Busker’s Holiday

Desolate and despairing after a painful romantic breakup, a Columbia University grad student named McKay Chernoffa Hemingway-Kerouac scholar with a harmonica in his pocket and a blues band in his background--decides to reinvent himself as a street performer during an impromptu European sojourn beginning in Paris. A would-be Dionysus, he’s determined to enter the busking life, sing a song of summer, and accumulate a mermaid or two. McKay is accompanied on his journey by a pair of foils. The first, a fellow grad student named Paul Goldberg, is a Jewish Montrealer and Renaissance specialist who plays an irritable Sancho Panza to McKay’s manic Don Quixote. The second is Billy Lee Grant, a wild young guitar shredder whose Memphis-to-Mississippi pedigree and Dylanesque surrealism make him, when he explodes into view, precisely the doppelganger McKay has been yearning for. A fearless, antic Dean Moriarty, Bill goads the scholar-turned-blues-desperado into a sun-drenched bender, stoked by wine, women, mushrooms, and trains, that careens down out of Avignon and across the French Riviera into Italy, leaving broken guitars and all-night chaos in its wake. After parting with Bill and reuniting with Paul, McKay staggers down the road of excess toward moral collapse in San Gimignano, a walled hill town deep in the Tuscan countryside. What happens nextin Florence, Solingen, Amsterdam, Parisis a story of purgatory, redemption, and love regained: hope, in a word, as a modern troubadour returns from his wanderings, reborn. A fast summer read for beach and backpack, Busker’s Holiday is also a work of aesthetic daring, a genre-bending mashup. It’s a comic picaresque featuring a trio of roguish antiheroes; a Hemingwayesque evocation of Europe’s fiesta season crossed with a blues-laced Kerouackian road narrative; a hero’s spiritual fall, atonement, and rise that tracks the plot-curve of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s a contemporary reimagining of Boccaccio’s Decameron that offers extended riffs by a handful of storytellers whose tales of the road offer counterpoint to McKay’s bluesy voyage. These include Joey Cohen, a martial-arts-loving college kid from Long Island (and update of Hemingway’s Robert Cohn) who is determined to taste the pleasures of the Euro beach-party scene; Dr. Livingstone, a London-based performance artistblack, bitchy, bisexual, outrageouswho serves as McKay’s unlikely mentor on the path to creative liberation; and Marianna Baaziz, a worldly young German-Algerian intellectual whose rural stone cottage and compassionate conversation finally help McKay put his demons to rest. Above all, Busker’s Holiday is a meditation on what it means to live a soulful, purposeful, and authentic life, one that honors "crazy" dreams of personal transformation.