2.5/5 Stars
I thought I would enjoy Rio’s Hot Wax; I enjoy multiple timelines, road trip stories, and novels about bands and music. But I was so disappointed. First, this isn’t a “coming-of-age” story nor is it a “loss-of-innocence” story because we’re talking about a ten-year-old and the extreme trauma she experienced while on the road with her rock-and-roll father. What she went through was not a rite of passage; it was full-blown abuse. In fact, there’s abuse and trauma on just about every page, and the book left me wondering whether there was a single character who wasn’t unbalanced in some way (except for Nathan).
I picked up the book on a recommendation and was happy to see Jennifer Egan’s endorsement of the book on the dust jacket. I couldn’t disagree with her more about this book. Egan calls this a “father-daughter story infused with rock and roll.” I did not find it to be that. The relationship between Suzanne and her father was not fully explored; her interactions with him on the road (for one month) were minimal and hardly ever one-on-one. Rather, the book was a toxic rock and roll story infused with a father-daughter dynamic that ultimately went nowhere.
First, I couldn’t connect with the main character, Suzanne, whether she was ten (or eleven), seventeen, or forty. As a ten-year-old, she was inexplicably allowed to accompany her father, Gil, the leader of a hard-rock band, on the band’s road tour. You can’t say this is a totally relatable experience. What her father exposed her to was just criminal (literally), and even the nice moments between them didn’t make the tour any less traumatic. Not just the drinking and smoking but the sex, drugs, and violence were over the top for a ten-year-old. What kind of parent exposes his kid to that? No adult looked out for her interest. It was surreal, unnerving, and unrealistic.
Suzanne as a forty-year-old never got over the trauma, and she dealt with it by internalizing guilt, as though she were somehow at fault for what happened and how the tour ultimately ended (horribly, as you’ve probably guessed). She never got through the guilt and the aftereffects of the trauma, not even by the end of the book. She showed no personal growth, no redeeming qualities, no understanding of what she had been through and whose fault it was. Her criminal act at the end of the story showcases her lack of insight. I couldn’t connect with a character who was so disconnected from herself, even at the end of it all.
As I said before, all of the characters were unbalanced in their own ways. Every adult in the book failed Suzanne in some way, and ultimately she fails herself. She didn’t learn anything from her experiences, and I think that frustrated me the most about her. She blames her childhood and her month on the road with her father, which were both rife with abuse, but she never moves beyond that.
I gave it two-and-one-half stars because the writing was good. I didn’t find it to be slow, as some reviewers have. Rio can capture a moment, or a scene, or a feeling, in compelling prose. She wrote convincingly about the seedier side of a rock band on the rise and the nuances of bad relationships. But in the end, it was my inability to connect with Suzanne that disappointed me.
Leave a Reply