The Singer Sisters: A Novel

Reading The Singer Sisters, what comes immediately to mind is not the soap-opera-like drama of Fleetwood Mac circa 1977’s Rumours, but the thinly veiled miniseries made of those shifting relationships, Daisy Jones & the Six, itself based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel. Got all that? The rock and roll bed-hopping was tailor made for dramatization.

Seltzer’s novel is initially set in a similar fraught period, the Greenwich Village, New York, folk scene of the early ’60s. An intellectually inclined family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, (another period folk mecca) births two musical daughters, who make some minor waves and record as the Singer Sisters. Everyone smokes, just like in Daisy Jones.

The loose models would appear to be Joan Baez and her singing sister Mimi Farina—out of a similar household in Cambridge and ascendant in that New York period. To them, add the intermarried Wainwright/Roche/McGarrigle crowd, whose songs—like the Singer Sisters’—are all about, and with, themselves.

Judie Zingerman (the more volatile of the sisters) runs off to the Village, is immediately impregnated by a semi-famous Irish folkie, gives the baby up, and turns a rush of angry, anguished songs into a career with her sister, the more stable Silvia. The former has the songs, the latter the charismatic voice. Their first album is a cult classic, and two more—less successful—follow. But then Judie, pursued by various demons, abandons music for motherhood.  

The interpersonal drama is not bad. There are enough meltdowns and crises to push the book forward. The problem, surfacing quite soon, is that the author has no real feel for music scenes, and is way out of her depth in imagining the Village at that time. It’s as if Bob Dylan and Baez were musical loners on those city streets, and not accompanied by and intertwined with Fred Neil, Eric Andersen, Paul Siebel, Tom Paxton, Patrick Sky, Dave Van Ronk, Josh White, Carolyn Hester, Richard Farina (husband to Mimi), Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, and many others.

Later in the book, when the family reunites for a memorial concert, they perform “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and “Down by the Riverside,” songs that were the darling of a generation before theirs—think the collegiate Kingston Trio (and A Mighty Wind).

Dylan’s own writing in Chronicles: Volume One from 2004 uses telling details to richly evoke the times and locations where he made music. The stories add to our appreciation of his work. In The Singer Sisters, the sense of place is missing, and the songs are reduced to some out-of-musical-context (as well as fairly vapid) lyrics. They’re aimed at the inner circle.

The Village Voice of 1973 seethed with political ferment and feminist consciousness-raising. So consider this excerpt from a Voice “review” of the Singer Sisters cited in the book: “Enough Emily Dickinson-style interiors, enough women gazing out of them and lamenting their heartbreak, enough sad stories about the raped and mistreated heroines that populate too much of folk music, enough navel-gazing about female confinement. . . . Look at [the fictitious] Miranda Steel! She does what she wants, her stories about her latest lay are why she’s the female Dylan . . .” Did he forget to cite Joan Baez? No, he didn’t—it’s later in the review.

A male writer in the 1973 Voice who only grudgingly acknowledges feminism and makes light of a woman’s pain at being raped would have been hung in effigy on MacDougal Street. What the Voice was actually printing that year were essays from women like Vivian Gornick, who wrote then in the newspaper’s pages that feminism is “a profoundly new way of interpreting human experience. It is a vital piece of information at the center of a new point of reference from which one both re-interprets the past and predicts the future.”

Singer Sisters is told in episodes from different cities and different eras. So, we get not only Judie and Sylvia on stage, but Judie’s daughter, Emma, and her short career as a one-hit wonder who gets canceled. Her reference points are Alanis Morissette, Courtney Love and, cringingly, Britney Spears. Neither generation of the family is particularly likable—both mother and daughter come across as entitled and selfish.

Emma’s kind brother, Leon, is some kind of musical genius whose gifts aren’t totally made clear. He’s off somewhere, in the background, working on an opera or producing a Swedish pop star. The book’s structure could be confusing, but it actually isn’t because events merely alluded to in one chapter are fully developed in another.   

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is frequently cited as a great music book, as is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. They have their moments, but a book with a truly vivid sense of a developing musician is the late Frank Conroy’s Body and Soul. The Singer Sisters has the page-turning story but not the milieu.