuses to acknowledge. Instead, she’s seen too often as the hateful, frowning presence who shares the stage with Elijah, a charismatic singer who’s heaven-made for adoration.
There’s a searing scene in the novel when, on the verge of securing an essential recording contract, Elijah reminds a Columbia executive of Jane’s essential role in their success. The executive warns him to keep that information to himself. “Guys aren’t going to want to be screaming lyrics while headbanging in their pickup trucks to songs that were written by a woman.”
So Jane is ultimately reviled for being too much of a presence in the duo’s success. Her own steely musical integrity is not welcome — she instead acquires the status of a “pushy bitch” who is in some way holding Elijah back. And although Stapley insists that the novel’s principal characters are products of her own creative imagination, she also acknowledges that in writing about Jane and Elijah, she was also thinking about Yoko Ono and John Lennon.
“It’s public knowledge — if we care to pay attention — that the lyrics to Imagine where taken from a poem of the same name by Yoko. John only acknowledged it later and admitted he’d been a kind of jerk about it. Yet we never talk about that — instead we talk about how she broke up The Beatles.”
Stapley has her own blunt views about why the Beatles split. “The guys screwed it up themselves.” Yet Yoko continues to be the villain in many eyes “and it’s so frustrating that this sort of thing continues to happen.”
In her view, the same insidious dynamic was present in the 1990s. “Courtney Love is a fascinating character, but she did not murder Kurt Cobain — and she did not need him to become famous. She had her own deal before he became along, and it was bigger than his own record deal. It was so ‘90s … and to this day, people think Courtney was responsible for what happened.”
On one level, The Lightning Bottles, is a story about the mystery of Elijah’s disappearance. Five years after he vanished, Jane is in hiding from a hostile public in a countryside retreat in Germany. It’s by chance that the girl next door is an obsessed fan who claims to have proof that Elijah is still alive and has been leaving clues about how he may be found. The two of them — reviled wife and neurotic teenager — embark on a quest for the truth.
But on another level it’s about creative relationships and a woman’s place in them. “We keep stripping women’s contributions away,” Stapley protests. And women often allow that to happen. “Jane is not perfect and there’s a very good reason for that. In her journey she’s enabling Elijah but is also so closed and naive in not looking out for herself. She’s not realizing that this creates a vacuum and places her in a narrative she cannot control. She really makes herself vulnerable, and we see it happen.”
Stapley’s previous novel, Lucky, was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick. She treasures this success but is clear-eyed about it “There are many great novels and great writers who don’t have that flash of luck,” she cautions.
She also emphasizes that her situation is easier to deal with than that of a pop star.
“I’m lucky that my success is manageable … But when you are recognizable and people think they own you, it becomes so dangerous. I think we need to dial back on our sense of ownership over people who become famous..”
For Stapley, Elijah and Jane are recognizable specimens in the culture she’s writing about. “I feel that to be a truly great artist you must be completely obsessed with your art. You may not have the best grip of reality, yet we’re putting you in impossible situations where mental health is not at the forefront.”
And fame itself can be the most impossible situation of all.
“We can look at someone like Taylor Swift who is extraordinary in keeping control of the narrative. I just find it so impressive but also unfair that she has to work so hard to keep her name above water. Then you look at someone like Britney Spears who’s just kind of a mess with everyone watching.
“It harder for female stars — you don’t get to be forgiven for something you’ve done, and the double standard is so alarming to me.”