[New Book] LaCour’s new work plays the soundtrack of young lives

The Disenchantments

By Nina LaCour

(Dutton)

The summer after high school is a time when senioritis gives way to the anticipation of life’s next chapter. For most middle-class high school graduates, that next chapter means packing up and heading to college. In Nina LaCour’s young-adult novel “The Disenchantments,” it involves a weeklong tour of an all-girl band (which gives its name to the book’s title), during which two best friends reconcile their disparate aspirations and affections for each other.

The friends in question are a girl and a boy named Bev and Colby. Colby has long had a crush on his gal pal and presumes his attraction is unrequited, but that hasn’t stopped the two from spending the better part of high school plotting a yearlong tour of Europe that will dovetail with the end of the Disenchantments’ tour and delay their entrance into college, if they even go at all.

But on the first day of a Podunk concert tour spanning five days and 800 miles, Bev reveals she won’t be sampling baguettes with Colby in Paris after all. Instead, she’ll attend the Rhode Island School of Design.

The question is, “Why?” And, even more important for Colby, why didn’t Bev tell him before they hit the road?

There’s nothing like the story of a vintage VW bus packed with teenagers road-tripping for the first time to explore what happens when two people make a pact and one of them breaks it. Or, as Colby says in this book written from his perspective, “There’s something about distance, being removed from what’s familiar, that lets things happen.”

And happen they do, as the various members of the Disenchantments reveal the false pretenses under which they’ve been living and confront their fears and dreams in that uncomfortable middle space between life stages.

As a book, “The Disenchantments” is divided into chapters that span individual days of the tour. As a band, the Disenchantments aren’t particularly good. Colby, who’s often at the wheel chauffeuring Bev and her bandmates, describes them as sounding “so terrible that anyone with a sense of humor would assume they were joking” when they played, but what the trio lacks in talent it makes up in youthful exuberance, doe-eyed attractiveness and an anything-goes spirit of adventure ― which is why the tour has been booked in never-heard-of-it towns in venues of questionable authenticity.

Such offbeat locales bring the band into contact with all sorts of characters they wouldn’t have met otherwise and inspire interactions with people who, by turns, serve as inspiration or as cautionary tales for adulthood. The first gig, for example, takes place in an abandoned, foreclosed house squatted in by a thirtysomething male who fancies himself a concert promoter. A thrift-shop experience later on, however, introduces the band to new music that acts as artistic encouragement.

LaCour is a Bay Area native, and her affection for northern California is infused in this lovingly written, quietly compelling novel that will appeal to music fans and countercultural readers with its college radio soundtrack and tour stops at tattoo parlors, urban farms and independent coffee shops. The Disenchantments might, as one gig attendee said, sound like “the summer the house next to me was under construction,” but the music the band listens to leverages a time in life when individual songs and their lyrics act as surrogates to express difficult emotions.

The tour turns out to be a “crash-course in living,” Colby says. “You get close to people. You get farther from them. You learn how much you love them, and then you say good-bye, believing that you will be together again, someday, when your lives curve back into one another’s.”

This beautifully succinct description of life’s ebb and flow applies just as well to LaCour’s latest. “The Disenchantments” is reality-based young adult fiction in the style of Sarah Dessen ― well rendered, bittersweet and hopeful. (MCT)