Novel About Punk Rock and Hearing Loss is Music to My Ears

By Michael Malone

“The Sterns are Listening” is an offbeat tale of punk rock and what happens years after you age out of that scene.

Benjamin and his wife Dita Stern are longtime New Yorkers, living in an Upper East Side pre-war building. They have two children who are on their own.

Benjamin doesn’t really have a job. His grandfather built the building, and the Sterns live off rent money. Dita is obsessed with Italy, peppering conversations with terms like carissimo and cretino, and renaming the kids, born Claire and Mark, as Alessandra and Giorgio. She also watches cable news all day long, gets angry at the pundits and shouts at the TV. With a few Italian terms mixed in.

Alessandra is the big sister and doesn’t have a major role in the novel. Brother Giorgio does. He was attending a private high school in Manhattan, and committed a violent act, smashing his friend’s head into a fish tank in their classroom, injuring poor Walt and a few fish as well.

After a few scary incidents, Mom and Dad figure he is better off in a program out west, where naughty kids hike all day, prepare their meals over a campfire and sleep outside.

And so 14-year-old Giorgio is off to Utah for two months.

While Benjamin lacks professional drive, his little brother Spence is a full-on hustler. He runs a chain of hearing aid shops and comes up with a unique product – a hearing aid for people like Benjamin and him, who spent their younger years in deafening rock clubs and don’t hear so well anymore. The product is called the Rocker and the release party will be at the former legendary rock club CBGB.

Spence is rich, and has loaned Benjamin and Dita the money for Giorgio’s western excursion with the delinquents. He hires Benjamin to do some research for the Rocker.

Spence is also a scary a-hole that Benjamin has long cleaned up after and apologized for. But Benjamin relies on Spence for money, so their relationship is complicated.

As the Rocker hints at, hearing is a theme in the book. As Benjamin leaves his ear doctor, his hearing has a temporary rebirth.

“Back on the street, ambient sounds seemed brighter. Sonic details were sharper. The garbage trucks rumbled thunderously like boulders avalanching down a hillside. The horns of vans and taxis wailed; the brakes squealed and pierced his aural defenses,” author Jonathan Wells writes.

Rock and roll is a theme as well. To kick off his research for the Rocker, Benjamin pulls out the ‘70s art-punk band Television’s influential “Marquee Moon” album, and puts it on the turntable. He hasn’t listened to it in years, and the experience brings him back to when he and Spence were schlepping to CBGB.

“Music might have damaged them, but it had heartened and healed them too. It had spoken to them in a fluent, incantatory language. It had been their shibboleth of pride and devotion,” Wells writes.

The novel shifts between the perspective of Benjamin in New York and Giorgio out west. Midway through the novel, Giorgio returns home. He was supposed to do two months at the camp, and was gone for three years, with minimal contact with his parents. He’s now 17 and looks like a man.

Spence has invited Giorgio, who is back to being named Mark, to a Rolling Stones concert at the Barclays Center. Wells writes of the concert, “Seven or eight shadowy figures appeared on the stage far below them. A few random chords ricocheted across the arena. Some drum strokes pounded into the cavernous air. A voice mumbled something into a microphone.”

During his time out west, Mark had plenty of time to think, and realizes his violent behavior stemmed from an incident involving Spence. He confronts Spence about it at the Stones concert.

The book leads up to the Rocker hearing aid’s launch party at CBGB. Benjamin wants to smash Spence’s head into a wall and, well, things get nutty at the party the way they often did at CBGB.

I enjoyed this book. Besides hearing, Wells has written a book for the array of senses. It opens with a poetic description of New York City’s summer humidity that leaves you clammy.

I liked the Giorgio chapters more than the Benjamin ones. Benjamin is a bit dull, while Giorgio is full of life, with a more energetic voice to share his wild experiences out west and back east.

My primary criticism is that women don’t have significant roles in the novel. Dita talks a lot of nonsense. Daughter Alessandra is clever and sensitive, but has a bit part. A partner of Spence’s, Dr. H, doesn’t do much more than come on to Benjamin. Giorgio falls for a teen girl named Lainey out in Utah, who offers unique insights into what makes him behave the way he does. But she’s not around for long.

Wells has published three books of poetry and a memoir, and “The Sterns are Listening” is his first novel. The book came out in November and has 257 pages. I usually toss in the GoodReads rating here, but only three people have rated “The Sterns are Listening,” including me. There aren’t many published reviews either. Forbes, for one, called ‘The Sterns’ “a deeply felt, richly detailed, and imaginatively conceived literary novel that would be comic if there wasn’t serious darkness at its core.”

Without many reviews, you’ll have to go with mine. And mine says, read it, especially if you spent some time in dingy New York City rock clubs.

Journalist Michael Malone lives in Hawthorne with his wife and two children.