Grade: C+

The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana (2023) is well written with adroit use of imagery and metaphor by author Jennifer Banash. Here the narrator describes a lemon: 

“I knew that if I raised it to my nose, it would smell of summer, that unmistakable citrus tang that clung to the pads of your fingers” (50). 

I mean, that’s pretty good. The plot of Ava Arcana is well- executed too. 

On the other hand, the novel suffers from stilted dialogue and characters that are meant to fulfill the perspective of feminism rather than realism (men = bad, women = good).  

The novel does not say anything particularly important or profound, but at least the prose is good and the storyline is paced well.  It is also refreshingly a modern (in the sense of 2023) novel, with references to online dating and Google drive. But to the extent that the book attempts to have a message, pointing to an alleged abusive patriarchy in the music industry, this message is ham-handed.

Synopsis 

The plot follows two timelines, 2005 and 2019. Kayla, a Rolling Stone journalist, is the narrator of the 2019 timeline. Each chapter is named “Ava” or “Kayla” to indicate who is narrating. Both timelines are set in New York City, which is described vividly, down to minute detail for different neighborhoods. 

In 2005, Ava Arcana meets an aspiring pop star with the somewhat ridiculous stage name “Lexi Mayhem” when she is hired as a bartender, under Lexi’s tutelage. The two traverse across the city after their bartending shift, getting in trouble, getting drunk, and at one point Lexi introduces Ava to coke. Ava is shy to Lexi’s brashness, they are both singer-songwriters, budding performers, and they both  have a crush on Lexi’s manager, Jamie, in what becomes a tense love triangle. 

This competition between Ava and Lexi intensifies when they are both being scouted by a record exec, the ridiculously named Christian Vane (not that “Lexi Mayhem” is any less ridiculous). 

Kayla is an embodiment of what liberal, White professional females feel that they are supposed to be: overly dedicated to their careers in a work horse manner, fridges filled with only water and leftover Chinese food, and a martyred air in recounting how much they work (as if anyone cared).  The subject of Kayla’s Rolling Stone cover story, Lexi Mayhem, meanwhile, is described as being intimidating by the “sheer force of her personality,” whose presence fills up the room “like helium.” Yet there isn’t any concrete example of this charismatic personality of Lexi, she never does or says anything particularly clever or creative. It’s a case of “tell” rather than “show” for Banash. At any rate, the way that her antics are described makes one suspect Mayhem is a stand-in for Lady Gaga, another pop-star of supposed profundity with not much to show for it. Besides a stated desire to “push boundaries,” one is hard pressed to find any substantive contribution to music or culture from this modern brand of teeny-bopper star. 

As Kayla interviews Lexi and brainstorms her Rolling Stone cover story on Lexi Mayhem, the novel turns into a murder mystery. Kayla tries to uncover what transpired between Lexi and Ava. From here, Lexi seeks to obstruct the journalist. We then learn, rather improbably, that Kayla has something in her history parallel to what apparently transpired between Ava and Lexi, though this thread of the novel seems extraneous. 

Kayla learns that Christian Vane has a history of drugging his victims by spiking their drink, with the idea to take advantage of them.  While the politically correct novel likes to attribute this to a WASPy character (white males the preferred villains of today’s publishing industry), the best real-life parallel for this particular criminal is Bill Cosby. 

In the end of the novel, we are assured that nothing that transpired is the fault of any of the female characters, not Lexi Mayhem nor Ava nor Kayla; rather, it is the men that are at fault, be it Ben, Lexi’s manager or Christian Vane. The male characters have different levels of villainy and culpability, whereas the female characters have different levels of victimhood (having been victimized by men naturally). 

Thematically 

The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana seems to suggest that the sisterhood of women should never be split asunder for the mere sake of a man; that a man is never worth breaking up a friendship. This is what happened between Ava and Lexi, with Jamie, their manager, coming in between them. In reality, and perhaps as the novel concedes by dint of the events, the romantic possibility can and does trump friendship probably more often than not. Yet this may not accord with the feminist sensibility of Ava Arcana. 

Evaluation

Overall, The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana is a workmanlike effort. The writing is pretty sharp.  There are elements of it, however, that feel more like YA fiction rather than adult fiction (or women’s fiction?). For example, the characters were a bit one-dimensional. Ian, Ava’s ex-boyfriend, is the evil frat-boy type, and he doesn’t seem to have any other motivation rather than being a bad guy with bad intentions. The dialogue is not great either. The prose in general though is good, particularly in the description of the setting, New York City. 

The men portrayed are either a feminine ideal of what a man could be (Jamie), or over-the-top villainous, in the style of me-too perps, who in the mind of the author are apparently WASPy men with sandy colored curls (not exactly the actual perps of me-too predation). The villains of course are men, who are apparently so malevolent as to admit their me-too crimes to the enterprising journalist Kayla. Ironically, the heroine works for Rolling Stone to uncover a me-too crime; meanwhile, the real Rolling Stone magazine, in a similar spirit of imagining that they were avenging predatory men, fell for a me-too hoax and implicated an innocent person in the University of Virginia case (2014), later retracting their defamatory article. 

The songwriter Ava Petrova moved to the US at age five from Ukraine, and I have to wonder if that isn’t also a nod to the left in this politically correct novel.

Like many books or films which endeavor to strike a feminist tone, the novel at times feels anti-male, but most of its readership is probably female anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter. 

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